The Afterlife: Real Or Imagined?

It's a question we all have pondered: When it's over, is it really over? Is there life, after death? And if there is, just what is it like?

Is death followed by heaven or hell as Michelangelo imagined? Do we become ghostly presences like those Shakespeare conjured? Was Plato right: the body dies, but the soul lives on forever, asks CBS News correspondent Mika Brzezinski

"I do believe in the afterlife. It's a wonderful afterlife," says psychic Barbara Reeder.

Asked if anything about the afterlife scared her, Reeder answers, "No. I think it's much easier. Waitressing scares me."

Reeder says she communicates with the dead all the time.

"Many times they want their loved ones to know that they're O.K. And they want their loved ones to know that there's something else, that they live on. They haven't died," Reeder says.

Through prayer and meditation, Reeder says she works with an angel who connects her with "the unseen world." Believe what you will, Reeder says her proof is a budding business.

Reeder explains her craft, telling Brzezinski, "Sometimes it's like, do you remember that show Laugh-In? Where you'd walk in and there'd be an Indian, a minister and, like, you know co-chiefs and all of these different people.

"So it's like that when I look at someone 'cause I see the aura and I see the guides and the spirits around them in the aura -- in that -- in that realm."

It all sounds pretty out there, but could her "claims" stand up in a reading for this correspondent, Brzezinski wonders?

While it may seem fringe today, at the turn of the last century seeing the dead was a popular pastime. Pierre Apraxine is curator of "The Perfect Medium," an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Referring to photographs some believe depict ghosts, Apraxine says, "They're called - what else -- spirit photographs. They date back to the Civil War when grieving Americans believed new technology could capture one last glimpse of them with their 'departed' loved one."

Apraxine adds, "You know if you think about the microscope lens, that you can see all, or with the telescope that you can see much farther or infinitely small. So why not the invisible?"

The images flourished along with the popularity of spiritualism, the belief that the living could communicate with those who didn't exactly die, but "crossed over." Former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln was a believer and after her husband's assassination, sat for her own spirit photograph.

In time, most spirit photographs were revealed as fakes. But even after one famous photographer, facing charges of fraud, admitted to fakery in court, "Nevertheless, people in the audience continued to believe, Apraxine says. "And the rationale was, 'Well, yes, he faked most of the images, but in my case, he was right.'"

Virtually all societies and cultures from the beginning of time have had some notion of the afterlife, Brzezinski says.

For Alan Segal, professor of religion at Barnard College, the real question isn't finding the answer.

"It must be the greatest mystery, you would expect, because we aren't any further at solving it than we were when we were cavemen," Segal says.

Segal adds, "The question is how to quest for it. What are the right questions to pursue? Do we have similar ways of envisioning our afterlife? Do they have similar functions? And the answer to that I think, is yes.

"We have very similar notions from culture to culture, of what's going to happen to us. And they do the same things. They help us organize what we should be, what we want to be. And they help us to express what we think are the most important things about ourselves."

But, says Segal, most of us don't really think about the afterlife until a certain age.

"It's more important how to set up a household, how to develop a career, how to raise children," Segal says. "But after those questions are resolved and people get older, even in the United States, we return to the more basic questions of what is my existence for? Does my life have meaning? And that's when we begin to think about notions of life after death."

So in the year 2005, where do Americans stand on the notion of life after death, spirits or ghosts?

According to a new CBS News poll, 45 percent of Americans do not believe in ghosts, but even more of us, 48 percent, do.

When asked whether they've ever seen or felt the presence of a ghost, more than one in five Americans, 22-percent, say "yes."

And what about the afterlife? Is the end, the end? Fourteen percent say yes, but 78 percent of Americans believe, indeed, that there is a life after death.

Rev. G. Vale Owen reported seeing in February of 1923 a vision of heaven, where sailing was a popular pastime.

Dispatches from beyond can seem farfetched, which brings the debate back to psychic Barbara Reeder. Is it possible she really is communing with my dearly departed, Brzezinski asks?

While some of her comments were not quite on mark, such as, "Your grandmother is chubby. No, she's not that chubby, your daughters have never had any injuries. Well, no, one did," Reeder tells Brzezinski.

Yet some rang eerily true: "Oh, grandfather says your husband has to check his transmission," Reeder says.

To which Brzezinski responds, "Weird, his service light is on."

But, does anyone really know?

"There are a lot of people who, who believe that they know," author Mary Roach says. "But I don't mean, nobody really knows."

Roach travels the sometimes inspired, sometimes zany terrain of the great beyond in her new book, "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife."

As Roach recalled some of the more fascinating anecdotes in "Spook," the following story came to mind:

"There was this guy, Thomas Lynn Bradford. He wanted to prove there was, this beyond. And so he got together with this woman named Ruth and figured out, O.K., the only way to do this is to get two minds perfectly attuned," Roach says.

"One of them must shed its earthly mantel, meaning die. In an effort to, then, he was gonna communicate to Ruth that 'Yes, I'm here and here's what's here,'" Roach says.

Bradford's 'efforts' made front page news in the New York Times, but unfortunately we'll never know whether he ever actually got through to Ruth.

"When you're talking about really getting an answer, you know, pinning down some sort of truth, some of the near-death experience work that's going on right now is, is very intriguing," Roach says.

But claims of near-death experiences remain just that: claims.

So, can science ever prove or disprove the existence of an afterlife, Brzezinski asks?

"I, I'm not sure we want them to," Roach replies. "It's possibly nice to have some mystery to it. And to be, to leave it open to one's beliefs.

"If we say, 'Prove that there's, that lights out, that's it,' how sad to take that away from people. So I don't even know, you know, although I personally still wanna know," Roach says, then laughs, well, "Only if the answer's yes."