Where Books Whisper And Footsteps Type Themselves

The quiet of a library can be louder than any scream. We open a door marked “preternatural” and step into reading rooms where stories don’t end at the last page: a coal-scented childhood library with a balcony watcher, a deserted building that typed without a working typewriter, and modern stacks where webcams tried to catch a Grey Lady in motion. What starts as one listener’s prompt becomes a map of haunted libraries—and what they teach us about place, memory, and the strange ways buildings hold on to people.

We compare two kinds of hauntings you’ll hear about again and again: legend-backed sites that turn every creak into a ghost, and sober reports from staff who log footsteps on upper floors, lights that refuse orders, and cold spots that sit in the same corner for years. From Peoria’s supposed curse that faded after renovation, to Pendleton’s intercom buzzes tied to a tragic loss, to Cairo’s “Toby” who favors special collections, we trace how architecture, history, and expectation shape experience. Bernardsville’s Phyllis Parker—honored with a library card—shows how communities adopt their ghosts, while Willard Library’s Grey Lady invites the internet in, turning surveillance into a shared investigation and sparking record traffic.

Along the way, we swap skeptic tools and believer instincts: check the pipes, log the temperatures, respect the archives, and still leave room for wonder when a chair slides back after you’ve pushed it in three times. The most compelling moments arrive in the seams—between renovation and ritual, between a locked vault and the click of phantom keys, between a beat cop’s shifting memory and a night that refuses to explain itself. If your town has a closed branch, a Carnegie relic, or a children’s room with a draft that smells like perfume, we want to hear it.

Enjoy the journey, then help us grow it—subscribe, share the show with a friend who loves a good library, and send your haunted branch or personal stack story through our website. Where should we open the next locked door?

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Listener Email
• 1:22 Childhood Library And Coal-Town Atmosphere
• 6:02 The Balcony Watcher And Early “Preternatural” Lessons
• 9:45 Card Catalogs, Vault Room, And Subtle Activity
• 9:48 Are Libraries Haunted? Two Types Explained
• 12:49 Peoria’s Curse And Renovation Aftermath
• 15:05 Pendleton’s Ruth And The Moved Building
• 17:36 Cairo’s “Toby” And The Rocking Chair
• 19:04 Bernardsville’s Phyllis Parker And The Grey Lady
• 22:13 Willard Library Webcams And Tech Anomalies
• 26:33 Teen Ghost Hunt In A Deserted Pittsburgh Library
• 31:39 The Beat Cop Mystery And Open Question
• 32:12 Call For Listener Stories And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Good evening, everybody. It's Dr. G, Spirit, Tales, and Magic. We hope this finds you well. We'd like to say hello to some of our newest listeners in Nottingham. Yes, that one. And tonight's email, however, comes to us from Goodyear, Arizona. Comes from a gentleman named David, who says, talk. I was looking through some of your really old stuff back in your ghost story bus days. And you talked about a library in a small town where you grew up. You only spent about two minutes on it, but recently I have my own library ghost story that's not too different from yours. It caused me to do a little research on haunted libraries. So I thought maybe you would touch on that for us. Well, we would be happy to do that. So if you're a frequent flyer of the podcast, you know a little bit more about me as time goes on. Now I must interrupt here and say that if you hear the sound that sounds like a dog barking, it's not a dog, it's a person. It's actually three people. They are eight inches from the window where I'm recording. Um I won't go into a huge detail, but someone needs to come and get them and take them away and put them somewhere where they can't hurt themselves or anybody else. Okay, then again I digress. So my young life, we're talking, very young life. I grew up in a town that was actually a village back then. It hadn't become a city yet. I would call it a small mining town in Ohio. The people who live there would probably take some issue with me saying it in that respect now. And don't get me wrong, it was a great place to grow up. And as far as I know, it's still a great place. But back in my very young days, I remember walking with my grandmother. We lived on a street called Woodrow Avenue, and there was a fairly good-sized hill called the short market that went up to Main Street. And as you walked up that hill when you got to the top, the library and the clinic were on the left. It was actually in reverse order of that. There was the clinic, then the library. And if you crossed the street, you'd be walking up the gigantic stairs to the courthouse. And to the right of that was the jail, and to the right of that, across another street was the Masonic Lodge. And you'll hear a lot of ghost stories from there on other podcasts. If you see that place now, next to the Masonic Lodge, further down the street, is the police station in the city building. Many years ago, there was a powerhouse, and it was run by coal. So the smell of burning coal is very nostalgic for me. The house was heated that way. The village got its power from that. So the library was a safe zone before we had safe zones. So you wouldn't find a sign on the door that said this is a safe zone. But if you were in the library for any other reason than to be quiet and read a book, the librarians were going to have issues with you and they were going to throw you out. So I spent a lot of time in the library as a very, very young man. But you would walk up the hill, and as we know, coal makes that certain smell that only smells like coal. So imagine this, it's just twilight. It's just dark enough to be cold. It's getting dark. And then we walk up the hill. There was one streetlight going up that hill. So it's it's a little dark there anyway. But as you go up the hill, you you smell all the burning coal, and you see the layer of smoke. So it looks spooky, it looks foggy, even when it's not foggy. You get up the hill and you're left on Main Street. And the library is this old bank-looking building. As a matter of fact, I think it may have been an old bank before it was a library. And it's just this grand structure, especially when you're a little kid. You go through the doors, and it's got that library smell with the coal smell. And as you walk toward the desk where the you would take your return books, on the right and the left of that big counter, there's a curved staircase that goes up to a little balcony, and that's the second floor. As you do whatever it is you're doing in there, and it comes closing time, it's even darker outside. And always when I walked down those stairs from that second floor into the door, I always felt like someone was standing right behind me. Now, occasionally a librarian would walk me to the door. One of the part-time librarians worked for a lawyer friend of ours who lived right next door to where I lived, and she would walk every day to work. So sometimes when I left, the librarian would walk with me down to her house, which was right next to ours. So as we're walking down the hill one day, I said, Do you ever feel like when you leave the second story and walk toward the door that someone's staring at you from the balcony? She kind of gasped a little bit. She said, Who told you about it? I remember this like it was yesterday. And told me about what? And she goes, Well, that's our that's our ghost, one of our ghosts. She likes to stand up on the balcony and make sure everybody gets out of the building okay. Wow, what what else? And she goes, Well, you're you're a little young, I'm not going to tell you the story, but you're right, there are several spirits in the library. Now, here I am, a young man with an overactive imagination to begin with, and spending way more time than just about anybody who's listening has spent in the library. I tried to dig around and find all the stories of any paranormal thing that I could find, and that was before I even called it paranormal. And same library that used to walk me home. Her name was Judy. And she said, So you have an interest in the preternatural. The what? The preternatural. I don't know what that is. She goes, it's an adjective and it means beyond what is normal or natural. I said like ghost stuff. She says, no, not necessarily. Just say it with me. Beyond what is normal. Or natural. Spent many years talking about ghosts, and in the bottom floor of that library, just past a vault door, the little kids section. And that section had a window that looked out into the alley. And on more than one occasion, I felt like someone was looking at me through that window, and I'd turn around and it would be gone. And there were a lot of rumors of hauntings and um card cabinets being opened and closed. When I saw Ghostbusters for the first time, I kind of giggled at the library scene because we didn't have anything like that, but we did have some card catalogs open and close on their own. Not in front of you. You'd leave one open, you'd go sit down, you'd go back to close, and it would already be closed. So our friend writes, in the fall, a journalist fancy it likely turns to thoughts of ghosts or goblins. Newspapers and magazines that hauntingly refrain from printing any news of the paranormal for eleven months of the year, eagerly jump on the Halloween coach in October to regale their audiences with dubious tales of the preternatural. Some of those extend into the first week or two of October. Libraries, are they haunted? Bleak mansions and somber castles are usually what spring to your mind when we think of haunted places. But really, ghostly phenomenon. Whatever the cause can be manifest in very well-lit modern offices, as well as crumbling carnets. Of course, it helps you to inadvertently build your library. It helps if you've inadvertently built your library on top of a graveyard. Let's talk about haunted libraries. They usually fall into two types, they say. First, there's the building with a reputation where a convenient murder curse or other tragedy has occurred. Library staff can then blame the odd noises and the occasional book falling off the shelf or glitches in the air conditioning system on the resident escaped ghost, if you will. No one reports anything spooky, and the children's librarians have a good time with it at story hour. Secondly, there are libraries where credible, responsible people observe, well, enigmatic, if you will, human shapes. They hear disembodied voices, and they witness other classic parapsychological events. A ring as a hole of those mysterious footsteps late at night on the upper floorboards. I would say that both categories of haunted libraries, like a good journalist would begin. Type one, forcing you to read through the inn to get the good stuff. Just make sure you don't finish the article alone in bed late at night during a violent thunderstorm. There's one called 'Tis the Curse of Service. As if library directors didn't have enough to worry about. A curse would be sufficient to send stress levels over the line. Fortunately, the curse on Pedoria III public library seems to have lifted long ago. They say it was first uttered in 1847 by the lawyer-plagued woman who owned the land where the library now stands. The curse is said to have been responsible for the untimely deaths, if you will, of three of the directors of said library. The first, I believe, was killed in a streetcar accident in 1915. The second died from a heart attack. And I believe he suffered that after a heated debate at a library board meeting in 1921. And the third committed suicide in 1924 by swallowing arsenic. Now it seems that since then the P. Aurea directors have lived long and somewhat fruitful lives. Trisha Noak, she would be, I believe, the manager of public relations at the Peoria Library, said that their main library was remodeled and reopened in, I believe, December of 2010. Most of the reports of hauntings came from the Stax area, now known as LL1, and the home of our art gallery and local history and genealogy room. She goes on to say that since the stacks were eliminated, the entire library building was stripped down to bare walls. There has been no further activity after the rebuild. On October 11th, 1947, Ruth Cochran, assistant library of, I believe, the Utama County Public Library, and I think that's in Pendleton, president of the Eastern Oregon Library Association, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage as she was closing the building. She went to the basement to rest, but soon became too weak to move or to summon help. The next day the custodian's wife found her still conscious, and she was taken to the hospital where she died. Now, according to the Pendleton East Oregonian, ever since spooky events in the library have been blamed on Ruth's ghost. A gentleman by the name of Harvey, a library patron, he took a deep interest in Ruth, said there is something in the building that makes people nervous. Once a custodian was alone in the building painting the children's room when the intercon system buzzed repeatedly. Now the folklore was that Ruth was suffering in the basement trying to summon someone. The library, now called, I believe, the Pendleton Public Library, moved to a vacant remodeled junior high school building in November of 1996. According to library director Mary Finney, Ruth's old building has been converted into the Pendleton Center for the Arts. The former executive director, I believe it's Tom Hilliard, said that he never really saw or heard anything that he couldn't explain. It was an old building, a Carnegie built in, I believe, 1916. And he could always write off noises that turned out to be pipes or the walls expanding or contracting, or perhaps a bird in the attic. There's one that we call Rockin' Wraith. That's the Cairo III Public Library. It boasts of a ghost that one young library patron dubbed Toby. Director Monica Smith noted that Toby usually hangs out in the special collections room on the second floor of this 1884 building. She says I'm here a lot of times by myself at night, and I do hear many different sounds like someone walking around upstairs. Many times I come back and find the lights on that we have turned off in a room. I definitely think that there is a presence here. Former librarian, I believe her name was Louise, once saw a ghostly light rise up from behind a desk, pass slowly by her office and disappear into the book stacks. Another staff member who actually claimed to be with her and saw the same thing. There used to be a rocking chair in the library, and it always made creaking noises, all by itself. As if someone were rocking on it. In an interview, Smith said, You just kind of get used to it. Phyllis Parker, the female ghost at the Bernardsville Public Library, that's in New Jersey, said, Ghosts who read succeed. The library's former building too at Morristown Road was so active that the staff issued a library card. Jean Hill, local history room volunteer, remarked she was not put on her computer with the rest of the mortals, but her card is always available should she ever choose to use it. Beginning in about 1974, employees started seeing an apparition moving through the front rooms of the library building, which was a tavern during the Revolutionary War. The ghost is said to be that of Phyllis Parker, an innkeeper's daughter who suffered a nervous breakdown when her British spy boyfriend was executed. You can read the whole story in Phyllis, the Library Ghost. That was a book published by the library and written by a local history room volunteer, I believe. It was Eileen Johnston. The last known Phyllis fighting. When a three-year-old boy, excuse me, three-year-old boys claimed to see a lady in a long white dress in the reading room and said hello to her. In the year 2000, the Bernardsville Public Library moved into a new modern building at one Anderson Hill Road, leaving the home of their library ghost. Which we have not had any visits from her since the move. The library's readers seem to miss her. And I believe they call her the Grey Lady. The Spectre supports a scent of perfume that is often sensed near the elevator, near the restrooms, or in the children's room. Occasionally, staff will walk into what they refer to as cold spots in the library, which, as we know, is also indicative of a presence. The library director, I believe it's Greg Hager, said that there have been reports on the second floor in the genealogy department of chairs being pulled away from the tables, and we would go back and meticulously push them in, but they would be pulled back again. File boxes jumping as high as three feet or more from a shelf as if it were pushed or thrown. But the library had been closed for several hours. No one was in the corner, and there was no typewriter. He said that there have also been many reports of electronic and electrical equipment being disturbed, such as fresh batteries being destroyed or staff members hearing the library elevator moving between the floors when there's no one in it and no one near the elevator. Hager and the Evansville Courier and the press's new media editor, and I want to say that's James Dirk, came up with the idea to set up a webcam that sent a live picture to his server every 30 seconds so that it could be viewed on the internet. He says we set up the webcam on the second floor about two weeks before Halloween. In the first two weeks, the cam captured over two million images requested by internet viewers on Halloween night that year. There were so many people trying to visit the cam that all the internet service to and from the city of Evansville crashed. Excuse me, the library kept it up. And five more have been added. The webcam has won several national website awards, including the Digital Edge Award for most innovative use of online medium in 2000. That was won by the Evansville Courier. Willard Library has also been featured on numerous paranormal shows on networks and cables. And Ghost Hunters, I believe, was also there. So far, the library staff has received two reports of strange occurrences happening in the new edition. I mean, you name it within 15 minutes driving distance of where I grew up, you can find every kind of paranormal thing you can possibly imagine. We were, as young men, I were 16, 17 years old, decided to go into Pittsburgh to check out some of their libraries. Figuring we would find these huge gothic structures like you see on TV. Some of them were that way. And I can't remember where this particular library was, but it looked a little run down and we walked up the steps. Didn't seem like anybody was around. And as we peered through the windows, all the books were gone. And there were some card catalogs in there, that the drawers were open, but there were no cards in them. And you could clearly see that perhaps some vandals had been in there. That was the first time I realized that there were still policemen who walked a beat because one came up behind us, and he wanted to know if we were the people who had been breaking in there. We assured him that we weren't and showed him our driver's licenses. And he said, Are you ghost hunters? Now I don't know where he got that back then because all the TV shows and things like that were not in existence at the time. But it just felt right to say, Why, yes, we are. I can tell you how to get in there, but I got your driver's license, I got your names, and I know where you live. You go in there and break something or spray graffiti on something or do anything bad in there, and you're gonna go to jail. So we went in. We walked around. There were two carloads of people. I had four people in my car, that includes myself, so myself and three passengers. The other car had five people in it. Within the first 15 minutes, half of them were gone, ran out. So it had a second story area that reminded me of the library I described to you in the beginning where I grew up. We're standing in the middle of the kind of great room, if you will, downstairs, and you can very clearly hear the sound of typing coming from upstairs. Now there seemed to be only one way to get up there, but you know there's always a second, there's a fire exit somewhere. So a couple of people go and find that, and the remainder of us are still standing there looking up. So, you know, they scream out, Okay, we've got the stairs back here going up. We're starting up. And we went up the front stairs. And we met in the middle of the upstairs rooms. There's no typewriter. Up there. So we're looking around, and there's a door. It says a bolts only. And it's still locked. By that time I had been a magician for a very long time. There's no such thing as actually locked. So we opened the door. And there was a typewriter, old typewriter, one of the real big ones. It's like, I don't know, 30 inches wide. It's an amazing looking thing. But it was in no condition to type. We tried to press a couple of the keys. Most of them were frozen from people walking in and smashing down on them. Spent about another 20 or 30 minutes in there, and we go back outside. Same beat cops walking down the street. We're sitting on the great stairs going up to the place. He goes, hey, you kids shouldn't wait or on the stairs. That's well, we kept our word, we didn't do anything in there. What are you talking about? That's what you said you had our driver's licenses and you know you'd seen them and you know our names and we're I don't even know you. Were you kids in that library? I'm like, no, the doors were locked, but we looked in the windows a lot. You need to get out of here. Do you have a car? I say it's that one parked right down the street right there. It's the only one that's there. That has an Ohio plate. What are you doing up here? We came up to see the library. Bad things happening there. You need to not be here. Now imagine you're a young man who had his first paranormal experience when he was eight and grew up in a place where ghosts were very common. Now, here's the question: was the police officer just screwing with us? Or not? What's your library story? Do you have one? Probably soon, Cassandra and I will try and accumulate a list of closed or abandoned libraries. We would love to visit a couple of them. So if you know of one, whether you have a story or not, send it to me. I'd like to know where it is. You know, we always ask you to remember that there is indeed a world unseen. It's a world that exists all around us all the time. And every now and then, for whatever the reason, we catch a glimpse of it. And the dead give in. Thank you so much for listening, for sharing, for following us and telling everyone about the podcast. That's the only way we're going to be able to keep doing this, so please keep doing that for us. And we'll keep bringing you stories as we get them. Remember, you can send us your story from the website. You can send it via Snail Mail, which is also on the website. Tell a ghost story. Share a book with your favorite ghost.