THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 9AMY BRUNI TALKSabout her job as if she’s a
guest sitting next to you at a dinner party,
making small talk about the common way
she earns a check. She works in ghosts, she
writes in a matter-of-fact tone that elicits a
“Huh! How’d you get into that?” as if she’s
just mentioned she’s a proctologist or
something, rather than the co-host of the
smash-hit Travel Network show “Kindred
Spirits” and one of the best-known para-
normal investigators alive today.
The way she downplays a career that’s
more extraordinary than not has a pur-
pose, especially when trying to bring a
wider audience to her debut book, “Life
With the Afterlife.” Bruni doesn’t want to
spook you (too much). She doesn’t want
you to be wowed by ghost hunting, or to
force you to believe in ghosts by being too
obvious about the awe-inducing presence
of the spectral world. If you do, you do, and
if you don’t, you don’t: One need not take
ghosts literally in order to benefit from the
lessons Bruni’s learned serving both the
haunted and the haunting.
The book starts with a fascinating por-
trait of the ghost hunter as a young woman,
casually gobbling up books by the Austrian
parapsychologist Hans Holzer (the inves-
tigator of the “Amityville Horror” house).
She grew up with parents who believed,
and who reported witnessing their own
ghosts, in a house where bumps in the
night were normalized: “Sometimes there
are ghosts, the thinking was in our family,
and sometimes they’re in our house.” Bruni
was raised to be receptive to the idea that
there are things in the universe that we
can’t easily understand, and over 13 chap-
ters she lays out how this has informed her
philosophy of ghost hunting. She doesn’t
fetishize hauntings; she approaches the
work with empathy and compassion. It’s
more like social work. She wants to help
the people being haunted, but she wants to
help those doing the haunting almost as
much.
The ghost-skeptical, or those who don’t
watch her show, might wonder what this
book could possibly offer them. Especially
because the industry secrets aren’t exactly
juicy (this is no takedown of, say, the rock-
star parapsychologists who inspired “The
Conjuring”), and the ghost stories she tells
are more chill than chilling. But the ques-
tions Bruni asks bear relevance to all of us,
haunted or not: What does it mean to live
with ghosts? When we think or talk about
ghosts, it’s never about the ghost, really.
They’re more of a mechanism to talk to one
another about the way the world is inexpli-
cably weird sometimes, and about the
deep emotional experiences we feel living
in it.
I thought of this recently. I should note
that I do believe in ghosts — or at least am
willing to sometimes wonder, when I make
eye contact with strangers on the subway,
if I am the only person who can see them.
Maybe it’s because of the one childhood
summer I spent rooting around the ESP
section of my local library, but I tell a lotof
ghost stories — both actually ghostly (ask
me about the time I was awakened by a re-
ally horny ghost in a house in Hudson:
spooky) and metaphorically ghostly (askme about recently being ghosted by some-
one I was dating for four months: also
spooky). But what are we to do with ghosts
both literal and figurative? Take the ghost
of the man in my phone, who will occasion-
ally arise during demon hours with a truly
haunting “u up?” and then disappear, leav-
ing me little evidence of existence. What
would Bruni have me do with this demonic
poltergeist?
As she writes, we cannot force a ghost to
cross over into the world of the living (i.e.,
leave me alone or text me during normal
times). It is egotistical to think we know
what a ghost needs — we can barely figure
out the “means, motives, thoughts and de-
sires” of physical people sitting across
from us, she writes. Instead, we should re-
alize that every ghost has a story to tell, if
we listen, and if we just confront the
ghosts, we’ll learn what it is they need to
leave our world and return to theirs. 0Ghosted
Some advice for the haunted, from a paranormal investigator.
By ALLISON P. DAVIS
LIFE WITH THE AFTERLIFE
13 Truths I Learned About Ghosts
By Amy Bruni
257 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $27.
ALLISON P. DAVISis a features writer at New
York magazine and The Cut.
Amy BruniPHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREI JACKAMETS/NBCUNIVERSAL, VIA GETTY IMAGES
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