HOWTO manual for communicating with dead people

For those who would like to talk with dead folks but haven't had much luck, perhaps this technical manual may be of some help.
Spiricom: An Electromagnetic-Etheric Systems Approach to Communications with Other Levels of Human Consciousness (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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nordgren

I have talked to the dead with these exact methods, albeit in an ambitious roleplaying.

A game based largely on the people and methods in this book was created in Stockholm in 2007, as part of pervasive games research project iPerg. Players spent a month roleplaying that they were possessed by dead radicals and communicating with the dead through technology. There’s a documentation website of the game here: http://momentum.sics.se/
Anonymous

It’s very easy to talk to dead people, anybody can do it.

The hard part is having them talk back to you :(
nanuq

This book does make for fun reading. One of the authors is described as “deceased” (quotation marks included) and the authors include a warning that anyone who tries to use the information in the book for personal gain will start out their afterlife on the “lowest level of the astral plane”. Words to live by (so to speak).
jjasper

This thing reads like stereo instructions!
Roy Trumbull

When Harry Houdini was hard up in the early days, he and his wife would do a spirit reading show for the gullible to pay the rent.
They would find and talk to all the town gossips. Mrs. Houdini would dress the part and be the cloak room attendant and pick up lobby gossip. Then she would change into a different outfit and play the medium. She and Harry had a set of word codes they used so the medium could identify an object or other information from a member of the audience. The blindfold arches over the bridge of the nose leaving enough space so a billet can be read. The billet in hand is the following billet, not the one being spoken of.
An amazing number of people got sucked up in this nonsense including Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers.
Anonymous

Yeah, a stereo for the dead. Exactly!
dross1260

Faves.

p. 70, Fig. 21
For Spirit Communications:
2. Wait for dial tomb.
4. Don’t be alarmed if the line goes dead.

p. 78
Although present-day psychiatry does not yet recognize it, we feel reasonably certain that at least 25% of the patients in our mental asylums are, in part
, the victims of such unwanted intrusion into their individual consciousness by entities on the lowest astral planes.
semiotix

Ha. “What’s that, Billy? You say you miss Grandma and wish you could have said goodbye to her? Well, here’s an idea… why don’t you RTFM, dumbass!”
Brainspore

Talking to dead people is easy. It’s getting them to respond that’s the tricky part.
Brainspore

@ Roy Trumbull #13:

Are you sure you have that story right? Everything I’ve read about Houdini says that he spent years DEBUNKING people who claimed to have genuine supernatural powers, and did his best to convince Arthur Conan Doyle that people who “spoke to the dead” were frauds.
JIMWICh

From Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (David Blair, 1991)

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/wax/

“In London that summer the telegraph company had begun to modernize its operation. As a result, Ella Spiralum lost her job as a telephone operator. Ironically, Spiralum was herself was an electrical inventor, who dreamed of developing the means to transmit moving pictures through the telephone.

Ella Spiralum was the half-sister of James Hivemaker. Through Hivemaker Ella found work as a photographic medium at the Supernnormal Picture Society. Each Sunday ghosts would appear at a seance in Tavastock Square to be photographed with the living, by Ella and her special camera. Often, the ghosts spoke to Ella.

One talkative ghost had died in an auto accident. This ghost was the dead wife of a Hungaro-Egyptian gentleman who often attended the seances. This sad gentleman was the charming bee scientist, Zoltan Abbasid.

Ella Spiralum discovered that Zoltan Abbasid knew her half-brother, James Hivemaker. It was Zoltan Abbasid who had brought Mesopotamian bees to England. Abbasid had discovered the bees near Basra, in the south of Mesopotamia.”
Maggie Koerth-Baker

David, you’re my hero.
Bloodboiler

There’s an electronics book with strangely similar title.
Anonymous

They are from Franklin, NC?? Holy crap, that’s only like 45 minutes from my house… oh goody… more crazy people even closer to me.
Mazoola

When I first stumbled across it, I immediately thought of the “GrailNet 2.0 User’s Guide” from Richard Grant’s wonderful Views from the Oldest House.
Antinous / Moderator

jjasper FTW
Ambiguity

“From Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (David Blair, 1991)”

What a great movie.

I took my wife to it when we were dating. She married me anyway!
Bray_beast

Looks a little like The Philosophy of Time Travel.
Kozmund

I misread the title and thought it was a manual for communicating with *deaf* people. I thought that would be a handy guide for people who over enunciate when talking to deaf people who are trying to read their lips, thus totally screwing the pooch. This is fine, too.
ZippySpincycle

Looks like they’ve discovered the operating manual for Project Flatline.
Roy Trumbull

#15 – True he did debunk spiritualism. But early in his career he used the bunk to make a buck.
See Houdini by William Lindsay Gresham.