Previously published as "Spook"--Cover

You again: A visit to the reincarnation nation -- The little man inside the sperm, or possibly the big toe: Hunting the soul with microscopes and scalpels -- How to weigh a soul: What happens when a man (or a mouse, or a leech) dies on a scale -- The Vienna sausage affair: And other dubious highlights of the ongoing effort to see the soul -- Hard to swallow: The giddy, revolting heyday of ectoplasm -- The large claims of the medium: Reaching out to the dead in a University of Arizona lab -- Soul in a dunce cap: The author enrolls in medium school -- Can you hear me now?: Telecommunicating with the dead -- Inside the haunt box: Can electromagnetic fields make you hallucinate? -- Listening to Casper: A psychoacoustics expert sets up camp in England's haunted spots -- Chaffin v. the dead guy in the overcoat: In which the law finds for a ghost, and the author calls in an expert witness -- Six feet over: A computer stands by on an operating room ceiling, awaiting near-death experiencers

"What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that, the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?" In an attempt to find out, the author brings her curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive

Includes reading group guide