Anonymous committee report. “Report on the Oliver Lodge Posthumous Test.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 38 (685), pp. 121–43 (September 1955).
Findlay, James Arthur. Looking Back: The Autobiography of a Spiritualist. London: Psychic Press, 1955.
Hyman, Ray. “How Not to Test Mediums: Critiquing the Afterlife Experiments.” Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 2003, pp. 20–30.
Matla, J. L. W. P., and G. J. Zaalberg van Zelst. Le Mystère de la Mort, 2d ed. Paris: G. Doin.
New York Times. “Detroit Student of Spirit Communication Ends Life, Perhaps in Effort to Test Theory.” 7 February 1921, p. 1.
New York Times. “Owen Says Heaven Needs Active Men.” 5 February 1923, p. 9.
Schouten, Sybo A. “An Overview of Quantitatively Evaluated Studies with Mediums and Psychics.” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 88: 221–54 (July 1994).
Schwartz, Gary E. The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death. New York: Atria Books, 2003.
——. “Evidence of Anomalous Information Retrieval Between Two Mediums: Replication in a Double-Blind Design.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 67 (2): 115–30 (April 2003).
Stevenson, Ian, Arthur T. Oram, and Betty Markwick. “Two Tests of Survival After Death: Report on Negative Results.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 55 (815): 329–36 (April 1989).
Tyrrell, G. N. M. “The O. J. L. Posthumous Packet.” Journal for the Society for Psychical Research, September 1948, pp. 269–71.
Chapter 8: Can You Hear Me Now?
Baruss, Imants. “Failure to Replicate Electronic Voice Phenomenon.” Journal of Scientific Exploration 15 (3): 355–67.
Cooke, Andrew. “Electroplasm: Technology’s Indissoluble Link to the Spirit World.” Master’s thesis, Royal College of Art, 2001.
Dusen, Wilson van. “The Presence of Spirits in Madness.” Fourth ed. of pamphlet. New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1983.
Ellis, D. J. The Mediumship of the Tape Recorder: A Detailed Examination of the Phenomenon of Voice Extras on Tape Recordings. Cambridge University Perrott-Warrick Fellowship (1970–72) report, published June 1978 (small-offset litho).
Fuller, John G. The Ghost of 29 Megacycles. London: Souvenir Press, 1985.
Johnson, Kristin, ed. “Unfortunate Emigrants”: Narratives of the Donner Party. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1996.
Lescarboura, Austin. “Edison’s Views on Life and Death.” Scientific American, 30 October 1920, p. 446.
Mason, D. H. “Psychic Psounds and Medium Tones: Spiritualism on 78.” Series of three articles. The Historic Record and AV Collector 35: 30–34, 36: 17–20, 37: 16–24 (April, July, October 1995).
Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
Rousseau, David, and Julie Rousseau. “The Spellchecker Case.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. (October 2005).
Runes, Dagobert D., ed. The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968.
Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions. Williston, VT: Hart Brothers, 1982.
Watson, Thomas A. Exploring Life: The Autobiography of Thomas A. Watson. New York and London: D. Appleton, 1926.
Weightman, Gavin. Signor Marconi’s Magic Box. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.
Chapter 9: Inside the Haunt Box
Bruchard, J. F., D. H. Nguyen, and E. Block. “Effects of Electric and Magnetic Fields on Nocturnal Melatonin Concentrations in Dairy Cows.” Journal of Dairy Science 81: 722–27 (1998).
MacDonald, Douglas, and Daniel Holland. “Spirituality and Complex Partial Epileptic-like Signs.” Psychological Reports 91: 785–92 (2002).
Persinger, Michael A. “Average Diurnal Changes in Melatonin Levels Are Associated with Hourly Incidence of Bereavement Apparitions: Support for the Hypothesis of Temporal (Limbic) Lobe Microseizing.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 76: 444-46 (1993).
——. “Increased Geomagnetic Activity and the Occurrence of Bereavement Hallucinations: Evidence for Melatonin-Mediated Microseizing in the Temporal Lobe?” Neuroscience Letters 88: 271–74 (1988).
——. “Experimental Facilitation of the Sensed Presence: Possible Intercalation between the Hemispheres Induced by Complex Magnetic Fields.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 190 (8): 533–41 (2002).
——, S. A. Koren, and R. P. O’Connor. “Geophysical Variables and Behavior: CIV. Power-Frequency Magnetic Field Transients (5 Microtesla) and Reports of Haunt Experiences Within an Electronically Dense House.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 92: 673–74 (2001).
——, S. G. Tiller, and S. A. Koren. “Experimental Simulation of a Haunt Experience and Elicitation of Paroxysmal Electroencephalographic Activity by Transcerebral Complex Magnetic Fields: Induction of a Synthetic ‘Ghost’?” Perceptual and Motor Skills 90: 659–74 (2000).
Randall, Walter, and Steffani Randall. “The Solar Wind and Hallucinations—A Possible Relation Due to Magnetic Disturbances.” Bioelectromagnetics 12: 67–70 (1991).
Chapter 10: Listening to Casper
Altmann, Jürgen. “Acoustic Weapons: A Prospective Assessment.” Science and Global Security 9: 165–234.
Davis, Laura. “Soundless Concert Stirs the Emotions.” Daily Post (Liverpool), 17 February 2003.
Muggenthaler, Elizabeth von. “Low Frequency and Infrasonic Vocalizations from Tigers.” Paper 3aABb1, presented at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America/NOISE-CON, Newport Beach, CA, 2000.
Tandy, Vic, and T. R. Lawrence. “The Ghost in the Machine.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 62: 360–64 (1998).
——. “Something in the Cellar.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 64 (3): 129–40 (July 2000).
Walsh, Edward J., et al. “Acoustic Communications in Panthera tigris: A Study of Tiger Vocalization and Auditory Receptivity.” Paper 4aAB3 presented at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Nashville, TN, May 2003.
Chapter 11: Chaffin v. the Dead Guy in the Overcoat
“Case of the Will of James L. Chaffin.” Editor’s report in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 36: 517–24 (1928).
Cornell, A. D. “An Experiment in Apparitional Observation and Findings.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 40 (701): 120–24.
——. “Further Experiments in Apparitional Observation.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 40 (706): 409–18.
Davie County Enterprise Record. “Dead Man Returns in a Dream; An Estate in Davie is Redivided.” 4 January 1979, p. 5B.
Gurney, Edmund, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore. Phantasms of the Living. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1918.
Osborn, Albert S. Questioned Documents, 2d ed. Albany, NY: Boyd Printing, 1929.
Wall, James W. History of Davie County. Spartanburg, SC: Reprint Publishing, 1997.
Chapter 12: Six Feet Over
Atwater, P. M. H. “Is There a Hell? Surprising Observations About the Near-Death Experience.” Journal of Near-Death Studies 10 (5): 149–60.
Becker, Carl. “The Pure Land Revisited: Sino-Japanese Meditations and Near-Death Experiences of the Next World.” Anabiosis—The Journal for Near-Death 4 (1): 51–68 (Spring 1984).
Blackmore, Susan. “Near-Death Experiences: In or Out of the Body?” Skeptical Inquirer 16: 34–45 (Fall 1991).
Blanke, Olaf, et al. “Stimulating Illusory Own-Body Perceptions.” Nature 419: 269 (September 2002).
Cheek, David. “The Anesthetized Patient Can Hear and Can Remember.” American Journal of Proctology 13 (5): 287–89 (October 1962).
Clark, Kimberly. “Clinical Interventions with Near-Death Experiences.” In The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1984.
Cook, Emily Williams, Bruce Greyson, and Ian Stevenson. “Do Any Near-Death Experiences Provide Evidence for
the Survival of Human Personality after Death? Relevant Features and Illustrative Case Reports.” Journal of Scientific Exploration 12 (3): 377–406 (1998).
Greyson, Bruce, and Nancy Evans Bush. “Distressing Near-Death Experiences.” Psychiatry 55: 95–110.
Jansen, Karl. Ketamine: Dreams and Realities. Sarasota, FL: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2001.
Morris, Robert L., et al. “Studies of Communication During Out-of-Body Experiences.” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 72 (1): 1–21 (January 1978).
Osis, Karlis, and Donna McCormick. “Kinetic Effects at the Ostensible Location of an Out-of-Body Projection During Perceptual Testing.” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 74 (3): 319–29 (July 1980).
Parnia, S., et al. “A Qualitative and Quantitative Study of the Incidence, Features, and Aetiology of Near-Death Experiences in Cardiac Arrest Survivors.” Resuscitation 48 (2): 149–56 (February 2001).
Ring, Kenneth. “Further Evidence for Veridical Perception During Near-Death Experiences.” Journal of Near-Death Studies 11 (4): 223–29 (Summer 1993).
——, and Sharon Cooper. Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind. Palo Alto, CA: William James Center for Consciousness Studies, 1999.
Sabom, Michael. Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.
——. “The Shadow of Death.” Parts 1 and 2. Christian Research Journal 26 (2): 14–21 and 26 (3): 45–51 (2003).
Schwender, D., et al. “Conscious Awareness During General Anesthesia: Patients’ Perceptions, Emotions, Cognition, and Reactions.” British Journal of Anesthesia 80: 133–39 (1998).
Van Lommel, W. “About the Continuity of Our Consciousness.” In Brain Death and Disorders of Consciousness. Edited by C. Machado and D. A. Shewmon. New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers, 2004.
——, et al. “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands.” Lancet 358: 2039–45 (2001).
Mary Roach is the author of Stiff. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Wired, Outside, GQ, Discover, Vogue, and the New York Times Magazine. She lives in Oakland, California.
*A modern corollary to the Pope’s alarm clock can be found in the erratic behavior of a digital alarm clock belonging to a Mrs. Linda G. Russek, of Boca Raton, Florida. Russek’s husband Henry had recently died, and she wondered whether he was trying to communicate with her via the clock. Russek, a parapsychologist, undertook an experiment in which she asked Henry to speed the clock up on even days and slow it down on odd days. Alas, the data were meaningless because shortly after the study began, the AM/PM indicator had gone on the blink, and Russek was unable to definitively conclude anything beyond the fact that she needed a new alarm clock.
*Delusions of reincarnation typically fit the culture and religion of the deluded—Saddam Hussein claiming to be Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar, excommunicated Mormon polygamist cult leader James Harmston claiming to be Joseph Smith, et cetera. Jesus is your big exception. A Google search on “claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus” turns up thirty-one competing candidates for J.C. incarnate, including the Reverend Sun Myung Moon—rumored to add drops of his own blood to the communion wine—and a Mr. Fukunaga, leader of an obscure Japanese foot-reading sect. Mr. Fukunaga also claims to be Buddha reincarnate. This is less impressive than it sounds because—according to the “Jesus Reincarnation Index” of New Age author Kevin Williams—Jesus is a reincarnation of Buddha.
*By some accounts, Mom didn’t need to be frightened but merely focused a little too long in one place. In a famous case detailed by Jan Bondeson in A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, a thirteenth-century Roman noblewoman gives birth to a boy with fur and claws; the authorities lay blame on an oil painting of a bear on her bedroom wall. The event prompted Pope Martin IV, clearly a tad hysterical, to have all pictures and statues of bears destroyed.
Crafty moms tried to work the phenomenon in their favor. In the early 1800s, Bondeson writes, it was common for pregnant noblewomen to be wheeled into the Louvre to spend an hour or so gazing at a portrait of some handsome earl or archduke of yore, in hopes of influencing their unborn progeny.
*And are we meant to? Unsure despite my Catholic upbringing, I consulted The Celebration of Mass, as thorough a manual of Catholic ritual as you’ll find outside the Vatican. While nowhere was it stated that the consecrated host is literally Christ, it is most certainly treated as something beyond a quarter ounce of unleavened wheat flour. For example, one may not simply throw old, stale hosts into the garbage; they must be consumed by the priest, unless they are so moldy as to be inedible, in which case they are to be burned or mysteriously “done away with in the sacrarium.” And finally, “should anyone vomit the Blessed Eucharist, the matter is to be gathered up and put in some becoming place.”
*There’s a good chance you underestimate almost everything about the sea urchin. For instance, the Encyclopædia Britannica tells us some sea urchins use their little sucker-tipped feet to hold pieces of seaweed over their heads like parasols, for shade. Plus, they have teeth that can drill into rock and excavate entire living rooms for their owners. The teeth are hard to see, because sea urchins sit on their mouths; possibly they are self-conscious about their “complex dental apparatus called Aristotle’s lantern.” One type has spines that can be used as pencils, though not, disappointingly, by the urchin itself.
*Zimmer’s book is about the dawn of neuroscience: the first men to open up heads and figure out how brains worked. Zimmer once edited a story of mine for Discover, a situation from which he’s probably still recuperating. The guy is smarter than anyone I know. If you were to open up his head, his brain would burst out like an airbag.
*My disappointment was short-lived, for this was a wondrous book. Here were detailed rabbinical opinions upon “whether or not a cattle breeder whose animal caused damage by knocking something with its penis must make restitution” (undecided); upon the inadmissibility of cleansing the anus “with the snout of a dog”; upon “the misconduct in which a woman places into the vagina of another woman a piece of meat from a fallen animal.” Here were descriptions of “hairy heart” and treatments for chronic uterine bleeding (“take three measures of Persian onions, boil them in wine, make her drink it and say to her, ‘Cease your discharge!’”).
† A rather barren place, from what I gather. Egyptians made frequent trips to the family plot to supply departed souls with food, clothing, and kitchen items. According to Clara Pinto-Correia, some tombs were even outfitted with toilet facilities for the ka (soul). That No. 2 carries over into the afterlife was apparently a common belief. Correia cites a reference to a funerary fragment expressing anxiety over the possibility that the ka, should its food cache run out, might resort to feeding on its excrement.
*I was intrigued to learn that the French for “pus”—even among members of eighteenth-century aristocracy—is “le pus.”
*I feel it would be wrong to introduce Le Petomane into a manuscript and then abandon him in the very same sentence. I had always thought that the act consisted of popular songs performed on his own wind instrument. But I learned from “The Straight Dope” columnist Cecil Adams that, in fact, Le Petomane, whose real name was Joseph Pujol, could produce only four notes without the aid of an ocarina. This is not to belittle his rectal talents. Pujol could smoke a cigarette down to its butt (or his butt, or both) and blow out candles, as well as expel a fountain of water several feet into the air.
*In looking up “portable hydrogen gas generator” on Google, I came across a study called “Detection of Flatus Using a Portable Hydrogen Gas Analyzer,” apparently a novel use of the device. The author taped the machine’s sampling tube to twenty postoperative gastrointestinal patients’ buttocks in an effort to detect farts, a happy sign that their plumbing was back in action. Hydrogen is the main component of flatus; you and I are, in essence, hydrog
en gas generators of a less portable variety.
*The terms “idiot” and “lunatic” were acceptable diagnostic terms in England up until 1959. “Imbecile” and “feeble-minded person” were, likewise, listed as official categories in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. England has always lagged a bit behind in discarding outdated terms for the disadvantaged. (When I was there in 1980, it was still possible to shop for used clothing at the local Spastic Shop.) That is, compared to the United States, where it takes, oh, about twenty-five minutes for a diagnostic euphemism to become a conversational faux pas.
*Medical treatises were eminently more readable in Sanctorius’s day. Medicina statica delves fearlessly into subjects of unprecedented medical eccentricity: “Cucumbers, how prejudicial,” “Phlebotomy, why best in Autumn,” and the tantalizing “Leaping, its consequences.” There’s even a full-page, near-infomercial-quality plug for something called the Flesh-Brush.