Ptolemy Tompkins (born 1962) is an American writer specializing in books describing the role of the spiritual in ordinary life.
His best-known work, "Proof of Angels" (Howard Books, 2014), co-authored with Utah police officer Tyler Beddoes, focuses on the death of Jennifer Lynn Groesbeck, whose car veered into the Spanish Fork River just outside the town of Spanish Fork, and the mysterious voice which Beddoes, along with three other responding officers, heard inside the car as they struggled to right it.
Paradise Fever (Avon Books, ISBN 038097438X), his 1997 memoir, chronicles his childhood in the early seventies, focusing on the time his father spent searching for Atlantis in the waters off of the island of Bimini in the Bahamas.
His The Divine Life of Animals (Crown, 2010), argues for the validity of the idea that animals possess souls, while The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria, 2012) sketches a contemporary map of the afterlife focusing on the work of mid-twentieth-century afterlife investigators Robert Crookall and Jane Sherwood.
Other books include The Beaten Path: Field Notes on Getting Wise in a Wisdom-Crazy World (William Morrow, 2000,ISBN 978-0-380-97822-9), which focuses on Tompkins' step-brother, the Buddhist Abbot Nicholas Vreeland.