Ghost Hunters

It turns out that Stephanie and one of my new work colleagues, Susan, have a couple of things in common. Both love haunted houses and the Sci-Fi (TV) Network's "Ghost Hunters" TV show. And both love St. Louis. This weekend Susan and her mother are staying in the "most haunted town in America," in Illinois outside of St. Louis, and are slated to go on a ghost tour of St. Charles, another St. Louis suburb that Stephanie has visited. (Stephanie's been to St. Louis with her friend Rita and with Vincent and Frisco and me.) Susan watches the show on Wednesday evenings, along with the new Ghost Hunters International and a rival A&E Network show. I didn't ask Susan whether she'd been on the Louisville downtown ghost tour which we have. In all of these TV shows - in Ghost Hunters case - basically, a reality show - professoinal ghost hunters use scientific evidence, their own sense, and their theories to find evidence that ghosts either do or don't exist at a particular house or building. (They try to account in other ways for their client's sense that a houes or building is haunted - like checking for plumbing problems that might account for noise, and then use special scientific instruments to check for changes in temperature, voices, or hardly visible light that might provide evidence of "paranormal activity.") The ghost hunters - who double as Providence, Rhode Island plumbers by day - visit with the house's owners/residents, and then hang around and monitor through much of the night. Susan and I reminisced about how the live Ghost Hunters special, live at Waverly sanitorium (a tuberculosis highway probably 15 miles from our house on Dixie Highway on the way to Fort Knox), supposedly the most haunted place in the country, where tens of thousands of tuberculosis patients died before, during, and just after World War II, was bland because it lacked music and they found little. We'd still live to get out to Waverly - in fact, we tried to figure ou how we could meet the key The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) leaders - including Jason - or even help out at Waverly. But they came and went and we didn't get out there - we'll have to connect with them other ways. Obviously, in the interim, we'll still watch the show. And hope to get back to St. Louis at some point. (I also mentioned to Susan that until this year she had a whole class of (last year fifth-grade) students who all loved Ghost Hunters and watched it religiously every Wednesday night - so she and they could talk about the show and dissect it every Thursday - in English of course, since she's teaching English to students for whom English is a relatively new language - just as she talks with her principal every Wednesday and Thursday about "Idol" and just as she talked with a number of colleagues yesterday about the pregnant man on "Oprah.")