I Didn't Know If I Believed In The Afterlife. Then My Dead Father Sent Me A Message.

I’ve always been curious about the supernatural. When I was a kid, I begged my parents for a subscription to the Time Life “Mysteries Of The Unknown” book series and spent hours paging through the thin, hardbound black books and gawking at blurry photos of Big Foot and fuzzy, unexplained lights hovering in formation over some lonely mesa in New Mexico.

But the volume I found most captivating was about mediums. The idea that a person could function as a mystical transistor radio and pick up messages from the afterworld thrilled and terrified me. I was especially fascinated by a woman who had lived a century earlier and had ceremoniously oozed ectoplasm from her orifices ― sometimes in the shape of a gooey hand or even someone’s face ― whenever she spoke with the dead.

I had so many questions: Could we really come back, even if just for a few seconds, in the form of a mysterious, garbled memo beamed into the head of someone with the ability to pick up these ghostly radio waves, and if so, what would we say? What would it feel like to hear them ― to be reached by someone who had left Earth but hadn’t entirely left their earthly life behind?

Determined to find out, I tried to initiate conversations with spirits in my bedroom before I fell asleep. I’d offer up an open invitation to whoever or whatever might be floating by our house, whispering, “If there’s anyone here who wants to talk to me, I’m listening! Don’t be afraid!”

I was never completely sure if I was trying to convince the ghosts or myself that there was nothing to be afraid of. I didn’t know what I’d do if one actually showed up or, heaven help me, I started dripping ectoplasm from my ears, but it didn’t really matter because I never got a response.

Because I