Iron

My dresser drawer was starting to remind me of the cat's toy basket this week. The stuff on top was well-used, while the stuff at the bottom was almost forgotten. With my cat, I try to be egalitarian about the toys, and I occasionally rotate the bottom toys to the top, so that nothing is neglected. With my clothes it is not so simple; everything at the bottom has been there so long, it needs to be ironed to make it presentable. So, it had become inevitable that I would have to begin hours of ironing to reclaim my wardrobe.

While ironing, I brought my Macbook upstairs so I could watch some Ghost Hunters re-runs. There was some discussion a few weeks back about their last show, that featured the Real Housewives of Atlanta (one of many mind-numbing reality shows on TV these days). The producers really seem to have jumped the shark with this one; while the investigation wasn't a total catastrophe, it was hardly their shining moment. Even the TAPS members seemed rather tentative and uneasy with the arrangement, but were clearly making the best of it.

In the midst of discussion about this, someone asked me if anyone ever saw or heard anything remotely like a ghost on this show. The answer is yes. For your convenience, I've made a list of the stand-out episodes in this category, mostly from the first 3 seasons, which I will now share with you:

Race Rock Lighthouse--an empty chair in an unoccupied room slides across the floor--twice.
Eastern State Penitentiary--full body apparition caught on upper floors (This is the original episode from Season 1--the "Dude, Run!" episode)
Crescent Hotel--Full body apparition caught on thermal cam.
Ellis Home--weird psychedelic light show between the owner of the house (who's a medium) and Jason Hawes.
St. Augustine Lighthouse--voices, shadows, and a full-body apparition looking over the railing at the camera.
Stanley Hotel--Jason's closet door opens and shuts by itself, and the glass on his nightstand cracks from the inside by itself. Also--a table and chair lifts up and drops by itself.
Bird Cage Theater--A cord unravels itself from the bell it's wrapped around and hits the floor.
Leap Castle--Dustin Pari gets picked up and thrown to the ground by the Elemental that is supposed to haunt the place.
Lisheen Ruins--Weird figures show up on thermal cam, and a ghostly face appears on camera--the same face seen by Irish investigator Barry FitzGerald.
Northern State Hospital--apparition steps out, and then back into the darkness on camera. Plus you hear eerie singing in the attic.
Lullaby Lane--crazy electronic voice phenomena--responds directly to questions.
Gibbons House--full body apparition rises out of the floor and walks away.
Fort Mifflin--more creepy electronic voice phenomena. One voice asks for a drink of water after seeing a sound guy drinking from a bottle of water.

Ah, ghosts. On a tangentially-related note, I was reading an article on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the stages of death (and grieving). She is famous for the traditional "5 steps" in the grieving process (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). Psychologists have taken this pretty literally, and as the article points out (and Kubler-Ross herself), that the neat packaging of the process in this manner belies its complexity. There is a sense that grief is linear, that we move forward or backward, when in fact this is not how loss manifests itself at all.

Nor anything else, for that matter.