Boo(ks)!
Haunted Libraries
It's midday at the New York Public Library. A gray-haired librarian, her arms full of books, heads alone to the basement to reshelve. Deep in the stacks, volumes begin to float through the air behind her. She senses movement and looks up; the books sit mutely, as they were. As she passes a bank of card catalogs, their drawers open unaided and cards explode forth, showering on her. Now scared, the librarian starts to run towards the stairs through the tall labyrinth of books. But she stops short and howls when she sees it — the ghost.
The library ghost — aka the Gray Lady — from the opening scene of the 1984 movie "Ghostbusters" is perhaps the world's most famous library phantom, but she is, of course, fictional. What of real-world library ghosts? It turns out there are many. In Massachusetts alone, patrons and library staff have seen, felt, or heard spirits of all kinds in at least 10 libraries. Here are a few of the stories:
A team of investigators from the SyFy Channel series "Ghost Hunters" recently visited the Clapp Memorial Library in Belchertown, 80 miles west of Boston, to check out reports of apparitions and cold spots in the basement. (The episode aired in March 2008.) They didn't find anything.
Two ghosts haunt the library and grounds of the Hull Public Library, which sits on a peninsula south of the Boston Harbor Islands. The library was built in 1889 as a home for wealthy Irish editor and poet John Boyle O'Reilly. He died in the house a year later "under suspicious circumstances," says library director Daniel Johnson. (The official version is that he overdosed on his wife's sleeping pills.) After the building was converted to a library in 1913, people started to feel O'Reilly's presence. "They just have a feeling he's there in some way," says Johnson, who hasn't sensed anything strange himself. The other ghost is that of an unnamed British Revolutionary War soldier who died in the care of a family and is buried on the same plot of land as the library. "Anyone who dies of wounds from battle is probably distressed," says Johnson, so it makes sense that the soldier's ghost would be hanging about.
Ghost stories abound at the Millicent Library in Fairhaven, where legend has it that the library's founder buried his daughter (after whom the library is named) under the foundation. Though library staff say that story isn't true, patrons have seen a girl walking through the halls and standing in a window. They've also seen a man mopping the floors — perhaps the ghost of a janitor who died in the basement.
In 1856, New England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story about a library spirit called "The Ghost of Dr. Harris." In the 1840s, Hawthorne frequented the Boston Athenaeum, where he regularly saw an older man, the Reverend Doctor Harris — a pastor and former librarian at Harvard — sitting in the reading room by the fireplace with the Boston Post newspaper. The day Harris died and for weeks afterward, Hawthorne saw him as frequently as he did before, always with the Boston Post and in front of the fire. "I sometimes found him gazing at me, and, unless I deceived myself, there was a sort of expectancy in his face," writes Hawthorne. "Had he been a living man I should have flattered myself that [he was]. . .interested in me and desirous of a personal acquaintance." Read the story here: http://www.dorchesteratheneum.org/page.php?id=733.