My first job was as a library page, a job I began a few days after turning fourteen and continued until the summer after I graduated high school. It was a good job, a few hours of work every week and little bit of money I could call my own.
The library I worked in was a living fantasy, exactly the image of the classic library archetype. The front of the building was supported by long white columns. The word “Lyceum” loomed large above the doors. There were marble busts of notable writers balanced atop the ends of each bookcase that fed into its spacious reading rooms. A marble fireplace (long decommissioned) occupied the center of the stacks.
The building was erected in the 1830s, expanded in the very early 20th century, and placed on the National Registry of Historic Places in the 1970s. It was an ideal of the vintage library aesthetic, the type of quaint library where librarians wore cardigans and cat-eye glasses, and they shushed their patrons with steely authority from behind old wood circulation desks.
But there was another level of this library the public rarely saw: the basement. If the library was like the setting of a cozy romance or mystery novel, the basement was from a good old-fashioned horror novel.
Housing an antique reference and periodical collection, the basement was a partially sealed dirt pit. Rickety steps led to a cavern-like hallway dug loose of the building’s foundations. At the end of the hallway was a dark and dry room that ran most of the length of the library above. There were no windows and complete darkness until the electric lights were switched on.
The space was creepy, and I hated shelving down there. But sometimes people actually requested a thirty-year-old newspaper or a turn of the century edition of National Geographic, and it was my job to put it back when they were done.
One afternoon, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I needed to shelve a small stack of items in the basement. I’d done this trip enough times to know to do it quickly before the creep factor kicked in. The bookshelves were laid out as a dusty maze, obviously built by someone with either no plan or a sick sense of humor. In a far corner was the tiny office of the local historical society, sitting empty and dark this day, their door left open to an unlit room.
I worked through the maze, shelved the items, and retraced my steps towards the half-dug hallway. I was nearly to the light switches when I heard a creak and a slam from the far corner. I looked back at the historical society’s office just in time to see the now shut door slowly reopen into this space of no windows, no drafts, and no other humans.
I ran like hell.
I ran down the hall, up the creaky wood stairs, and back into the library. I made an adult on staff go back to turn off the lights. I would not return to that basement that day or any other unless someone accompanied me. Some of the librarians even poked gentle fun at my freak-out, but I didn’t care. They could judge all they wanted, I knew something was down there and I wasn’t going back.
After so many years in this field, this is still the creepiest thing to ever happen to me in a library. But that doesn’t mean I’m out of stories, because most of my friends are librarians and library workers, and many of them have encountered things guaranteed to chill you to the bone. Check back all month long for more ghost stories from the stacks!
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