What happens when we die? It’s a question that has been posed for centuries, and while religion can offer some clarity, there's no scientific answer as to whether life goes on after death.
It seems people are intrigued by death, so much so that best-selling author Mary Roach has made a career from the subject.
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She says people are curious about what lies ahead as we’re all heading towards death.
In her new book Spook, she talks to scientists, mediums, researchers and people who explore their own theories - from reincarnation to ghost conversations, and the weight of a soul.
She’s fascinated by people who have tried to apply a scientific method to the study of the spirit or soul because it’s such a bizarre undertaking.
“I didn’t really come at it that I wanted to prove or disprove, I mean who am I to answer the giant mystery of life?”
A mystery that includes whether or not a personality continues after death, whether we have a spirit and if there’s an afterlife.
Surprisingly, she sounds rather sceptical.
“We’re all going to find out one way or another in the end.”
But, as she says, sceptics are “kind of party-poopers”.
In the 1920s a doctor decided to put someone who was dying on a scale to see if when they died, the weight would decrease, as if something was leaving the body. Roach loves that.
There were studies with cryptographers, who could make an unbreakable code, and after their death a medium would be brought in the hope that the cryptographer would then communicate the code, proving the existence of the afterlife.
It’s the creativity in trying to prove that there’s somewhere to go that Roach likes.
Of the many things she’s done, Roach went out with the International Ghost Hunters Society to tape record ‘spirit voices’.
“There was a lot of excitement that this tape recorder has caught the voices of beyond. There’s this kind of thing all throughout the history of technology, when you get a new piece of technology, whether it’s an infrared camera, you get this sense that wow, this might be a way to capture the communications from beyond. That now we can hear them, we can capture them.”
That was debunked when someone said that the voices were people speaking on the radio two towns over. Not everyone believes that theory.
She also took a 'fundamentals of mediumship' class in England.
“It was before the internet, these were mostly just everyday people trying to see ‘do I have what it takes?’ …It was not here’s how you make money as a medium scamming people, it was ‘this is how you open up your mind, this is how you become receptive to clues’.”
The class paired off and tried to get clues from each other. It was exciting when you guessed the right thing, she says, like the floral curtains she guessed her partner had.
When she was a kid, Roach got together with a group of friends and sat down with an ouija board,
“I wasn’t moving it, everybody else swore that they weren’t moving it… my guess is that it was a combination of an unconscious movement, not an intent necessarily. It’s possible somebody was pushing it towards the ‘Y’, I don’t know. I think it was possible that there was somebody there communicating, I don’t know.”
Roach can see the lighter side to the scary stuff.
“It’s fun and spooky. I’d love to live in a house with a ghost - how fun is that!”
And there’s been a few whacky moments in her own life.
She once lived in a house where she woke up one morning and on the table in the kitchen was a little candy heart that said ‘no use’. Her boyfriend didn’t put it there, he told her. Ten years later he still swore he didn’t do it.
“As human beings we like to be mystified and scared, not in a life-threatening way but a little bit of being spooked is kind of fun.”
Mary Roach is giving a talk about her book at the University of Otago's 'Science and the Afterlife' festival in the few days, and tells us about the theories she's heard.
