Modern technology has given us powerful new tools for an age-old dream: seeing and speaking with the dead. Using things you probably already own - such as a camcorder, computer, or tape recorder - you can contact departed loved ones or other spirits, record their images and voices, and establish two-way communications between the worlds. Speak with the Dead also details the more traditional methods of seance, trance, and scrying. You don't have to be a "techie" or an occultist to use any of these techniques. This book will guide you to one of the most awe-inspiring experiences you'll ever have - making contact with deceased loved ones and other souls. Speak with the Dead is the first book in the modern marketplace to focus on practical, usable techniques for communicating with spirits. This book shows you seven methods for spirit contact: -catching Electronic Voice Phenomena on tape -using radio noise to provide spirits with a voice -capturing ghostly images on videotape -letting spirits use your computer or telephone -scrying, establishing telepathic contact with the dead, and holding a seance Speak with them. They're waiting.

Discusses the merging of medical, religious and social aspects of handling the topic of death, especially to those who work and learn in those environments.

In most Western and Westernized cultures, the reality of death is a subject that we avoid because it makes us uncomfortable. Even participants in religions that celebrate death as a release to a paradisiacal realm will avoid talking about or facing the death experience, unless it's through the lens of their religious beliefs. The rest of us tap dance around the subject, enjoying death-related fiction involving vampires, zombies, and serial killers, while we recoil in mind-numbing horror at the thought of being in the same room with a corpse. Chelsea Tolman is a funeral director, mortician, and embalmer with over 15 years experience. In her book, "Speaking of the Dead," she attempts to provide the balm that allows us to engage in the real world of death's circumstances and give us a peek behind the curtain at what it's like to be a professional in the death industry.This book is a collection of Chelsea's recounted stories that illustrate the unique perspective of being a professional in the death industry. She covers a wide range of emotions and circumstances from light hilarity to deep sadness and grief. She does well in not taking herself too seriously and is quick to share stories where she laughs about her own foibles and mistakes. Chelsea also takes the time to celebrate the diversity of cultures, describing in intimate detail the way some religions and nationalities treat their dead. All get equal respect, including the careful corpse wrappings of the Bha'i, the pronated wailing women of the Far East, the colorful dancers of Africa, suicides, and drug overdoses. She expertly weaves these stories of culture in with the experience of grief and loss to reveal how we all share the basic human essence of missing our dead.Finally, "Speaking of the Dead" serves as Chelsea's heartfelt attempt to show to the world that the experience of caring for one's dead is one that should be embraced and cherished, rather than avoided and feared as it largely is at present. She details the loving care she gives to the bodies and how she encourages the loved ones to participate and catalyze their own progress at closure. The tenderness she shows in wrapping infants in blankets, smoothing an old man's hair, or applying a young woman's make-up invites you to step over the gap from macabre avoidance to emotional acceptance and understand that death is simply another part of the human experience that we should all embrace.

How to Speak With the Dead: A Practical Handbook was first published in 1918, written anonymously by Sciens. Though Curious Publications guarantees no results with this new reprinting, it does believe it'll offer a sense of wonder and amusement. This edition also features an original review from the October 9, 1919 issue of Life Magazine. As Sciens said himself: "This book is intended, first, as a practical guide for the assistance of those persons who may be desirous of speaking with the dead; and, secondly, as an elementary textbook of occult phenomena. It presupposes for its readers a willingness to be guided by facts and a disregard of opinions based upon imagination instead of upon fact. ... Let us speak to the dead and let us add their knowledge and counsel to the common store."

Originally published in 1990 by Bantam Books.

In late medieval Catholicism, mourners employed an array of practices to maintain connection with the deceased—most crucially, the belief in purgatory, a middle place between heaven and hell where souls could be helped by the actions of the living. In the early sixteenth century, the Reformation abolished purgatory, as its leaders did not want attention to the dead diminishing people's devotion to God. But while the Reformation was supposed to end communication between the living and dead, it turns out the result was in fact more complicated than historians have realized. In the three centuries after the Reformation, Protestants imagined continuing relationships with the dead, and the desire for these relations came to form an important—and since neglected—aspect of Protestant belief and practice. In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders. This prodigious research reveals how sermons, elegies, and epitaphs portrayed the dead as speaking or being spoken to, how ghost stories and Gothic fiction depicted a permeable boundary between this world and the next, and how parlor songs and funeral hymns encouraged singers to imagine communication with the dead. Speaking with the Dead in Early America thus boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

In Speaking Spirits, Sherry Roush presents the first systematic study of early modern Italian eidolopoeia.