[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Number 12: Proof. Okay, so I read an article in the News Scientist by author Mary Roach. And it starts like this: "What happens after you die? I can name you 47 men who've tried to harness the rational horsepower of science to answer this most floaty question. Some were physicians, some physicists, some psychologists. Two were Nobel Prize winners. Of them, only one to date has landed irrefutable proof. The man's name was Thomas Lynn Bradford."

MARY ROACH: Yes. [laughs]

JAD: And that is Mary Roach.

MARY ROACH: Hi.

JAD: How are you?

MARY ROACH: I'm fine. How are you, Jad?

JAD: I'm good.

JAD: Mary is the author of several books with wonderfully succinct titles.

MARY ROACH: Spook. Stiff. Bonk.

JAD: Those are three different books. The one we're talking about today is Spook.

MARY ROACH: The subtitle is Science Tackles the Afterlife.

JAD: Which brings us to Mr. Bradford.

MARY ROACH: Thomas Lynn Bradford was a spiritualist who lived in the early part of the 1900s.

JAD: A spiritualist. Is that ...?

MARY ROACH: Spiritualism was very—was a religion, very popular around the turn of the last century, that was predicated on this notion that there is no death. That when you die you just go on to Summerland.

JAD: Summerland?

MARY ROACH: A beautiful place beyond.

JAD: The thing is, spiritualists like Thomas Lynn Bradford—actually especially Thomas Lynn Bradford—they didn't just have faith that Summerland was out there after death. They wanted ...

MARY ROACH: Proof. Physical evidence that there is a beyond.

JAD: So here's what happened. One day ...

JAD: When was this, by the way?

MARY ROACH: This was 1921.

JAD: One day in 1921, Thomas Lynn Bradford put out an ad.

MARY ROACH: Yes, he put an ad in a Detroit newspaper.

JAD: Which basically said, "I would like to prove the existence of the afterlife. Anyone out there that can help?"

MARY ROACH: "I'm looking for other like minded people to think about this." And this one woman contacted him.

JAD: Really?

MARY ROACH: A Ruth Moran.

JAD: Who was apparently a psychic.

MARY ROACH: And the two of them sat down, and they devised what they thought was an ironclad plan. One person dies, crosses over to the afterlife.

JAD: And then from the beyond that person would yell back.

MARY ROACH: "Hey, it worked! I'm here. There's an afterlife."

JAD: Meanwhile, the person who didn't die would be sitting in a room somewhere, psychically listening to see if they could hear something.

MARY ROACH: Because if they could, then we'd have our proof.

JAD: Huh.

MARY ROACH: In fact, he—I think it was that evening, Thomas Lynn Bradford in his rented room, he turned on the gas with the pilot off and asphyxiated himself. The New York Times reported this whole thing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Detroit. February 6. Thomas Lynn Bradford committed suicide last night. His body was found in his room at 2500 Howard Street with the gas turned on.]

MARY ROACH: The landlord in his building found him the next day.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Nearby were found several typewritten pages on can the dead communicate with the living? Somewhere in Detroit is believed to be a girl who is waiting for him to answer this question.]

JAD: The girl, of course, was Ruth Moran, the psychic. And there she was, cross town in her own small apartment with the lights off, as I imagine it, just waiting.

MARY ROACH: Listening. But she didn't hear anything from Thomas Lynn Bradford.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Detroit. February 7. Though more than 40 hours have elapsed, no message has come back from the spirit world to Mrs. Ruth Doran.]

MARY ROACH: There was a follow up story the next day. The headline said, "Dead Spiritualist Silent."

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Dead Spiritualist Silent."]

MARY ROACH: It was almost like when somebody is lost at sea. They wait a certain amount of time, and then they finally say, "Okay, we're declaring him dead." [laughs]

JAD: Yeah. But you know what's weird is like this Ruth girl, right? Why wouldn't she just lie and say that she did hear Thomas Lynn Bradford?

MARY ROACH: I know that's ...

JAD: I mean, I think it's very—it's very admirable of her to be honest like that.

MARY ROACH: I think that people like Thomas Lynn Bradford and Ruth Moran, I just. They weren't trying to pull a hoax. They weren't charlatans. They really were just seekers. They really just wanted to find proof.

JAD: Huh. But you say—you said in that thing I read, you set him up as being the guy who knows. The guy who found proof. Were you just being colorful when you wrote that?

MARY ROACH: No. I mean—well, he knows in that he's dead now.

JAD: Oh, I see.

MARY ROACH: Dead people know.

JAD: [laughs] So this isn't really like a knowing problem. It's a journalism problem.

MARY ROACH: It's a reporting problem. Billions of people know. They just can't get the answer back to us.

JAD: Huh. Okay, that brings me to my last question. In your book Spook, in the dedications, you say, "To my parents, wherever they are—or aren't." At this point, after writing this book, are you willing to say that they are somewhere or that they aren't?

MARY ROACH: If I had to put my money on it? Seriously, if a great deal was at stake and I had to decide one way or the other, I would put my money on they aren't anywhere. But that's really depressing, and I don't want to have to put my money on it.

JAD: Yeah.

MARY ROACH: And I don't like to be the sort of person who even says that because, you know, my mother believed. My mother absolutely had faith that when she died she was going to heaven. And even if she's wrong, she doesn't know she's wrong. So she went through her whole life with a calmness and a peace of mind that I'll never have. The people who believe, win. The skeptics lose.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jolie Holland: [singing] Give me that old fashioned morphine. Give me that old fashioned morphine. Give me that old fashioned morphine. That's good enough for me. It was good enough for my grandpa.]

JAD: Thanks to Mary Roach, author of the book Spook and many others. More about her on our website. Radiolab is supported by the Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation.

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