Did Dumbledore die?

Of all that transpired in the fictional realm during 2005, none shattered the senses more than what unfolded in the pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Millions of fans bought the penultimate chapter of the Harry Potter saga... only to reel in horror as J.K. Rowling took everything to be expected of a children's book, dragged it out into the street and shot it in the head. And out of everything that went so terribly wrong in this sixth book of the series, nothing was more heartbreaking than what happened at the end of Chapter 27, during the Death Eaters's assault on Hogwarts: Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of the school and mentor to Harry Potter - and one of the most beloved characters of recent literature - murdered with the Avada Kedavra curse... by none other than Professor Severus Snape!

Call it the "Who Shot J.R.?" of the new millennium: since the release of Half-Blood Prince, the events that took place in its final chapters have become some of the most hotly debated subjects on the Internet. Most especially the question of what exactly did take place atop the tower that tragic evening, when Professor Dumbledore was mercilessly killed by the very person he had sworn could be trusted...

...Or was he?

Like a forensic pathologist, David Haber has meticulously sifted through the pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, taking notes and comparing this book to what we know from the previous chapters. And he's come up with a theory that's pretty interesting to anyone who's a Harry Potter fan. At Dumbledore Is Not Dead.com, Haber lays out a lot of evidence suggesting that there was much more going on in the final pages of the book than what was readily presented before us. His case is compelling: that Albus Dumbledore did not die, as the wizarding world believes he did. Read what David has put together but be warned that like any good scholar, he has been quite thorough with his documentation.

(Personally, I think Dumbledore is dead, but I was impressed enough with David's work here that I really felt led to make a mention of it here :-)