Houston Southard

MARY ROACH - SPOOK

Boo who? Where is the afterlife? Is there a soul? How do hauntings happen?

Roach takes a deep-dive into the minds of priests, mediums, philosophers and neuroscientists to find out. She paints more of a possibility space for how different cultures and cults interpret each of these questions rather than pointing to one definitively. She's more generous than me.

Is an apparition a spiritual experience we conjure to commune with the dead, or the latent effect of dopamine-inhibiting, hallucination-causing micro-seizures brought on by subtle changes in electromagnetic and infrasound frequencies?

Is belief in reincarnation so prevalent in east asian hinduism because the souls just like to stay local or because it's easier to live surrounded by so much death thinking you'll get another go around the maypole when your number gets called? Is the afterlife in general a self-prescribed opiate to the pain of hell on earth or an evolutionary mechanism beset to deny death?

Is the soul, first famously considered by aristotle, an ephemeral vapor in the driver seat of life or a cognitive plague that planted the seeds of eugenics via phrenology? Is it conceived in the uterine egg upon bumping uglies with a sperm cell, or only after a fortnight when the zygote decides to twin into two half-souls or not?

Does the soul halve when epileptics undergo corpus callosotomies or full hemispherectomies to reduce epilepsy severity, or is it how we can't know everything that still imbues hope into the many who seek the sweet solace of an easy, comforting answer to the question of why we're here?

The answer has always been easy, just sans the comfort. Roach doesn't deliver the answers, but reports on the full spectrum of those who think they do. For that, it doesn't deliver the most satisfying ending, but much like life, it's still a wicked fun ride to read. I think that's the point. It's not trick or treat. The trick is the treat.

Hope everyone's spirits are high this Halloween, because next week the afterlife might make a comeback.

For more cryptic wonderings on origins and classist divisiveness, dig into the crypt of my essay ‘Halloween, Unmasked’ on my website. Link in story.