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The Ghostbusters Fan site defines a ghost trap as \u201ca piece of ghostbusting equipment almost as important as the proton pack in the Ghostbusters universe. The ghost trap was used for detaining and transporting \u2018busted\u2019 ghosts until they could be safely stuffed into the Ecto Containment Unit. Believed by some to entrap the ghost with a laser containment field, precisely how the trap works was never fully explained in the films.\u201d But of course, YouTube has directions on how to make one. Search \u201cMaking A Working Ghostbusters Ghost Trap!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nNone of which is as poignant and scary as a real Maine ghost trap on a windswept beach. When they roll up the sidewalks in Maine in the winter, a low-tide walk by the shore takes you close to mortality along a path of seaweed and brutal reality. A real ghost trap is a lobster trap that\u2019s had its lobster buoy and rope ripped from it by storms or rope rot. Or other forces, seen or unseen. Lobster wars or a mutiny of captive crustaceans on a ghost ship? That\u2019s a different ghost story. Stripped of their identifying buoys, the ghost traps survive in their disconnected universe, working independently of the humans who were once convinced they owned them.<\/span><\/p>\n USA Today<\/em> has weighed in on this in an Associated Press story: \u201cBeneath the cold ocean waters off the coast of Maine lie hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of old wire lobster \u2018ghost traps.\u2019 Lost over the years to storms, boats\u2013even the knives of fishermen who\u2019ve cut them from their buoys to settle scores\u2013many of the traps continue catching lobsters. \u2018It would be very interesting if we could drain the ocean and look at what\u2019s down there,\u2019 says Holly Bamford, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Marine Debris Program. \u2018We might be surprised.\u2019 The extent of Maine\u2019s ghost trap problem isn\u2019t fully known, but lobstermen say they sometimes recover traps that contain skinny lobsters\u2013ones that appear to [be wasting]\u2013or shells from lobsters that have starved and withered away to nothing or been eaten by other lobsters.\u201d Lobsters are, famously, cannibals.<\/span><\/p>\n
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