'Such as: Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?' 'Dead people never seem to address the obvious - the things you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us not-yet-dead are madly curious about,' Roach writes about her time with the mediums. Reading 'Spook' is a bit like listening to the weekend programming on NPR - 'This American Afterlife'? - intellectual, assiduously attentive, but the obvious undercurrent is 'People do the wackiest things!' And depending on your frame of mind, you find yourself either oddly entranced or wondering, 'Why am I listening to this?' 'It is interesting,' she writes in a perfectly deadpan style, 'to come across people who feel that a ghost communicating via a spell-checker is less far-fetched than a software glitch.' Later, ignoring the locals' warnings that a Canadian professor keeps rats and mows his lawn in a three-piece suit, she allows him to lock her in a soundproof chamber and expose her brain to electromagnetic fields in an attempt to pick up ghost 'presences' in the atmosphere. She takes a 'Fundamentals of Mediumship' course in England, and heads out with the International Ghost Hunters Society (14,000 members in 78 countries) to tape-record so-called spirit voices in a national forest in California. Mediums who transcribe their conversations with the dead.

Researchers who interview children claiming to be reincarnated. The guy who says he's determined the weight of a dog's soul. In 'Spook,' she sets off on a skeptic's scavenger hunt to find out if there's any scientific way of proving there is life after death, listening to a whole range of people who have doubtless grown used to people's eyes glazing over - or worse.ĭescribing her undertaking as a 'giggly, random, utterly earthbound assault on our most ponderous unanswered question,' Roach gives all her subjects their due. Roach has endless patience with people whose ideas are most charitably described as unconventional. 'Most people don't listen nearly as long as you have,' the forlorn professor tells her. But he can't find collaborators - a predicament Roach has trouble believing. He wants to test it by putting a live organism in a box with electromagnetic sensors and watching it die. A PROFESSOR of obstetrics at an esteemed university explains to Mary Roach his quantum-theory equation to measure the energy lost when the soul departs the body.

Spook by Mary Roach