We see dead people?

In a follow-up to her bestselling "Stiff," Mary Roach searches for proof of the afterlife -- and finds some startling (and scary) evidence.

By Priya Jain

Read more: Religion, Books, Mary Roach, Science, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews

Oct. 21, 2005 | To be polite about it, Mary Roach has a rather eccentric sense of curiosity. When she was a columnist for Salon, the advent of Thanksgiving led her to investigate how much a human stomach could hold before it burst. That column, as well as one on a human crash-test dummy, inspired her first book, which looked at the odd ways science puts your donated remains to use (like seeing how much food it takes to burst a stomach). While "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" was climbing the bestseller lists (and even made a cameo on "Six Feet Under"), Roach started to wonder about what happened after death to that other part of us: the intangible, undonatable part -- the consciousness, or the soul.

"Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife" is Roach's answer to that question, or rather it's her exhibit of the various conclusions reached by scientists trying to determine whether part of us lives after our bodies give out. There are no Ouija boards here (well, maybe a couple). Instead, Roach relies on a string of men in lab coats -- the lucky ones armed with high-tech scales and sensors and sound equipment, the not-so-fortunate at least possessing a relentless set of questions and an unshakable conviction that the scientific method can suss out the truth on anything, even that which normally belongs to the realm of religion and mysticism.

Take, for example, Duncan Macdougall, a respected surgeon in turn-of-the-century Massachusetts. In 1901, he weighed consumptives on a giant scale, hoping to prove that they'd become lighter at the moment of death and that, therefore, the soul existed and had weight (that's right: he concluded it to be 21 grams). Today, Dr. Kirti S. Rawat travels around India investigating cases of reincarnation, while Gary Schwartz, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, performs lab experiments with mediums.

As with "Stiff," Roach brings to "Spook" a lightness and a sense of humor that, happily, smooth the morbid edges of the proceedings she describes: Before zooming in on Schwartz, she takes us on a hilarious romp through the history of mediumship and ectoplasm -- the white stuff that emanated from a medium during a séance, often from her vagina, and that, disgustingly enough, was almost certainly rolled-up cheesecloth or bits of sheep lung. It also helps that Roach's curiosity is boundless (evident in the abundant tangential footnotes) and she's willing to declare, even to the experts she's talking to, that she knows absolutely nothing about either this afterlife business or that science stuff. "My ignorance is not merely deep, it is broad; it is a vast ocean that takes in chemistry, physics, information theory, thermodynamics, all the many things a modern soul theorist must know," she writes. This ignorance proves to be a wonderful asset when she sits down with a thermodynamics expert and wills him to can the wonky jargon and to simply explain, in lay terms, what his field has to say about the soul.

But the most refreshing thing about "Spook" is that Roach herself is a skeptic, guiding a skeptic's tour. "This is a book for people who would like very much to believe in a soul and in an afterlife to hang around in, but who have trouble accepting these things on faith," she writes. What evidence she does come across, therefore, becomes all the more compelling. In Gary Schwartz's laboratory, she talks to Allison DuBois, the medium on whose life the television series "Medium" is based. DuBois, supposedly communing with Roach's dead mother, says a lot of vague and unlikely things, until she mentions an hourglass in connection with Roach's brother -- who, unbeknownst to DuBois, collects hourglasses. How can science explain that? I talked with Roach, 46, who lives in Oakland, Calif., by phone about wanting to believe in the soul, the difficulty of finding scientific proof, and the weird sexuality of séances. We even swapped a few ghost stories.

How did you choose the researchers and scientists you did for this book?

It was easy. Because the theme was people trying to prove that there's evidence for an afterlife or a soul, I wasn't just interested in investigations of near-death experience or religious theories of the afterlife, so it had to be somebody who was actively engaged in trying to get evidence. There are very few people engaged in this pursuit these days, so it was a scramble to even fill the book.

You start with an investigation on reincarnation. It's the only non-Western research in the book, and the only belief integral to a religion. Did you look at other parts of the world?

I did. I so wanted to find someone doing research into, for example, a Muslim type of afterlife. I would have loved it if I could have found anyone out there in the world. In my opinion, a chapter based on a foreign country is always more interesting. So I wasn't limiting it by choice: These were the only people I could find doing any research at all. Scotland has a couple; there's someone in the Netherlands. I didn't find anyone else in the Asian subcontinent; I didn't find anyone in South America or Russia.

Do you know why that might be?

I think it has to do with the difficulty of getting funding. It's hard enough in the United States for something perceived as fringy and nonessential. Dr. Rawat was self-funded. I actually covered his expenses when we traveled, which in India is not a terrific burden. Also, I think a lot of cultures don't see this as something that's in question. Western culture has such a thriving scientific community, and we turn to science for the answers to everything, even things that belong possibly in the realm of theology and religion. So possibly it seems preposterous to spend time and money in other cultures to see if there is an afterlife when most people kind of accept it.

Next page: Are there ghosts all around us? And what about that gooey ectoplasm?