Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005), published by W. W. Norton & Company, a non-fiction work by Mary Roach who also wrote Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, is a humorous scientific exploration as to whether there is a soul that survives death. In Britain, the title of the book is Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife.

Book synopsis

Author Mary Roach investigates the possibility of an afterlife, and also various attempts to define and find the soul.

The book covers these topics:

• Investigations of reincarnation
• Attempts to find the soul (by dissection, weighing, and other methods)
• Spiritualism, fraudulent mediums, and ectoplasm
• Modern mediumship, and "medium schools"
• Attempts to use electronic devices to communicate with the dead, including electronic voice phenomena (EVP)
• Other forces that make people feel haunted electromagnetic fields, infrasound, etc
• Court cases involving ghosts
• near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences