*Original image provided by Loren Rhoads*

When I was a kid, I went to a sleepover at a friend's house. Her family were strict evangelical Christians, which makes what happened later even more inexplicable.

There were a gang of us there, all sixth-grade girls: Sherry, the two Lisas, Raeann, and me. I wonder now if we were celebrating someone's birthday, but it was so long ago that I don't remember. For that matter, I'm not sure who suggested we play "light as a feather, stiff as a board." Sherry and the Lisas all had older sisters, so one of them must have learned from an older girl.

When it was my turn, I sat in a high-backed wooden chair, arms on the armrests, eyes closed. Sherry stood behind me, rubbing her fingers lightly in circles over my temples. The point was to hypnotize me. Everyone repeated "Light as a feather, stiff as a board" over and over. Sherry shushed the other girls when they giggled.

My body relaxed by degrees, slumping into the chair. Eventually, I felt as if my soul flew out of my body, rushing upward toward the ceiling. I traveled through the house, which looked like a model or doll house, like a rat's maze with no roof. I watched her dad watching TV in the bedroom and her sister talking on the phone.

Back where my body sat in the dining room, my friends each stuck out two fingers on both hands. They slipped their fingers under my thighs and butt and lifted my body off the chair. I'm not sure how far they planned to raise me, but the process was complicated by the arms of the chair. As they tried to work out how some of them could hold me up while the others reached around the chair's arms, I could hear their voices as if at a distance.

When they juggled, then dropped me, I woke up from the trance.

It was the most incredible experience. The things I saw seemed so very real, things that eleven-year-old me would have had trouble imagining.

That's the mindset that's informed the rest of my life and led to my newest book. This Morbid Life is a memoir told through essays: stretching from taking prom pictures in a cemetery in the rain to spending a couple of days in a cadaver lab, from traveling the world to visit dead people in museums to standing beside my brother's coffin, from smuggling absinthe before it was legal to eating bugs for fun. I hope you'll join me on my adventures.

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Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel. She was the editor of Morbid Curiosity magazine and the book Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: True Tales of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual. Her most recent book is This Morbid Life, a memoir comprised of 45 death-positive essays.

About This Morbid Life

What others have called an obsession with death is really a desperate romance with life. Guided by curiosity, compassion, and a truly strange sense of humor, this particular morbid life is detailed through a death-positive collection of 45 confessional essays. Along the way, author Loren Rhoads takes prom pictures in a cemetery, spends a couple of days in a cadaver lab, eats bugs, survives the AIDS epidemic, chases ghosts, and publishes a little magazine called Morbid Curiosity.

Originally written for zines from Cyber-Psychos AOD to Zine World and online magazines from Gothic.Net to Scoutie Girl, these emotionally charged essays showcase the morbid curiosity and dark humor that transformed Rhoads into a leading voice of the curious and creepy.

“Witty, touching, beautifully written, and haunting — in every sense of the word — This Morbid Life is an absolute must-read for anyone looking for an unusually bright and revealing journey into the darkest of corners. Highly recommended!” — M.Christian, author of Welcome To Weirdsville