Even now, when I'm more or less familiar with Unity, I occasionally make dumb little mistakes. For one thing, I keep forgetting that any settings that I change in Play mode will reset themselves when Play mode is turned off. Today, I've been reminded once again to be very careful when selecting a Unity object by clicking on the object directly.

I first discovered the problem when my avatar began bumping up against an invisible object. I thought at first it might be a wall I couldn't see from this angle, since planes in Unity are only visible from one side, but there didn't seem to be a wall anywhere nearby.

I moved the avatar around some more and discovered another spot where it behaved oddly, this time climbing on top of a phantom object. About then, I remembered that there had previously been an object on that spot which the avatar had climbed on top of when I moved it there. Was my scene being haunted by the ghosts of objects past?

A little investigation turned up the problem. Earlier, I had indicated some objects I wanted to move by clicking on them directly, rather than selecting them in the hierarchy. As a result, in each case I had actually moved one of the children of the object, not the object itself. The part I moved contained the mesh renderer and all the visual components, so it looked as if I had moved the whole thing, but I had actually left the collider and all the physics components behind--hence the phantom barrier my avatar had encountered.

Here's a picture of my avatar with the phantom bathtub:

The silver lining is that this incident led me indirectly to the solution to a different problem: it explained why the chasers hadn't been turning black when the script told them to. Because the visual components were in the child object, I should have told the child to turn the object black, rather than adding a renderer to the parent. Now if I can just make that work in a script...