Get ready for a spine-tingle. Well, sort of. For the Outside feature story "Something Blubbery This Way Comes" (November 2006), contributor Mary Roach spent a ghost-hunting night aboard the 19th-century whale ship Charles W. Morgan in Mystic, Connecticut. But as the author of the non-fiction books Spook and Stiff—devoted to ghosts and cadavers, respectively—Roach didn't find herself running from the ship in terror. Still, that doesn't mean she's not hoping for a scare. Megan Michelson chatted with the Oakland, California-based writer about her sleepless night on the Morgan, the key to getting creeped out, her next book, and her not-so-macabre plans for Halloween.

Outside: You spent a night on the Charles W. Morgan, a ship rumored to be haunted by the spirit of a dead whaler. Sounds creepy.
Roach: I had hoped that it would—at the very least—be kind of spooky. But in truth, it was a bad combination of anti-climax and insomnia, owing to the non-stop, incredibly loud snoring of the PR guy who insisted on spending the night in the blubber room with me. So I was awake

Books by Mary Roach

Click on the following links to buy Mary Roach's books Spook and Stiff

in a bad mood almost all night. I wasn't terribly receptive to the ghosts—so maybe it was my fault. To be spooked, you need to be by yourself, it needs to be dark, and you need to be focused on listening to weird noises. During the day, it was such a zoo in there, there were so many people running around, and it was brightly lit because they were filming. It was the opposite of an experience in which you'd be spooked.

OK, but with the amount of research you had to do for Spook and Stiff, you must have some great scary stories.
The scariest moment I've ever had was this time I was up in Canada and I'd agreed to be a subject in this researcher's lab. He puts this helmet on your head and he runs electromagnetic fields through the right hemisphere of your brain. He has this theory that the effects of a certain kind of electromagnetic field make people have low-level epileptic symptoms, including hallucinations and thinking someone's in the room. A mimic haunting. I was going there in a taxi cab and I realized, "I don't know who this is and I'm letting him hook me up to this machine and run electromagnetic fields through my brain."

Spook