A Book Proposal for
Ghost Hungry: In Search of the Dead
Through Psychics, Science and Psychology
By Laura Clark
Note to Paige: Please see the note included in the Word document I sent you, explaining some of my concerns. I prefer not to publish it here.
Ghost Hungry: In Search of the Dead Through Psychics, Science and Psychology
By Laura Clark
There is nothing I want more in the world than to see a ghost. Be it sheeted, see-through, wispy or gruesome, little else would satisfy me more than to witness for myself the spectral embodiment of a person long dead. While to most, ghosts represent nothing more than a sleepless night or horror movie fodder, to me they promise the proof that there is something beyond this life, that those we loved and lost are not gone forever into the blackness of nonexistence. Seeing a ghost is the only thing that could assure me that the loss we suffer is only momentary and sure to be rectified in the next spiritual plateau.
I am on a ghost hunt.
On a summer night before my mother died, as those voracious cancer cells were proving their resistance to the chemotherapy, promising to conquer her at 52, I asked her to promise to come back. We weren’t religious and didn’t believe in a heaven, hell or anything of the sort, yet I found myself unable to bare the idea of death’s finality in regards to my own mother. I told her she had to haunt me. I wanted proof both that an afterlife exists but, most importantly, I wanted to know that she continues to see, to know, to be with me. So, she promised.
Seven years later, she’s still a no show. There have been no bumps in the night, no invisible caresses or words uttered without a speaker. After almost a decade, I’ve got nothing. Well, almost nothing. Other family members have reported better luck than I, claiming experiences with my postmortem mother through some spooky, if questionably legitimate methods. I can’t help but be offended by the idea that I am not first on Mom’s list of hauntings, especially since I was the only one to ask for it. And I’m tired of sitting around and waiting for her ghost like some teenager waiting by a silent telephone on a Friday night. So, I’ve decided to set out to find her—if she is indeed out there.
Ghost hunting for one’s deceased mother would be an eccentric ambition for a person who believes in the spirit world, in the existence of god or a life after death. That I don’t believe in any of these things makes my search nearly insane. Yet, as a skeptic I possess some things that many others like me do not: a deep desire to believe and the hope that everything I think I know is wrong.
To acquire an apparition, I’ve turned to scientists, psychologists and psychics, experts on ghosts, grief and the metaphysics of the soul. I will document my search for my mother and the afterlife while also exploring theories about what remains or doesn’t remain of a person after they take that last, long sleep. In conducting a skeptical search for the afterlife and as a way to go beyond the effervescence of anecdotes and spiritualism, I will be exploring scientific conceptions of consciousness, the soul, so-called paranormal encounters and brain functioning during “psychic” visions. Every person you meet has a different theory about the possibility of life after death—my goal, through research and fieldwork, is to find my own answers to these questions. In doing so, I hope to also find my mother.
I’m not the only one searching for ghosts these days. There are over 60 television shows on ghost hunting and the paranormal currently being produced or in syndication in America. Celebrity psychics have talk shows and worldwide tours. Nearly every town and city leads ghost tours through their streets on weekend nights. There is no question that the early 21st century has been a great time for the specter snoop. The difference between that work and mine is that, where they rely on folklore, shaky night-vision cameras and hidden microphones amidst the audience, I offer a sincere search for the unknown through empirical research and a daughter’s love.
The book will be an intriguing mix of memoir, science, history and experiential reporting. It will be moving, philosophical, descriptive and (believe it or not) humorous. It will seek to answer the question that burns within most grieving people: will we ever see the dead again?
Below is an outline of some proposed components of this work.
