We spent this past Saturday playing tourists, and ghosthunters looking for new investigations, up in the mountains. One of our stops was Georgetown, which has been called the most haunted city in Colorado, although we’ve heard that title applied to Ouray, Denver and Leadville, and probably a few others we can’t think of at the moment.

In any case, we thought we’d drop in to the legendarily haunted establishment once known as the Full Circle Inn. They did a Sightings here, with Him-Of-Gray-Hair-And-Black Eyebrows, the late ghost guy/psychic Peter James, who spent much of the episode yelling back at an angry (“I didn’t do it! “I didn’t do it!”) spirit in the cellar.

The Full Circle is long gone, replaced by a dining establishment specializing in Czech dishes (something, oddly, I actually know something about – ask me later). That actually lasted about 13 or 14 years, until it sort-of changed hands again about a year and a half ago.

Out of respect for the staff and owners, I won’t give the new establishment’s name out…and anyway, the place is reportedly not really haunted anymore.

One of the staff told me that they had done a ‘cleansing’ of the place shortly after the Sightings episode, and things quieted down. She also told me that nothing unsettling has happened to her in the near-two years she’s been working there (“…well, one morning when we opened, we found the ‘Open’ sign that normally hangs in the door on the floor, and the chain had been flung across the dining room, but that’s all…”), and even though we expressed an interested in investigating the place, she seemed pretty insistent there wasn’t anything to investigate…although she did say the place across the street was supposedly crazy haunted – we’re looking into that…

Something about all this made some strange sense to me. We tend to lean on biases that suggest there’s an element of immortality associated with hauntings – they just go on and on – unless confronted with some sort of intervention, like a smudging or a cleansing.

She was quite matter-of-fact about it, and seemed if anything a little disappointed that the place was no longer the ragingly haunted little Cafe of twenty years ago. We may be inclined to regard a ‘cleansing’ as a kind of jailbreak for misplaced or captured spirits, or some sort of redemptive act of reassurance or forgiveness for guilty or angry ones, or perhaps even some form of spiritual extermination, even if mediums and the such would be loathe to characterize it as that.

I’m a shade skeptical, however, of buying into this altogether. Mediums and professional spiritualists do exhibit great facility with describing mechanisms, intentions and unseen architectures to frame their ceremonies and incantations, and you’re often left with the feeling that you have to buy the whole package, or none of it. Because once you unravel or pointedly question one piece, the whole thing comes apart.

Anyway…having said all that, we actually ARE looking for a decent medium to join us on the odd investigation. We’ll keep you updated on that.

As for the formerly haunted little cafe, the nice lady we talked to kind of shrugged off the notion of it being haunted, if even with quiescent spirits, and had to cut our chat short as it was getting close to dinnertime and the place started filling up with customers. .

But, she said over her shoulder, “I won’t go down in the basement. No way.”

Haunted? Creepy?

“Spiders. Lots of ‘em. I hate spiders.”