Wayback Wonders: Rediscovering a Ghost Website

My featured photo series on La Gallerie today is about visiting a castle that no longer exists — Into the Phantom Castle, I called it. I managed to more or less recreate what the place might have looked like by blending an old photo with a new one of the remaining foundations. A few tweaks to exposure, color, and contrast — and voilà, a ghost castle appears.

But that’s photography. What about the internet?
We’ve all been there: you Google a website, click the link… and boom — error message, black screen, site not found. Yep, the dreaded 404. The site is gone, deleted, or simply… vanished. A ghost.

So what if you actually wanted to revisit that “phantom” site?
Well — you can! (At least in most cases.)
That’s where the Wayback Machine comes in — a brilliant service that crawls and archives websites over time. If you’re lucky, it might just have a snapshot of that lost page.

That’s exactly what I discovered when I tried looking up my old site-www.digicrea.be.

Heads-up: I no longer own that domain, so don’t visit it directly !!! — that’ll lead you nowhere near me !!!

But through the Wayback Machine? I just entered the old URL, picked a date from a time when I still owned it, and there it was — my old Digicrea Open Source Photography site, rising from oblivion.

Useful? Definitely.

I was honestly surprised by how much of it was still there — even working links, and a few uploaded photos! I even managed to recover a shot of my old Honda motorcycle decked out in ‘Flying Tigers‘ warbird colors, ready to race.

The Flying Tigers had those iconic shark teeth painted on the nose of their planes — and since I’ve always had a soft spot for warbirds, I gave my bike the same treatment. Shark teeth on the front fairing — because why not?
And guess what? I once opened it up full throttle on an actual runway. Yep — full speed, on an airfield. Pure adrenaline.

I swear I had a full-on Top Gun déjà vu !
Marc.

This article was written by Marc R.
While I primarily speak Dutch and have some knowledge of English and a little French, ChatGPT helps ensure my writing is grammatically correct. I often mix Dutch and English in my drafts, and ChatGPT steps in to translate and correct.