Such was the straightforward comment made by the eminent zoologist and philosopher J. S. Huxley, contributing to a collection of essays which sought to answer precisely that question. The publication, Where are the dead? (1928), drew together philosophers, clergy, atheists, scientists and spiritualists to answer an anonymous letter published in the Daily News, which wondered of the dead, ‘Where are the mighty hosts of the dead … what happens to the poor bewildered soul?’

Similar questions have been addressed by all human beings at some point in their lives. An encounter with death, perhaps through personal bereavement, leads people to ponder what is, after all, one of life's greatest mysteries. Our natural human concern for family members or friends does not immediately cease with their death, and we speculate on the possibility of their continued well-being beyond the grave. The sense that a corpse does not resemble the living friend, and that ‘something’ is missing from the shell of the body, leads us to ask where that ‘something’ might have gone. Faced with the reality of death, even the most life-embracing person is forced to recognise his or her own mortality and the self-regarding question surfaces: what will happen to me when I die?

Nothing about this is new; the finality of death, the possibility of the survival of the human soul and the nature of the afterlife are matters that have been pondered for millennia. Huxley's stark, and all-too-obvious response to such questions (‘we do not know’) has not prevented speculation.

This book offers an investigation into some of the lively speculation about life after death that took place between 1850 and 1939. More particularly it examines modern spiritualism, a phenomenon whose central tenet was that the living and the dead could converse with one another and that people could indeed ‘know’ what had happened to the departed. This study takes seriously the spiritualist visions of the afterlife and the theology that underpinned them, and offers the first thoroughgoing and systematic account of spiritualist beliefs.