Ghost Catfish?

So if you have been reading my blog you know by now that sometimes "weird" things go on at Tanglewood. This week has been no exception.

It all started with a smell. A funky, dead animal kind of a smell that we, unfortunately, are pretty familiar with. Usually the smell is from a mouse that got fed to one of our snakes that didn't get eaten. Sometimes they bury them and you only find them when the smell erupts, but this wasn't the case here. I sent someone looking for the smell, it had been around for almost a week it was getting nauseating. The person I sent came back and indicated that it might be coming from a few dead hissing cockroaches or Molly, the 6ft. boa's cage. A 6ft. boa can make very big, smelly excrement. I didn't buy it, it was a BIGGER, more persistant smell than that, but I let it go.

That was until the sky broke open and it poured. Unfortunately sometimes when it rains outside it rains inside at Tanglewood. I don't really want to go there, suffice it to say, beautiful new building, bad original roofer. So I went looking for leaks in the exhibit hall. That is when I saw it, in a crack next to the freshwater tank. The Catfish. He had escaped his water world and was obviously dead. And stinky. I got some paper towels and picked him up and looked at him. Then I screamed a bit (yes, I am still a bit girly here and there), and I dropped him- he was crawling with maggots! Eww! Cathy, our office manager was with me, because I didn't want to be alone with the dead catfish... She opened the back door and I said, "Say a prayer that he makes it over the deck" because it was still pouring and I wasn't going out there. I tossed him and gave another little scream (ok, I know, I'm not proud of that), and he sailed over the deck into the grass by the pond. A perfectly good place for a dead catfish to finish decomposing.

Two days later, on the deck railing, there he was. The Catfish. Still dead, more dead if that's possible. But he moved. Creepy. But I could buy that maybe a bird picked him up and was nibbling on him and the squishy maggots that covered his body? I pushed him off the deck rail anyways. I didn't think visitors needed to see nature THAT closely. Plus...eww!

That was that. But it wasn't. Two days later, he appeared on the deck AGAIN. More than creepy. They threw him off. He wasn't there today, but I am not writing him off as "dead" for good yet.