ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a strange secular story, the story of contact with the dead and ask whether that experience might shape religious imagery or vice versa. Contact with the dead, perhaps not surprisingly, does correlate, and significantly, with a number of different measures of religious behavior. The intensity of religious commitment and the frequency of church attendance, however, do not seem to correlate with contact with the dead That almost two-thirds of the widows in the American population have had some "contact" with a dead person is perhaps less surprising than the fact that two-fifths of the population who are not widowed also report such contact. The model developed for the present analysis assumes that religion might be involved in accounting for the disproportionate experience of "contact" with the dead among those who are widowed. One still would be inclined to believe that it is the changing religious imagery that produces a propensity to experience contact with the dead.
