"So," I typed back, my keyboard clacking loudly in my real-world apartment. "This is a graveyard?"

In the sprawling digital expanse of the —home to over 800 billion web pages, millions of books, and decades of television news—certain keywords lead researchers down rabbit holes that blur the line between the physical and the virtual. One such query is "Hotel Courbet Internet Archive."

That is a truly evocative and peculiar string of words. It sounds like the title of a lost nouveau roman or a piece of "hauntology."

This is where the (the Internet Archive’s web history tool) became the sole surviving repository of the Hotel Courbet experience.