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.

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