And if so, do the dead come back? Can we communicate?
Faith attempts to answer these questions, but periodically science has, too. Never mind that science would rather forget the whole thing.
The last major embrace of ghosts by sober-minded scientists is the provocative subject of a new book, "Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death" (Penguin Press) by Deborah Blum, professor of journalism at UW-Madison. She's an award-winning science writer, and author of the widely praised "Love at Goon Park."
"It's selling better than anything I've ever written," Blum says of "Ghost Hunters." "It's doing really well. It's the first book I've ever done that's been reviewed by Entertainment Weekly and Oprah's magazine.
"I got an 'A' from Entertainment Weekly - for an academic book!" she adds with a laugh.
She says the book is "not at all dry or academic. It's a good ghost story on some levels - I meant it to be."
Readers will find it to be similar in tone to the runaway best-seller "The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson, minus all the improbable interior monologues. The shared macabre flavor is perhaps natural to the material.
"I wrote it as a historian, in a real narrative way," Blum says. "When I started to write it, that was one of the things that appealed to me about it. I wanted to give a little of the creepy feel of a ghost story, where you're wondering what's real and what's not real."
The book chronicles the best ghost hunt in the history of science, she says, the efforts of a coterie of early 20th-century intellectuals to quantify the paranormal and render the perception of ghosts in scientific terms.
"The book covers the years between 1880 and 1910, the post-Darwinian era, when many people were trying to resolve their doubts and fears about our moral future," she says.
They found a leader in American psychologist William James, whose novelist brother, Henry, scored a supernatural coup of his own with his novella "The Turn of the Screw" in 1898. But unlike Henry's success, William James' Society for the Psychical Research threatened to compromise his reputation.
"I hadn't realized before this book how much time and energy James put into his psychical research," Blum says. "As you get into it, you begin to see how much he risked in doing it, and how much he lost in professional respect."
The American spiritualist movement was something of a craze after the Civil War. With so many dead, the grief- stricken survivors were hungry for solace. It was part of several belief movements that were born in that era's "Burned-Over District" of upstate New York. The nickname was coined because the area had been so heavily evangelized that there was little fuel - meaning unconverted residents - left.
Spiritualism and other Burned-Over District movements have survived, and not just as research into parapsychology at places such as Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where it's folded into physics, of all things; think of extra-sensory perception and quantum mechanics' "the observer affects the system"). The Shakers, Mormonism, the Unitarian Universalist church, Seventh-day Adventism and Pentecostalism - all grew out of movements begun in the Burned-Over District.
Following the Boer War and World War I, and the loss of generations of young British men, spiritualism grew in popularity in England. Cold, rational Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, became its strongest advocate, and he even penned a massive, two-volume history of the movement.
In the Victorian Age of reason, the careful study of ghosts, clairvoyance and psychokinesis held out hope that life after death was fact: science-based faith.
Doyle lost a son in World War I, as well as a brother, two- brothers-in-law and two nephews. Critics thought he'd gone dotty in his enthusiastic support for paranormal science. For example, he wrote at length on the reality of fairies.
For his part, Doyle - who was a physician before he became an author - maintained that his scientist critics were not being very scientific after all: Science can, and should, argue with spiritualist theories and experiments. But even if the theories were dismissed, the observed phenomena still persists.
Blum had a similar experience after writing a recent op- ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, "in which I said you had really great, smart scientists working on this a hundred years ago. And now, when the questions are still just as fascinating, which people care about just as much, we're not getting that. Why is that?"
In response, "I got very angry letters from scientists - very angry," she says. "My books are not fiction. And especially if I'm going to write a book about ghosts, I'm not going to make anything up. It has to be really scrupulous, or the whole thing washes away like sand under my feet."
Blum spent about three years on her project, doing research primarily at Harvard's Houghton Library, which houses James' papers, and at the American Society for Psychical Research, which holds the correspondence of many of his colleagues.
"One of the things about doing the book that was so interesting to me - I'm a mainstream science writer - before I started doing this book, people just did not tell me their stories of what I think of as the everyday supernatural," Blum says. They might have been embarrassed to, because Blum represents science - rational thought - and has even won a Pulitzer Prize for it.
"Once I started doing the book, I was amazed at the number of people that I knew who had had these experiences, and the way they had repeated the exact phenomena that was studied by William James. The elegance of the pattern - it really impressed me. I felt more open-minded after I did the book, because if you spend any time with the subject, it forces you."
The question, she says, is not why some believe. "I think the more interesting question is why we see these things, and why we hear these things.
"The question is: Why haven't we answered this other question?"
If you go
What: Free Wisconsin Book Festival talk by Deborah Blum on "Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death."
Where: Wisconsin Historical Museum on the Capitol Square, 30 N. Carroll St.
When: 11 a.m.-11:45 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 21.
Information: www.wisconsinbookfestival.org.
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