Is your lab 'haunted' by former team members?

In one of my former labs, when people moved on to new haunts we’d say (quite morbidly) that they had died. ‘Oh, Charlie would have been able to help you with your stubborn cyclisation – pity he’s dead,’ was a typical example, or ‘looking forward to your funeral!’ as a greeting to a graduating friend, one time enthused breezily as a horrified professor passed by. As students with little direct experience of the careers we hoped for ourselves, we sometimes wondered whether our passed comrades were ‘in a better place’.

Yet in some ways departed colleagues never leave. Mementoes of them remain around the lab: a chemistry meme they printed out; an angry scribbled warning in an instrument logbook; their name blackened onto several cork rings to deter theft. Once, when I moved to a new desk, I found a Frisbee, a dried-out HPLC column, a children’s colouring book (complete with crayons), six pairs of goggles, some 12-year-old chewing gum and a tray of long-rotten Chinese food that rapidly found secondary containment in the bin.