Roach heads into a mire of ghostly and laboratory episodes with robust humor. Was that not the weight of the soul? How else to explain this consistent loss of energy? But if the soul leaves the body upon death, where does it go? Perhaps through some kind of window to heaven? At the turn of the last century, Duncan Macdougall's highly sensitive scale (erected in his barn) recorded that a body loses 21 grams upon expiration. That has resulted in cunning preparations for weighing expiring creatures - not only 'dying consumptives' but goats and lambs too. 'Mediumship,' says the group leader, 'is about proving that life after death is a fact.'Īccording to the laws of physics, a loss of weight always accompanies a loss of energy. 'After a lunch of soup and something ectoplasmic in tan sauce,' Roach pairs up with striving mediums. Roach enrolls in an English academy 'for the advancement of psychic science.' It's housed in an old mansion bequeathed by the wealthy Arthur Findlay, president of the Spiritualists' National Union. Mediums have rattled tables through the ages trying to communicate with the deceased. He later turned his microscope to semen in hopes of beholding the human soul in miniature.

Was it in the heart, the brain, the bladder? In 1675 the Dutchman Anton van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope, which revealed the lives of bacteria and protozoa throughout our bodies. Early anatomists poked around cadavers in search of the soul. Rawat exclaims: 'You come for one, and you leave with four!'ĭifferent cultures have different ideas about the afterlife. They visit a village where a child, Aishwary, is 'thought by his family to be the reincarnation of a factory worker named Veerpal, several villages distant, who accidentally electrocuted himself not long before Aishwary was born.' While in this village, further declarations of 'P.P.' (previous personalities) crop up among other families. Her co-journeyman into the rural landscape of India is a reincarnation researcher by the name of Dr. In America reincarnation claims are relatively rare. In India it is a culturally accepted phenomenon. 'Indian villages are fertile ground for claims of reincarnation,' she explains.

Roach travels to India to visit victims (victors?) of reincarnation. Which means that for millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter. 'And, of course, only one of these can be true.

'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,' she writes.

Spook by mary roach