When Spirits Come Calling: The Open-Minded Skeptic's Guide to After-Death Contacts

Repeated studies year after year demonstrate that millions of Americans claim to experience contact with people who have died. Such contacts are usually comforting and surprisingly intense. Most do not involve an intermediary such as a medium, and unlike near-death experiences, they often come unexpectedly to healthy people going about their normal lives.


In 1973 Sylvia Hart Wright married Paul Fletcher, a linguist. After he died in 1983, Wright and her son jointly had an experience that suggested that Paul was trying to contact them from beyond the grave; at this time two of his male friends reported similar events. This was startling to people steeped in the scientific method and agnosticism! Scholar that she was, Wright started researching the writings of doctors and social scientists on such phenomena and in time interviewed almost a hundred healthy, everyday people who had sensed contact with the dead. Her book, When Spirits Come Calling: The Open-Minded Skeptic’s Guide to After-Death Contacts, grew out of this work.