Mira Ptacin: What Does It Feel Like to Have a Ghost in the Room?

When I heard Mira Ptacin was working on a nonfiction book about mediums, I immediately thought about how her 2016 memoir, Poor Your Soul, weaves together two narratives of senseless loss. First is the story of Ptacin’s younger brother, who was killed in a car accident caused by a drunk driver when they were just teenagers. Later, in her twenties, Ptacin unexpectedly became pregnant; only after embracing the idea of motherhood did she learn her unborn child would not survive. Reviewing the memoir for Vol.1 Brooklyn, Joe Winkler summed up its central question: “How do we, as humans, survive the violence of living?” 

Ptacin’s second book, The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna offers one answer. The book, published by Liveright on October 29, is the result of five years Ptacin spent visiting a summer camp for mediums and clairvoyants in rural Maine. In it, she chronicles the feminist origins of Spiritualism, a little-known religion rooted in the belief that everyone has an innate ability to communicate with the dead. The movement was popularized in the mid-19th century by two sisters who gave public séances, carving out roles for themselves that diverged from what was expected of women at the time.

Through a mix of research, reporting, and personal reflection, Ptacin explores whether we are eternal souls with access to infinite wisdom—or just “giant bags of chemicals, eating and farting our way through life.” The In-Betweens offers a rare glimpse into the day-to-day lives of practicing mediums, which include a host of activities meant to summon spirits. On their face, practices like table tipping, water witching, and ghost hunting may appear no more sophisticated than a Ouija board. But Ptacin cannot help but become a kind of case study in the therapeutic benefits of connecting with the spirit world—or