The subtitle for Mary Roach’s book, Spook, is Science Tackles the Afterlife, which has more punch but is less a real description of her book than this: Oddball and Whacky Paranormal Claims of the Past and the New Ways Science is Trying to Uncover the Truth About Life After Death ... As Seen Through a Humorist Skeptic’s Pop Culture Lens.

Roach approaches reincarnation, mediums, ectoplasm, soul weighing, electromagnetic fields, psychoacoustics, ghost contacts, and near death experiences in turn as a skeptic-hoping-to-be-turned-believer, yet generally finds only situations she (and her readers) can laugh about—such as when she enrolls in a mediumship class in England with a woman who wants her students to open themselves up to, as she pronounces it, “spit-its”:

“Does anyone not  feel contact?” [Only] I raise my hand. The tutor comes over and puts her hand up to my face. She asks if I can feel my face. What does this mean? It’s not numb, so I guess the answer is yes.

“Okay, good, you’ve got it.” She turns back to the group. I don’t read minds, but I think I know what’s going on in hers: AVOID THE YANK. The Yank is trouble.

The Yank is trouble when her book delves too long into topics simply for the hope of a laugh, such as the chapter describing the apparently popular practice in the 1920s by séance-holding women of pulling “ectoplasm” from a certain orifice as proof of the after life. Roach even uses up a handful of pages describing a phone call she made that yielded no information at all.

However many asides—inserted as footnotes—are amusing both because they are bizarre and because of the rewarding and inevitable punch line.

Roach meets with modern researchers in various areas of paranormal study in the effort to see if today’s technology is at last able to provide proof of post-life consciousness and, like the researchers themselves admit, the anecdotes are numerous, but scientific study results are inconclusive.

In the end, Roach comes away with her hope for things not seen. But without realizing it, she comes to her conclusion at the beginning of the book while visiting a child in India who claims to be the reincarnate son of a family from another village:

It occurs to me that it doesn’t much matter whether this boy does or does not hold the soul of the son Mathan Singh lost. If Mathan Singh believes it, and if believing it eases the grief he feels, then this is what matters.

And so it goes with belief in the afterlife.