Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife Read online

  More Praise for Mary Roach and Spook

  “Science writing doesn’t get funnier or more human than this.”

  —Marta Salij, Detroit Free Press

  “Ms. Roach’s gift for facetiousness serves her well here. Spook is dependably witty, especially when it ventures far into the ether…. And it is populated by vividly evoked oddballs…. Ms. Roach makes herself a wry, enjoyable character throughout the book’s escapades…a clever investigator and a thoroughly entertaining, if skeptical, tour guide.”

  —Janet Maslin, New York Times

  “Funny and smart…since she’s a scientist at heart, she also lasers through the smoke and mirrors.”

  —People

  “First, there’s her wit and stylistic brio. From the clever dedication…to her gift for terse summation…to her genuine humility…Roach is a clear and versatile writer. She has a sharp eye for detail that demonstrates her traditional journalistic skills…but she delivers her findings in ultracontemporary tones…. She has a huge heart, a strong sense of empathy for the oddball, and she’s willing to go to great lengths to find and report stories from the hinterlands of understanding.”

  —Floyd Skloot, Chicago Tribune

  “Roach is a wonderfully vivid writer…[with] a keen eye for the perfect detail, an ear for the zinging quotation and a finely tuned sense of the preposterous…. A celebration of the wide, occasionally crazy spectrum of human pursuit.”

  —Kate Zernike, New York Times Book Review

  “Sly…irreverent…and downright witty…. Roach wields the scientific method and her skeptical mind like surgical tools, cutting away at myth, pseudo-theory and madness until all that remains is fact. In the end, believers and non-believers will be satisfied by Roach’s conclusions…. Reading Spook is like attending a lecture by a professor who is equal parts Groucho Marx and Stephen Jay Gould, both enlightening and entertaining. Roach makes learning about anything, be it decomposing bodies or the possibility of a verifiable afterlife, pleasurable.”

  —Dorman T. Schindler, Sunday Denver Post & Rocky Mountain News

  “This is Roach at her best.”

  —San Francisco Magazine

  “A sharp-eyed supernatural history.”

  —Cathleen Medwick, O Magazine

  “Funny, inquisitive and uncowed by experts, she’s the general reader’s ideal emissary to the arcana of serious science…. Roach’s writing has what science has so far failed to find: a divine spark.”

  —Malcom Jones, Newsweek

  “Investigative reporting has no lighter, more irreverent spirit than Mary Roach…. What lets Spook rise above the dry survey of (mostly inconclusive) scientific investigations it could have been is Mary Roach—her lively and distinctive style, or perhaps more accurately put, her attitude…. Roach is funny, fair-minded, impartial and endlessly curious…. Spook is enormous fun.”

  —David A. Walton, Pittsburgh Union-Tribune

  “Spook is nothing if not amusing. Roach heads into a mire of ghostly and laboratory episodes with robust humor.”

  —Nora Seton, Houston Chronicle

  “Oh, had Roach only been my high school science teacher. Spook is filled with fascinating characters, wacky experiments, and Roach’s accessible scientific reporting paired with comic relief and gentle insight.”

  —Brooke Gilbert, Amazon.com

  “Roach is a self-described skeptic, but one with an open mind, a sense of adventure and a ready quip. All of this makes her an amiable and entertaining guide as she traverses several continents to look for scientific proof for the great beyond.”

  —Megan Harlan, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Alas, she doesn’t find the answers. But Roach is such a smart and breezy companion that it’s enough to watch her realize that in the end she might not need them.”

  —Karen Valby, Entertainment Weekly

  “As fascinating and thorough as her research may be, the greater tale lies in the people: The mediums, the mystics, the I-want-to-believers, the scientists, pseudo and for-real. Roach has a genius for portraiture, and she can bring the oddest people to hilarious life without a hint of condescension…her oddball, incandescent personality radiates from her prose.”

  —Arthur Salm, San Diego Union Tribune

  “Spook is filled with some mind-blowing ideas that will make you glad you’ve got an open mind.”

  —Chris Watson, Santa Cruz Sentinel

  “Roach brings to Spook a lightness and a sense of humor that, happily, smooth the morbid edges of the proceedings she describes…. The most refreshing thing about Spook is that Roach herself is a skeptic, guiding a skeptic’s tour…. What evidence she does come across, therefore, becomes all the more compelling.”

  —Priya Jain, Salon

  “Short of the Ultimate Trip (the one with the light and the pearly gates), it’s about as entertaining a journey out of the realm of the living as anybody could want.”

  —Donna Bowman, The Onion

  “Her biting wit is omnipresent from the start…. This is one fantastically enjoyable book.”

  —curledup.com

  “For all Roach’s skeptical and often hilarious accounts, she is an eager volunteer and ready to accept evidence if evidence there be…. Throughout, she is critical and witty [and] truly deft handling of the (mostly) daft.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “She has done it again…. [Roach] now presents an equally smart, quirky, hilarious look at whether there is a soul that survives our physical demise. Roach perfectly balances her skepticism and her boundless curiosity with a sincere desire to know…. An original who can enliven any subject with wit, keen reporting and a sly intelligence.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Roach is dogged in her approach…. Gripping…Roach’s witty asides liven up an already interesting and unusual read.”

  —Booklist

  “Science writer Mary Roach’s wit and flair for vivid storytelling…have earned her a loyal readership, and her new book will only cement it.”

  —Ruminator Review

  “It’s a fabulous read, both a comic and a serious investigation of the history of séances, mediums, spirits and discarnate voices…. All of a sudden, with Spook, the field of the paranormal is bust-a-gut funny…. Spook is a comic romp through a mix of history and the current practices of a particular culture.”

  —Monica Drake, Sunday Oregonian

  “Roach’s humorous scoffings will make even the most adamantly-believing readers chuckle…. No matter what you believe, pick up a copy of Spook.”

  —Vail Trail

  “Spook is a hilarious look at misadventures in paranormal research…. In the sharp-witted world of Mary Roach, the answer is inconsequential. The interesting part is the question itself—and the eccentric characters doing the asking…. Surreal, fascinating, at times absurd and always hilarious, Mary Roach may not reveal the street address of our final destination, but in Spook she makes it sound less like a morgue and more like a comedy club.”

  —Vince Darcangelo, Boulder Weekly

  SPOOK

  ALSO BY MARY ROACH

  Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

  SPOOK

  Science Tackles the Afterlife

  Mary Roach

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK | LONDON

  Copyright © 2005 by Mary Roach

  All rights reserved

  Photograph credits: title page: Underwood & Underwood/Corbis; Getty Images/Robert Holmgren; Getty Images/Derek Berwin; Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; Getty Images/Digital Vision; Mary Evans Pictures Collections; Getty Images/Wallace Kirkland; Getty Images/Andrea Pistolesi; H. Armstrong Roberts/Corbis; H
ulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; Getty Images/Andrea Chu; courtesy of Grant Sperry; Bettman/Corbis

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roach, Mary.

  Spook: science tackles the afterlife / by Mary Roach.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-06920-4

  1. Future life. 2. Religion and science. I. Title.

  BL535.R63 2005

  129—dc22

  2005014450

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  FOR MY PARENTS,

  WHEREVER THEY ARE OR AREN’T

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. You Again

  A visit to the reincarnation nation

  2. The Little Man Inside the Sperm, or Possibly the Big Toe

  Hunting the soul with microscopes and scalpels

  3. How to Weigh a Soul

  What happens when a man (or a mouse, or a leech) dies on a scale

  4. The Vienna Sausage Affair

  And other dubious highlights of the ongoing effort to see the soul

  5. Hard to Swallow

  The giddy, revolting heyday of ectoplasm

  6. The Large Claims of the Medium

  Reaching out to the dead in a University of Arizona lab

  7. Soul in a Dunce Cap

  The author enrolls in medium school

  8. Can You Hear Me Now?

  Telecommunicating with the dead

  9. Inside the Haunt Box

  Can electromagnetic fields make you hallucinate?

  10. Listening to Casper

  A psychoacoustics expert sets up camp in England’s haunted spots

  11. Chaffin v. the Dead Guy in the Overcoat

  In which the law finds for a ghost, and the author calls in an expert witness

  12. Six Feet Over

  A computer stands by on an operating room ceiling, awaiting near-death experiencers

  Last Words

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  MY MOTHER worked hard to instill faith in me. She sent me to catechism classes. She bought me nun paper dolls, as though the meager fun of swapping a Carmelite wimple for a Benedictine chest bib might inspire a taste for devotion. Most memorably, she read me the Bible. Every night at bedtime, she’d plow through a chapter or two, handing over the book at appropriate moments to show me the color reproductions of parables and miracles. The crumbling walls of Jericho. Jesus walking atop stormy seas with palms upturned. The raising of Lazarus—depicted in my mother’s Bible as a sort of Boris Karloff knockoff, wrapped in mummy’s rags and rising stiffly from the waist. I could not believe these things had happened, because another god, the god who wore lab glasses and knew how to use a slide rule, wanted to know how, scientifically speaking, these things could be possible. Faith did not take, because science kept putting it on the spot. Did the horns make the walls fall, or did there happen to be an earthquake while the priests were trumpeting? Was it possible Jesus was making use of an offshore atoll, the tops of which sometimes lie just inches below the water’s surface? Was Lazarus a simple case of premature entombment? I wasn’t saying these things didn’t happen. I was just saying I’d feel better with some proof.

  Of course, science doesn’t dependably deliver truths. It is as fallible as the men and women who undertake it. Science has the answer to every question that can be asked. However, science reserves the right to change that answer should additional data become available. Science first betrayed me in the early eighties, when I learned that brontosaurus had lived in a sere, rocky desert setting. The junior science books of my childhood had shown brontosaurs hip-deep in brackish waters, swamp greens dangling from the sides of their mouths. They’d shown tyrannosaurs standing erect as socialites and lumbering Godzilla-slow, when in reality, we were later told, they had sprinted like roadrunners, back flat and tail aloft. Science has had us buying into the therapeutic benefits of bloodletting, of treating melancholy with arsenic and epilepsy with goose droppings. It’s not all that much different today: Hormone replacement therapy went from miracle to scourge literally overnight. Fats wore the Demon Nutrient mantle for fifteen years, then without warning passed it to carbohydrates. I used to write a short column called “Second Opinion,” for which I scanned the medical literature, looking for studies that documented, say, the health benefits of charred meat or the deleterious effects of aloe on wound-healing. It was never hard to fill it.

  Flawed as it is, science remains the most solid god I’ve got. And so I decided to turn to it, to see what it had to say on the topic of life after death. Because I know what religion says, and it perplexes me. It doesn’t deliver a single, coherent, scientifically sensible or provable scenario. Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Coming. And, of course, only one of these can be true. Which means that for millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter. Science seemed the better bet.

  For the most part, science has this to say: Yeah, right. If there were a soul, an etheric disembodied you that can live on, independent of your brain, we scientists would know about it. In the words of the late Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA and author of The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

  But can you prove that, Dr. Crick? If not, then it’s no more good to me than the proclamations of God in the Old Testament. It’s just the opinion, however learned, of one more white-haired, all-knowing geezer. What I’m after is proof. Or evidence, anyway—evidence that some form of disembodied consciousness persists when the body closes up shop. Or doesn’t persist.

  Proof is a tremendously comforting thing. When I was little, I used to worry that one day, without warning, the invisible forces that held me to the earth were going to conk out, and that I would drift up into space like a party balloon, rising and rising until I froze or exploded or suffocated or all three at once. Then I learned about gravity, the dependable pull of the very large upon the very small. I learned that it had been scientifically proven to exist, and I no longer worried about floating away. I worried instead about blackheads and whether Pat Stone dreamed of me and other dilemmas for which science could provide no succor.

  It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?

  Most of the projects that I will be covering have been—or are being—undertaken by science. By that I mean people doing research using scientific methods, preferably at respected universities or institutions. Technology gets a shot, as does the law. I’m not interested in philosophical debates on the soul (probably because I can’t understand them). Nor am I going to be relating anecdotal accounts of personal spiritual experiences. Anecdotes are interesting, occasionally riveting, but never are they proof. On the other hand, this is not a debunking book. Skeptics and debunkers provide a needed service in this area, but their work more or less assumes an outcome. I’m trying hard not to make assumptions, not to have an agenda.

  Simply put, this is a book for people who would like very much to believe i
n a soul and in an afterlife for it to hang around in, but who have trouble accepting these things on faith. It’s a giggly, random, utterly earthbound assault on our most ponderous unanswered question. It’s spirituality treated like crop science. If you found this book in the New Age section of your local bookstore, it was grossly misshelved, and you should put it down at once. If you found it while browsing Gardening, or Boats & Ships, it was also misshelved, but you might enjoy it anyway.

  AUGUST 6, 1978, was a Sunday, the Feast of the Transfiguration. It was evening, and Pope Paul VI lay dying in his bedroom. With him was his doctor and two of his secretaries, Monsignor Pasquale Macchi and Father John Magee. At 9:40 p.m., following a massive heart attack, His Holiness expired. At that very moment, the alarm clock on his bedside table rang out. Accounts of this episode refer to the timepiece as the Pope’s “beloved Polish alarm clock.” He bought it in Warsaw in 1924 and carried it with him in his travels from then on. He seemed to be fond of it in the way that farmers are fond of old, slow-moving dogs, or children of their blankets. Every day, including the day he died, the alarm was set for 6:30 a.m.

  I first came upon this story in a gullible and breathless compilation of supposed evidence for the afterlife. I don’t recall the book’s title (though the title of the chapter about spirit communication—“Intercourse with the Dead”—seems to have stayed with me). The book presented the story of the pontiff’s noisy passing as proof that some vestige of His Holiness’s spirit influenced the papal clockworks* as it departed the body. Pontiff, a popular biography of Paul VI, relates the tale with similar cheesy dramatics: “At that precise moment the ancient alarm clock, which had rung at six thirty that morning and which had not been rewound or reset, begins to shrill….”