Abe Vigoda Fulfills Internet Meme

“Oh my dear lord. It’s going by too fast to see,” Galcik said, looking at his website’s numbers while talking to The Daily Beast. “We’re looking at 50 hits per second.”

Galcik owns AbeVigoda.com, which has been alerting people of Abe Vigoda’s to-the-second mortality since May 2001. This may come as a surprise, but the website was not Galcik’s full-time job. He’s a Chicago-based web developer, and he bought the domain 15 years ago off “some guy for about 200 bucks.”

Vigoda starred in The Godfather and Barney Miller, but he may be best known for having been declared dead more times by high-profile people and news organizations of any actor ever.

He was dead in 1982, when People magazine declared him absent from the Barney Millerwrap party on account of his unfortunate passing.

He was dead again in 1987, when a local news reporter did the same thing.

He was dead all throughout the next four decades on David Letterman’s show, where the late-night host consistently referred to Vigoda’s ghost or had him on just to prove he was alive. (“So Abe, you’re anything but dead,” Letterman once said. “Well, thank you,” Vigoda replied.)

He was frequently dead in Conan O’Brien’s monologue and in guest appearances on sketches, at Drew Carey’s Friar’s Club Roast (he was in the audience, alive), and on his regularly vandalized Wikipedia page all throughout the 2000s.

Abe Vigoda was dead in four decades, and Abe Vigoda was very much in on the joke.

But he was never dead on AbeVigoda.com. So on Tuesday, when Vigoda died at 94, it was hard for many on social media to trust TMZ, The New York Times, or the AP until the news was posted on Galcik’s one-off joke website.

“It’s true: The site’s had more a consistent record of accuracy than anyone else has,” he said. Lil Wayne was near death in TMZ’s world three years ago, after all, and that’s the same news organization that broke the news of Vigoda’s death.

Vigoda died of old age shortly after 2 p.m. on Tuesday. Galcik, who was on deadline for his real job, was suddenly in a race against time.

A few minutes in, he was feeling the heat. Politico’s Albany bureau chief saidAbeVigoda.com “had one job…and you blew it.”