In the final weeks of her life, a photograph circulated online that was more unsettling than any frame from the horror film that made her famous. Daveigh Chase, the actor who at twelve had crawled out of a television screen as the vengeful Samara Morgan in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, was now a wraith in the daylight of Skid Row. She weighed 34 kilograms. Her boyfriend, Roy Hernandez, had posted a desperate appeal on GoFundMe, describing a body ravaged by meningitis and sepsis, a woman who “wants to spend the time she has left with me, comfortable and together, instead of in a hospital.” The image, captured in the squalor of downtown Los Angeles, was a brutal coda to a career that had once glittered with Disney magic and MTV Movie Awards.

Chase died on 16 June at the age of 35. The Los Angeles County medical examiner’s report, released two weeks later, listed the primary cause as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), with chronic polysubstance use as a significant contributing condition. The finding overwrote the initial narrative of a sudden, acute infection. Viewed from Los Angeles, the official record sketched a longer, quieter collapse: a child star who, by her father’s account, had been battling addiction since the age of 13, and who in her final years was homeless, estranged from her family, and living in a tent with the man who would later control the story of her death.

For a global audience that came of age in the early 2000s, Chase was a dual presence etched into the cultural memory. In 2002, the same year she terrified audiences as Samara, she lent her voice to Lilo Pelekai, the spirited Hawaiian orphan in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, and to Chihiro in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. That singular year, as American entertainment writers have noted, made her an unlikely bridge between the macabre and the tender, a child performer whose range spanned the darkest corners of J-horror remakes and the sun-bleached whimsy of animated musicals. She reprised Lilo for television and sequels, and later played a young sociopath in HBO’s Big Love, but after a low-budget film in 2016, she withdrew from the screen entirely.

The aftermath of her death exposed a bitter dispute over her legacy and her body. Hernandez’s crowdfunding campaign, which he claimed was for medical and funeral costs, was swiftly denounced by Chase’s former manager, John Ryan, and her father, John David Schwallier. In statements carried by American and Latin American outlets, Ryan insisted that Chase’s estate held ample royalties from her film work and that the family was covering all expenses. He accused Hernandez of exploiting the tragedy, telling Deadline that “this man brought her into the hospital in terrible condition and didn’t let any of the family know until she passed so he can control the dialogue.” The father, who had not spoken to his daughter for years, arrived at the hospital just before she died. The GoFundMe page remained a contested artifact, a digital monument to a life that had slipped through institutional and familial nets.

In the end, the image that lingers is not the ghost girl with wet hair, but the real woman in the tent, her body hollowed out by a disease that, with treatment, is no longer a death sentence in the city where she once walked red carpets. The medical examiner’s file remains open, a bureaucratic asterisk on a story that resists neat closure. Chase’s voice, still alive in the chirpy cadences of Lilo, now carries an undertow of silence—a reminder that the most haunting frames are often the ones captured off-screen.