The Devil Sat on My Bed Encounters with the Spirit World in Mormon Utah

In the mountains of bucolic northern Utah, many Latter-day Saints describe being visited by spirits. Local folklore is filled with stories of all kinds of uncanny encounters, and Latter-day Saint scripture and prophetic teachings emphasize the existence and importance of the spirit world. People report visits from the benevolent spirits of kin offering aid, and from evil spirits who tempt and harass. Combining folklore research with ethnography, in The Devil Sat on My Bed Erin E. Stiles examines many types of spirit encounters reported by believers and shows that such experiences must be understood as particularly Latter-day Saint phenomena.

Stiles poses that spirit encounters fit within a larger cultural and religious framework that emphasizes the relationships between living and non-living beings. For Mormons in northern Utah, spirit lore and experiences are interpreted and understood with reference to Latter-day Saint cosmology and particularly Mormon conceptions of the nature of the person, spirit, and family, as well as the nature of righteousness, evil, and spiritual power.

This book also explores how people in Utah differentiate between "Mormon culture" and the institutional church, and how they understand the "true" meaning of the religion, and speaks to key issues of concern--and polarization--among Latter-day Saints today.

Erin E. Stiles is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her primary interests are in the anthropology of religion and law, and she has worked in East Africa and in the western United States. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research on the everyday workings of Islamic courts in Zanzibar, Tanzania, with a particular focus on marital disputes. Her more recent work focuses on Latter-day Saint experiences of the spirit realm in northern Utah, where she grew up.