Spooky

I've decided: I love Mary Roach. Well, I love her books, anyway. Over the past year, I've read her entire corpus. First, Stiff. Then, Bonk. And I just finished reading, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Her books are so quirky, smart, and funny. And she's a great researcher to boot.

Now, after reading Spook, I had to join in Mary Roach's skepticism concerning our prediliction to embrace all kinds of zany ideas about the afterlife. Take mediums, for instance.

I mean, if there are really people who can communicate with our dead relatives, don't you think our relatives would have more interesting things to tell us? Most mediums say things like:

Your loved one is telling me that the letter "R" is important to your family. Someone's name begins with "R"?

Or: I'm picking up an image of a bell. There's a bell in your house? A picture of a bell?

Or: I get the sense that uncle Bob wants you to know that he forgives you. Something in the family was a source of animosity?

Really! If these folks have such close contact with the dead, and the dead speak, then why can't uncle Bob tell his family where he buried the $10,000 he hid in a Ball Mason jar in the back yard? Why is uncle Bob concerned about a bell when he would, we presume, be more concerned about his family in other ways?

Yes, I'm a skeptic. What's really spooky, as Mary Roach points out, is that people will actually pay money to get signals like this from someone who can't even talk to a dead person who knows the winning lottery number or a combinaton to a family safe.