We see dead people?

And from your book I gather that even here it's not exactly easy to get funding. You have a great quote from Gerry Nahum [a professor at Duke University School of Medicine who wants to try weighing the soul] saying, "People either think they already know the answer and don't want any external validation, or they think it's impossible to know the answer." I would think that some theologians would consider this line of inquiry dangerous.

Gerry Nahum went to the Catholic Church at one point to try to get funding. And not only did they not give him any money, they discouraged him, saying he might "open a window that might not be closed after opening," that he might cross into this dark schism. They really seemed to think he was mucking around where he shouldn't be and that it was a dangerous endeavor.

You don't seem like a very superstitious person, but there must have been times when you were tempted to give in to belief, or that all this thinking and reading about the paranormal got to you when, say, the floorboards creaked at 3 in the morning.

I have had times like that even before I started doing this work. There was this story in "Spook" -- we took it out because it was not that gripping -- but I used to live in a house that was supposedly haunted. And one time I came into the kitchen and there was in the middle of the table, in the morning, this little Valentine's Day [candy] heart. You know, the ones that are printed. It said "No use" -- which is kind of a downer for a Valentine's Day message. And I thought that was weird because the bowl of hearts was in the other room. I asked my boyfriend at the time, and he didn't know anything about it. I decided it was the lady who died in the house and who, according to the upstairs neighbors, would sometimes make the doors open and shut.

Later when I was working on "Spook," I was going to include this story and I thought, "Duh, David put the heart on the table. Why did this not occur to me?" because we broke up a few months later. At the time I couldn't entertain the thought that he put the heart on the table. And I loved thinking we had a ghost. The postscript is that I e-mailed David years later, when I was working on "Spook," and he said he did not put the heart on the table. So it remains a mystery.

I bet you're getting a lot of people challenging you with their own ghost stories.

Not challenging, just coming up to me and telling me about them. It's begun to seem like everyone has either a ghost story, an out-of-body experience or some amazing session with a medium.

I have one for you: When I was 15 or 16, I spent a summer at a university in Gainesville, Georgia, and the girl's dormitory was thought to be haunted by a ghost named Agnes, a former student who had died in one of the rooms. My roommate and I were bickering one night about who was going to get out of bed to turn off the overhead light, and suddenly the light went out. I got up to check, and the switch had actually been flipped.

Get out! Hmm. These stories all lead me to think, wow, is the afterlife hanging around and occasionally moving things, for eternity? I don't know how much I'm looking forward to this!

One of my favorite arguments in the book comes from Norman Ford, author of "When Did I Begin?" who says that ensoulment -- the moment the soul enters the body -- has to happen at least 14 days after conception, because before then identical twinning is possible, and if the zygote were ensouled before it split, each twin would end up with only half a soul. You wisely skirt the political issues at stake, but I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if the moment of ensoulment were to be discovered.

Well yeah, if it turned out to be two weeks, would we then have justification for guilt-free abortions? Would the religious right leave us alone for two weeks at least? His book was the best that I'd found, but I also liked that he was a Catholic priest, since that means no one can come down on me for dashing Catholic beliefs. But yes, originally I went a little into the abortion debate, but I eventually decided that it was A) off topic and B) not worth reading through the e-mails I was going to get.

Probably a good idea. I also wanted to ask you about the ectoplasm chapter. Did you ever discover why mediums tended to be women?

No, and actually there are quite a few male mediums. There were the Schneider brothers, there was [Daniel Dunglas] Home, there's the guy who's featured at the Met now in the exhibit on occult photography. Where they stored their ectoplasm I'm not sure. Rudi Schneider would ejaculate during his séances, but I don't think he tried to pass it off as ectoplasm, the semen that is. But why were there so many women? Some of the scientists who got really involved in it, there was sort of a weird thing between them and the mediums. There was some weird sexual thing going on. Plus all of the vaginal inspections. There was some Victorian repressed sexuality coming into play.

Some of the trickiest, most successful mediums were men. Home -- I don't think they ever figured out some of the things he did. He really stumped the experts. Supposedly he went out a window and came in the window below. He was either an amazing magician or some kind of legitimate ghost, I don't know what the heck. He was a bizarre case. But he didn't mess with ectoplasm so I didn't cover him.

Next page: Were Victorian siances actually sex parties?