Photo by Austin Carey for The Lafayette

Brett Hendrickson’s students speak to spirits during class time.

Students are learning to talk to ghosts around the world in Lafayette’s spookiest First Year Seminar (FYS) yet. Religious studies professor Brett Hendrickson teaches “Communicating with the Dead,” a seminar that explores the changing ways that people throughout history have tried to communicate with the deceased.

“For the first half of the semester, we have mostly been looking at the history of seances and American spiritualism, which is a movement that really flourished in the nineteenth century and lasted into the twentieth century,” Hendrickson said. “A lot of people were meeting for seances to talk to mediums and to try to communicate with their recently deceased, most of the time people in their families, but sometimes famous people as well.”

While FYS courses focus on developing college-level writing skills, they are also an opportunity to discover the many ways to explore and understand a topic in a unique way. In Hendrickson’s class, students used Ouija boards to try to talk to people from the beyond.

“I thought that the day with the Ouija boards was pretty fun,” Hendrickson said. “I split them into groups … and one of the groups was getting names and dates and all this sort of stuff from different spirits, and that was interesting for sure.”

“In my group, there were two [spirits] that spoke to us, one was named Saoirse, she was from Europe and then Roland and he was from New Jersey,” Alexa McCarus ’27, a student in the class, wrote in an email.

Along with Ouija boards, the class also went ghost hunting with their phones as a way to explore the use of technology in the modern world and how it connects to communicating with the dead.

“One day we downloaded ghost-hunting apps on our phones and did a little ghost-hunting around campus and thought about what these phone apps do and what purpose they have in people’s lives,” Hendrickson said. “Are they just for entertainment? What sort of thing are they?”

Johanna Douge ‘27 finds that the class allows her to experience a unique way of exploring death.

“This was my second choice for an FYS, actually, but I’m really glad I got into this one. I think that the dead is a low-key taboo topic and I really wanted to study something that’s niche and weird. The class is really living up to my expectations,” Douge wrote in an email. 

While the class spent most of the first half of the semester looking at methods to communicate with the dead along with historical background, Hendrickson is focusing the second half of the semester on the ways that communication with the dead varies between different cultures.

“I study Mexican-American religions, that’s my area of expertise,” Hendrickson said. “So, one of the things we’re going to do in the next half of the course is think about the way that different cultural groups and different people from around the world communicate with the dead. We’ve looked a lot at the United States in the first half, but we’re going to look at Mexico, China and we’ve got a few other places we’re going to look.”

Although the class has a clear focus, Hendrickson hopes that his students also see the general value of taking an FYS.

“I don’t know if this is what the class has gotten from it, but what I’d like to pass on a little bit is that I think all FYS [courses] have an opportunity to really introduce students to the strength of the liberal arts,” Hendrickson said. “Thinking about why do people do the things they do? What sort of histories and narratives and art and culture do they produce? And, also in this class at least, we’ve gotten a chance to think some about how that intersects with science and other new ways of knowing.”