All aboard the S.S. 'Ghost Whisperer'

Jim and Melinda are setting sail for a quick cruise on the Claridon, an old ship that is about to be decommissioned, and so it's packed full of ghosts. Some are even charming, which delights Melinda. If you can't turn off the ghosties, at least you can vacation with some nice ones.

Spoilers, full speed ahead, sailors.

As they're boarding, Delia tells them a woman jumped off the ship to her death just the week before (gee, thanks for the well wishes, D!) - but we don't get to meet her. We do meet Betty, who tells Melinda that all of the ghosts are afraid of what will happen to them after the ship is scrapped. Jim and Melinda are in room M110, and there's another couple in room M108, Rich (a major ship enthusiast) and Julia, who are on their honeymoon but the Claridon isn't their own personal Love Boat. They're fighting all the time, and the new husband is exhausted. 

We soon find out why. During a deck stroll on the first evening, Melinda sees a ghost, a drowned woman, making out with a passenger - a very much alive but asleep passenger - Rich the honeymooner. Melinda wants Jim to talk to Rich about it because she feels the ghost is very powerful, feeding off of him. Rich and Julia area also having problems with their room - temperature issues, moaning, scratching. The usual. Soon after, Melinda is confronted by a group of ghosts looking for help, and so Melinda calls in her new sidekick Eli for some "ship to shore crossovers." He makes a list of ghostly grievences, leaving Melinda to pursue Rich and his kissing ghost.

The next morning, Jim and Rich play squash (which Julia says he's been doing a lot of lately). Rich acts strangely about some marks on his back. During this exchange, Julia and Melinda find Rich asleep again on deck, and getting some more ghostly kisses. Melinda confronts the kissing ghost, who tells her that Rich swore he'd marry her, but he lied.

Jim does some more poking about Rich, and finds out he's been with Julia since high school, and all his loved ones are very much alive. But he's depressed about the state of his marriage. Jim tells a couple of white lies - that he, too, is having sleep problems. Rich confides that he's having vivid dreams about a long-haired woman kissing him, scratching him, and that he's sleep-walking during these dreams. He swears he's never seen her before. Jim asks him what he might know about the Claridon's history, if weird things like this happen a lot, and Rich tells him about a historian onboard who may know more.

Melinda approaches Bill the historian and asks if the cabin Rich and Julia in is haunted. He doesn't know of any particular haunting in that cabin, but Betty the ghost lurking nearby says that relationships seem to "hit an iceberg" in that cabin, but no one knows why. Another couple approaches, and Bill introduces them as Cliff Sturgis, the owner of the Claridon, and his friend Terri. Cliff tells Melinda that the ship isn't up to new codes, and the ship, like a person, has to die sometime. Creepy.

That night, we see poor Rich sleepwalk with the drowned ghost out to the deck, and dive overboard.  Eek. He doesn't drown though; he's saved from the water. Bill the historian makes a comment that it could be the ghost. The kissing ghost appears, and tells Melinda that she realizes that Rich wasn't who she thought after all. Melinda suggests they exchange rooms with Rich and Julia for the night. The ghost appears, and before she can start sucking face with Jim, Melinda gets her to start talking. The ghost says that her fiance doesn't know she's there, that she has to find him so he can pay for what he did, and then disappears. Melinda also realizes she has the word "AFT" somehow stamped or cut into her skin backwards.

Melinda wakes Jim up, and they talk about the woman and what she may be - a stowaway, maybe, since she says her fiance didn't know she was onboard. Melinda also says that it's a classic imprint haunting - the ghost continues to act the same scene over and over. They head out on deck, and Melinda sees an image of a man throwing the woman overboard. She was already dead when she went over though. There is a pitchfork and flowers all over the deck.

The next day, Melinda tells Jim that according to the historical records of the Claridon onboard, no one ever died in room M108, but that the crew had a habit of using empty staterooms for trysts. Betty also tells her that the pitchfork she saw in the vision was in fact a trident, used during a ceremony called the Neptune Ritual. Whenever the ship crossed the equator, the crew would dress up and initiate the passengers who'd never been over the big imaginary line in the middle of the globe.

Jim and Melinda go through the histories once again, looking for Neptune Ritual information, and happen to find a picture of the man Melinda saw in her vision. Turns out it's historian Bill, who was once part of the crew. They confront Bill, and Melinda tells him everything, and that she's been in contact with the ghost of the woman he threw overboard.

Bill explains that the woman's name was Lorelai, and she was indeed a stowaway. She had sneaked onboard to surprise her fiance, and he helped her. Bill leads them to the room in the ship where, three days later, he found her body. Bill was instructed by his commanding officer to throw her body overboard. After a quick review of the room assignments from the sailing in question, they find out Cliff Sturgis was the man that had been staying in room M108, and he was Lorelai's fiance. Ah. Ships have to die just like people eventually die, you know.

They rush to Cliff's room, and find him unconscious, with Lorelai with him. Jim wakes him up, and he tells them that he had indeed known Lorelai. They met in Rio, and she'd visited him on the ship when he was a young man, sailing around the world, and that he did propose the night they were going to sail. However, she'd left the ship just beforehand, and then she disappeared. He never saw her again. Lorelai explains that she snuck onboard, realizing that she'd made a mistake not staying with Cliff. Lorelai tells Cliff that when she found him, in room M108, he was with another woman. She fell to her death while trying to hide. Cliff tells them that the woman was someone he'd been with, but he'd just broken it off with her. He says that he tried to find Lorelai for years, and never got over her. Satisfied yet sad, Lorelai heads into the light.

But she isn't the only one who heads into the light. Many of the ship's ghosts (except for Betty who tells Melinda that she wants the cruise to last forever) head on too.

In the end, Cliff decides not to scrap the ship, but make her into a floating museum instead, and our heroine has a brief moment of "seasickness"... or morning sickness. Perhaps we'll find out next week. It's Halloween, you know. All sorts of things could go bumping around.

Thoughts and Musings...

• People, people, people. If Jim dies, I'm going to be first in line to turn in my official GW badge. I'm just thinking it's going to happen. But the happy-go-lucky ghostie show has been hinting about it for too long for it not to happen. Should we start new badges ("Save David Conrad") just in case?
• I wonder if this was filmed on the Queen Mary in L.A.?  I bet it was (I'll go look it up later). Supposedly, that ship is indeed crazy haunted.
• I'm glad Cliff threw the bracelet into the water, and threw the line out about "seeing that in a movie" somewhere. We were all thinking it, right? Too bad there wasn't a "king of the world" line too. Darn.

What did you think? I thought it was sweet and easy. Like a candy corn pumpkin, or four.

E-mail

• Digg
• Facebook
• Fark
• Yahoo Buzz
• Stumbleupon