Can I make postgres more verbosely tell me what it's doing?
The idle in transaction state shown in the pg_stat_activity output generally means that there's something that starts a transaction with BEGIN, does some work, and then doesn't issue the COMMIT so that the transaction is finished. This has the effect of leaving the ACCESS SHARE locks acquired by the SELECT statements hanging around, which block the ALTER TABLE statement you're trying to run from acquiring the ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock it needs to change the type of a column for every row in the table.

They could only be considered "ghost queries", in the sense that they are hanging around waiting for an answer of COMMIT or ROLLBACK that will probably never come. But they are problematic, nonetheless as you figured out.

There might be a bug somewhere in your application that has left all these connections open and waiting for a commit. I'd definitely check that out, and see if perhaps a code block doesn't have a terminating COMMIT.

More commonly (in my experience, YMMV of course), people start database sessions with a BEGIN, do some work, and then go to lunch and never close their session.

It's best to fix the problem at the source, but if you absolutely, positively need to do something right now, pg_cancel_backend and pg_terminate_backend are not bad ways to go. 

Commenting on your answer, I'd specifically select the state of idle in transaction, rather than LIKE '%idle%' because those are the ones causing your problems. The idle state backends are just waiting around patiently for new client commands, and had last ran a ROLLBACK command.

You can look at the Explicit Locking documentation for more information about what blocks what. 

The description of idle-in-transaction is in the Unix Monitoring Tools section for reference. 

pg_cancel_backend and pg_stat_activity issue SIGINT and SIGTERM signals, respectively, and the effects of those signals (and warnings about other signals) are documented in the Server Shutdown section.

Hope that helps explain what you saw and sheds some light on your mystery. =)