13. Spook

Book: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

Author: Mary Roach

Number of pages: 311

What I’m watching: TV: Bones, Red Dwarf, The Critic, Angel, Once Upon a Time, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Movies: Batman: Year One, Justice League: Doom, The Langoliers, What About Bob?, Memento, Hocus Pocus, Nosferatu, Ghostbusters

What I’m playing: Pokemon Red, Pokemon Stadium, Magic 2013: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers, Dead Rising 2, Terraria, The Last of Us, Batman: Arkham Origins

 

            With only one book remaining of my six, I turned my eyes to Spook. Honestly, the order of the six ended up exactly the order I wanted. A big novel followed by a light read, two shorter analytical non-fiction, a quick return to a more narrative book, and finishing with a book that I’ve had for I don’t know how long that I’ve been meaning to get to but kept putting off. Now, I’ve finally picked it up, and what better timing for Halloween than a book called Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.¹ Mary Roach has another book that I own and love called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. In it, Roach is one part researcher of weird science history and one part hands-on anecdotes of weird science now. Right off the bat, I recommend Stiff; it is a humorous look at a strange scientific area. And right off the bat, I could tell by the title of Spook that the book’s scientific subject would be even stranger.

            Roach’s “Introduction” didn’t get off to a good start with me. She begins by stating how she’s skeptical of religion because there’s no proof. She says “science remains the most solid god I’ve got” (12-13). It bothers me when non-religious people say that. I won’t go into it, and there’s more than one reason, so to keep myself short and not ranting, it irks me when people make it seem like a choice: you have to either accept science or religion as true. And the assumption is that if you choose religion, you’re stupid. The two are not mutually exclusive! But Mary Roach is also skeptical of science, because it too sometimes fails to provide real proof behind its answers. I’m not bothered by her skepticism – it can be a good trait to have. I just find it demeaning of my religion when people misuse the term “god.” And again, to Roach’s credit, her skepticism never comes off as close-mindedness.

            So, Mary Roach’s approach in her book is to look into different scientific studies of what happens to a person’s soul after death, both historical research and contemporary research. What I love about her books is how she inserts herself into what she’s writing about. For her first section of Spook, which deals with the idea of reincarnation, she not only describes how cases of claimed reincarnations get studied, Roach follows along with an Indian scientist who investigates these claims. Roach has a very natural, flowing, and easy-to-read writing style, which helps greatly to make some of the subject matter more accessible. She transitions smoothly between her research and her personal experiences. So, she and Dr. Kirti Rawat meet a boy who claims to be the reincarnated soul of a young man who died recently a few villages away. They also talk with the boy’s family and the family of the deceased man about anything the boy knew, said, or did that made them believe he’s the real deal. I never gave any thought to the investigation of possible reincarnations, and it’s an interesting read. I guess it’s kind of like priests investigating the occurrence of possible miracles to see if they’re really miracles.

            Roach’s next chapter discusses the scientific history that studied the beginning of life – as in, where do babies come from?² Scientists had some strange answers, even after sperm and ova could be seen via microscope. Leeuwenhoek, the first person to find them, believed that sperm were pretty much mini-people and the woman’s egg was just something for the sperm-man to eat.

But then, if sperm were little animals which ate, then there also had to be little sperm poops. See? Science was pretty weird. Roach ties all this early biology into her book by discussing ensoulment – the moment the soul enters the forming prenatal life. Roach also tells the history of people searching for the soul’s location in the body.

            That leads into her next chapter, as she writes about experimental studies about the weight of a soul. Since some people believed that the soul had weight, a study was done in 1901 which weighed people as they died to see if they lost any weight the moment they died. It’s difficult for me to showcase Roach’s humor without quoting long passages setting up the context. Her humor is built into her writing and is often contextual or based off of an earlier statement, like a running gag. Her wit carries throughout the book. What I can showcase is the oddity that is the history of science.

            Mary Roach goes to Cambridge University to find the sample of an alleged ectoplasm from a 1939 séance. Ectoplasm, which I first learned about in Ghostbusters, is left-over ghost residue. It can also be found in the Elder Scrolls games.

But the ectoplasm that Roach examines comes from the medium Helen Duncan. Back when séances were a thing, I guess it was common for the medium to end up covered in ectoplasm after communing with the spirits. However, these ectoplasm samples appeared to be cloth or animal intestines. Not weird enough yet? In order to prove the authenticity of their ectoplasms, mediums underwent rectal and vaginal searches prior to séances to show they weren’t hiding these things up there and just whipping it out during the séance.

I think that is sufficiently weird.

            Roach’s section of psychic mediums culminates with her taking a 3-day course on being a medium. Props to her for really making herself a part of her research. This part reminds me of the South Park episode about John Edward. Mary Roach meets her roommate for the weekend, who is “propped on her bed, reading a romance novel. We make small talk for a minute, and then she says, ‘I foresaw that you’d be an American. Blond and chubby.’ I’m hardly blond or chubby, but I feel it’s too early in our relationship to mention this” (172). Ha!

            Next, Mary Roach investigates EVP: electronic voice phenomena. She visits the place of the infamous Donner Party with a group of people with tape recorders and tries to catch ghost voices on tape. She writes about the history and validity of people hearing words out of white noise. Also mentioned is the research of people trying to record the voices that schizophrenic individuals hear, in case they aren’t hallucinations but are really ghosts.

            She also experiences first-hand electromagnetic pulses and infrasound waves, which both may induce audio and visual hallucinations. The science behind it is fascinating, and it’s cool to see how these two scientific principles can be applied to explaining famously “haunted” places. Her final research deals with studies of near-death experiences in which people claim to have out-of-body experiences. So, the idea is that the soul can leave the body and does so after death. Roach doesn’t experience this first-hand, but she does witness a participant in one such study.

            All in all, Spook is informative, entertaining, clever, and definitely worth reading. There’s much more information and humor in Spook that I didn’t cover, and I recommend reading it. Want more weird science courtesy of Mary Roach’s research? Cambridge University performed one study which involved a man dressed in a white sheet running through a porno theater to see if anyone believed it was an actual ghost. Almost half the people didn’t even notice.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Staying.

 

Notes

1. Plus, it’s the 13^th book. Spooky, right?

2. Lebanon.

Works Cited

Roach, Mary. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. New York: W. W. Norton &

          Company, 2005. Print.