Robbie Williams claims he has contacted Frank Sinatra from beyond the grave.
The troubled star, who recently spent time in rehab, believes he has special psychic powers allowing him to communicate with the dead.
Robbie wrote on his web blog: I like to play my Swing While You re Winning album when I m at home and Frank approves.
He was there when I made it.
I think I do have powers. I ve seen things.
My sister s dog jumping at her feet when it had passed away years before. Green lights coming in at my window, too.
The 33-year-old singer also revealed he likes to visit a Los Angeles cemetery with his dad, Pete.
He said: My dad read Dean Martin obituaries and tons of books. We are going to his grave to pay our respects to him. But I worry, am I disturbing him?
Robbie, who last week used his blog for a misogynistic tirade against women and his dislike for the Hollywood dating scene, was recently treated in the US for prescription drug addiction.
The star has admitted to suffering from depression, insecurity and drug and alcohol abuse in the past. Why do so many people who claim to be reincarnated return to earth as celebrities rather than, say, car salesmen?
Richard Macer tracks down some recent second comings for whom this is a matter of life and death.
What do I have to do to make you believe that I am Elvis Aaron Presley? So asked the overweight middle-aged man dressed in a white rhinestone jumpsuit.
This conversation was typical of many I was having on a journey into the world of the famously reincarnated. I was intrigued that so many people who claim to have returned for a second time are equipped with glamorous new identities - like rock stars, or legends or even gods!
Why is it that no one has ever been an estate agent or an insurance salesman in a previous life?
Is it simply that these former incarnations are just too anonymous?
My journey had begun in Bristol where I d heard the famous wizard, Merlin, had returned to life and was living in rented accommodation. George Vernon discovered he was Merlin while out fishing as a lad of 11 - voices in his head telling him Merlin, Merlin, Merlin, you re back.
With a skeleton, hair, some clothing and old bottles, police have managed to build an impressive profile of a young woman whose body was dumped in an old well nearly a century ago.
They know she was white, between 25 and 35, with a cavity and an abscessed tooth. They know she was likely middle-class, a stylish dresser who stood only 5-foot-1.
Soon they will have a picture of her face, when a reconstruction based on the shape of her skull is finished.
All they need now is a name.
I kind of have a good image in my head of what she looked like, said Ernie Walker, an archeologist and special constable with the RCMP.
We do know quite a bit about her, but we re missing the human part of that.
Mr. Walker and the Saskatoon police have been working on identifying the woman at the bottom of the well for nearly a year now.
They know she met a violent death at the hands of another person some time between 1912 and 1920 and are hoping science can help solve the mystery.
As a sceptic, Deborah Blum believed she was the perfect author to explore the supernatural when she set out to write a book about American psychologist William James and his circle of psychic researchers. But her careful work on these 19th-century men of science, Ghost Hunters, turned her into, if not a believer, at least less positive of my rightness.
I thought all over again about the shape of the world, about science, about the limits of reality and who sets them, Blum writes. There were days when I could feel the hinges of my brain, almost literally, creaking apart to make room for new ideas.
This is an interesting admission from a science writer, considering the ideas she was investigating are a century old.
If James died saddened that he was no closer to finding any explanation for a wide range of psychic phenomena, it would appear that no one has come any closer in the century since his death.
The mysteries remain and so does the scientific neglect, fuelled by the acrimonious debate between science and religion. Scientist Richard Dawkins wrote recently that serious theology is as spurious an object of study as serious fairies or serious unicorns .
For sceptics, serious ghosts is equally oxymoronic. Why, then, do so many people claim to have seen one?
How do you say goodbye if you never got to say hello?
Jay Richardson was born almost three months after his father J.P. Richardson better known as the Big Bopper died in a violent Iowa plane crash that also killed 1950s rock stars Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens on the day the music died, Feb.
3, 1959. It was rock n roll s first great tragedy.
By the time little Jay was born, the Bopper was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery here.
The odds Jay would ever get to meet his father were, oh, next to never.
But don t bet against history. Or science.
Or a son s heart.
Jay met his famously dead father last month, the day the music was exhumed. The Big Bopper came back in the land of the living for one day only.
Months ago, Forest Lawn Cemetery had planned only to quietly move the Bopper s gravesite to a more visible location with a life-size statue and historic marker, but the disinterment offered Jay a historic chance to say his first hello, and for forensic experts to examine the pop singer s unautopsied remains 48 years after his death.
The family of a Blackpool man who died suddenly have had his remains turned into a diamond.
Mick Egan s wife Susan decided she wanted a different kind of memorial after he died of a brain haemorrhage last year.
The stone took 24 weeks to create and arrived the day before daughter Celeste s wedding - allowing her to go down the aisle with her father.
We think he would have loved the idea, she told BBC News.
It was emotional but it was nice emotion because I was pleased that it had happened and that I could have something of my Dad to take down the aisle with me.
The family wanted a unique way to remember Mr Egan and turned to an American company to create the synthetic diamond.
The process involves extracting carbon from the ashes of a loved one, before heating it to extreme temperatures to convert it into graphite.
Rough diamond crystal is then created in the special presses before being cut to the family s specifications.
We had to have a blue one because my husband s eyes are blue. I never visualised that it would be so beautiful until it arrived, said Mrs Egan.
He is my diamond geezer now.
It was the right thing to do and it just brings me so much comfort that I ve got it now to last forever. They say such nice things about people at their funerals. Makes me sad to realize I’m going to miss mine by just a few days.
— Garrison Keillor
We humans do a lot of stupid things in a lot of stupid ways but few can match the way we let ourselves be treated after we croak. I’m talking about our terrestrial sendoff. Can you think of any other ritual as bizarre and illogical as the conventional burial experience?
If I was going to have a traditional burial here’s what I could look forward to.
My carcass would be splayed out jay-naked on a slab in front of one or more total strangers who would bleed me, disembowel me and pump me full of noxious chemicals to keep me fresh.
Then they would dress me in my best suit and tie, pimp me out with rouge and face powder to make me look natural.
Then I would go on display in a strange room where a lugubrious greeter would show in my friends who want to pay their respects as well as my enemies who want to make sure that I’m dead.
His life was spent defying his own mortality, but when death came to Harry Houdini, aged 52, the cause was poignantly mundane: peritonitis caused by a punch in the stomach that ruptured his appendix. Or was there more to it than that?
That is a question vexing Houdini s great nephew, George Hardeen, to such an extent that he wants the body exhumed to find out if the great escapologist was, in fact, poisoned.
Later today, (03/23) details of the planned exhumation, in Queens, New York, will be revealed.
The controversy has heightened interest in Houdini, and particularly the bad blood that existed between him and certain spiritualists, who would be first on the list of suspects if it turned out he were murdered.
But interest in the world s most famous magician has never died. A new film about him, to be released later this year, Death Defying Acts, starring Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta Jones, dramatises a passionate affair Houdini had with a psychic during a tour of Scotland in 1926, the year he died, and there is talk of another film charting his life from the standpoint of one of his descendants.
Roland Nadeau was digging out a gravel bank on his land last summer when he made a grisly discovery: Near the edge of an old cellar foundation, his backhoe had triggered a sudden explosion of mice and what looked like human remains.
Somehow or another I wound up with a body. It was quite a shock, Nadeau said. He didn t know it, but he had stumbled across an old, unmarked family cemetery containing seven bodies, including the grave of Gibbens Kimball, a soldier from the War of 1812.
We didn t even know it was there and we ve owned this property ten years, said Nadeau s wife, Pauline. It has sparked a lot of interest.
There had been rumors of a soldier s grave in the area, but no one knew exactly where, let alone what war.
Even so, a town official would put up a flag every Memorial Day in the center of a nearby field, right up until she moved away two years ago.
The Iteso of western Kenya have a way of handling their dead that would horrify many other people in the world.
About five years after burial, they exhume the skulls and skeletons and leave them exposed to the elements.
The result is that if you travel through Teso country, you will get the impression that a major archeological undertaking is underway.
In homesteads and in thickets, the skulls lie exposed in a custom the community believes allows the dead to rest better than if they were six feet underground.
Apart from allowing the dead a good rest, the custom is also intended to keep them from coming back to torment the living.
Leonora Faferko is an accredited psychic who specialises in the area of channelling deceased pets.
Leonora chanced upon her talent after the death of her pet dog Mitzy. Leonora said it was a shock and that it didn t take long for word of her ability to communicate with dead pets to spread.
I m absolutely flabbergasted that I have actually talked to pets.
The pet work is a gift given, she said.
And people started to come to me with animals and all of a sudden I could see where the pet went or who met the pet.
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