London, 1868: visiting Australian Aboriginal cricketer Charles Rose has died in Guy's Hospital. What happened next is shrouded in mystery. The only certainty is that Charles Rose's body did not go directly to a grave. Written with clarity and verve, and drawing on a rich array of material, Possessing the Dead explores the disturbing history of the cadaver trade in Scotland, England and Australia, where laws once gave certain officials possession of the dead, and no corpse lying in a workhouse, hospital, asylum or gaol was entirely safe from interference. With a rare blend of curiosity, delight in the unexpected and an eye for detail, award-winning historian Helen MacDonald brings to life this gruesome past to reveal the chicanery at play behind the procuring of bodies for dissections, autopsies and collections.

In People Who Don't Know They're Dead, Gary Leon Hill tells a family story of how his Uncle Wally and Aunt Ruth, Wally's sister, came to counsel dead spirits who took up residence in bodies that didn?t belong to them. And in the telling, Hill elucidates much of what we know, or think we know, about life, death, consciousness, and the meaning of the universe. When people die by accident, in violence, or maybe they're drunk, stoned, or angry, they get freeze-framed. Even if they die naturally but have no clue what to expect, they might not notice they're dead. It's frustrating to see and not be seen. It's frustrating not to know what you're supposed to do next. It's especially frustrating to be in someone else's body and think it's your own. That's if you're dead. If you're alive and that spirit has attached itself to you, well that's a whole other set of frustrations. Wally Johnston, a behavioral psychologist, first started working with a medium in the 70s to help spirits move on to the next stage. Some years after that, Ruth Johnston, an academic psychiatric nurse, who'd become interested in new consciousness and alternative healing, began working with Wally to clear spirits who weren't moving on. These hitchhikers had attached themselves to the auras of living relatives or strangers in an attempt to hold on to a physical existence they no longer need. Through her pendulum, Ruth obtains permission from the higher self of both hitchhiker and host to work with them. Then Wally speaks with them, gently but firmly, to make sure they know they are no longer welcome to inhabit the bodies and wreak havoc on the lives of the living. Hill has woven this fascinating story with the history and theory of what happens at death, with particular emphasis on the last 40 years and the work of such groundbreaking thinkers as Elmer Green, Raymond Moody, William James, Aldous Huxley, Edith Fiore, Martha Rogers, Mark Macy, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Bruce Lipton, and a host of others, whose work helps inform our idea of what it is to live and to die. As it turns out, our best defense against hitchhikers is to live consciously. And our best chance of doing that is by paying attention and staying open to possibilities.

Possession, a seemingly irrational phenomenon, has posed challenges to generations of scholars rooted in Western notions of body-soul dualism, self and personhood, and a whole set of presuppositions inherited from Christian models of possession that was “good” or “bad.” The authors of the essays in this book present a new and more promising approach. They conceive spirit possession as a form of communication, of expressivity, of culturally defined behavior that should be understood in the context of local, vernacular theories and empiric reflections. With the aim of reformulating the comparative anthropology of spirit possession, the editors have opened corridors between previously separate areas of research. Together, anthropologists and historians working on several historical periods and in different European, African, South American, and Asian cultural areas attempt to redefine the very concept of possession, freeing it from the Western notion of the self and more clearly delineating it from related matters such as witchcraft, devotion, or mysticism. The book also provides an overview of new research directions, including novel methods of participant observation and approaches to spirit possession as indigenous historiography

Until 1832, when an Act of Parliament began to regulate the use of bodies for anatomy in Britain, public dissection was regularlyand legallycarried out on the bodies of murderers, and a shortage of cadavers gave rise to the infamous murders committed by Burke and Hare to supply dissection subjects to Dr. Robert Knox, the anatomist. This book tells the scandalous story of how medical men obtained the corpses upon which they worked before the use of human remains was regulated. Helen MacDonald looks particularly at the activities of British surgeons in nineteenth-century Van Diemens Land, a penal colony in which a ready supply of bodies was available. Not only convicted murderers, but also Aborigines and the unfortunate poor who died in hospitals were routinely turned over to the surgeons. This sensitive but searing account shows how abuses happen even within the conventions adopted by civilized societies. It reveals how, from Burke and Hare to todays televised dissections by German anatomist Dr. Gunther von Hagens, some peoples bodies become other peoples entertainment.

A terrible judge comes like a thief in the night. Planes drop from the sky, machines sputter and stop, and the graves of the shrieking damned burst open. Angels from hell clothe themselves in the flesh of corpses to form an unholy army. Gary Holland is jolted awake to learn that his father is dead. The family gathers for the funeral... and confronts hell on earth.

Don't call me a demon. I prefer the term Fallen Angel. Everybody deserves a vacation, right? Especially if you have a pointless job like tormenting the damned. So who could blame me for blowing off my duties and taking a small, unauthorized break? Besides, I've always wanted to see what physical existence is like. That's why I "borrowed" the slightly used body of a slacker teen. Believe me, he wasn't going to be using it anymore anyway. I have never understood why humans do the things they do. Like sin—if it's so terrible, why do they keep doing it? I'm going to have a lot of fun finding out!

Meet Sam Thornton, Collector of Souls. Sam’s job is to collect the souls of the damned, and ensure their souls are dispatched to the appropriate destination. But when he’s dispatched to collect the soul of a young woman he believes to be innocent of the horrific crime that’s doomed her to Hell, he says something no Collector has ever said before. “No.” File Under: Urban Fantasy [ Souled Out | Damned If You Don’t | Collector Mania | On The Run ] e-book ISBN: 978-0-85766-219-4 From the Paperback edition.