Happy Halloween! Tonight is the culmination of the “Spooky Season,” when the eerie, the suspenseful, and the down right horrific hold court in many imaginations. There’s a chill in the air here now, does it portend something more? Halloween and ghosts go together, which reminds me of the time I once worked at a supposedly haunted library.

Back in the early 2000s I worked at the North Portland branch library, while my “home” branch was getting a brand-new building. North Portland was a lovely old Carnegie endowment building built in 1913, in the Jacobethan style with a peaked roof, lots of dark walnut, especially the arched and planked wooden ceiling.

I arrived at the beginning of December 2001, to help staff the reference desk, and also teach computer classes and give “pop-up” story times for kids in the main room. It was lively library, with a high school next door, and a diverse community that needed and loved their branch. “Never a dull moment” described North Portland library to a tee.

I had no idea that the branch was supposedly haunted.

The upstairs level, where the manager and youth librarian offices and the meeting room were, seemed to be the places mostly likely to have spectral apparitions, especially at night when the lights were out in the offices and after the computer lab in the meeting room had closed. Usually the apparitions were “just” noises, but sometimes people claimed they felt the touch of something invisible, or had a sensation of someone close by, only to discover there was no one else there.

The weirdest part was where the ghostly epicenter of the haunting was located: in of all places, the upstairs restroom. A wall-mounted hot air hand dryer would suddenly turn on when no one was in the restroom. The sound of the dryer’s blower echoing down the dark walnut staircase and into the main room of the library sent a chill up my spine the first time or two I heard it, but the veteran staff were used to it and just shrugged at the noise.

The unit was serviced numerous times, but it still activated when no one was in the rest room. A couple of times it was dismounted and sent to the repair shop. Each time it was tested and then returned and remounted.

It continued to turn on at odd times, often at night. Chances are it was just hard-to-fix faulty wiring, or a perhaps the dryer’s push button simply received too much wear and tear too fast and triggered on its own. Perhaps it was simply air pressure from the door being closed after someone had left the room.

Or was it the Little Chapel of the Chimes funeral home just across the street from the branch? Some people claimed it was a restless spirit or two coming over for some spectral shenanigans.

The funeral home has since closed and is now a pub. Last I’d heard, it wasn’t haunted. I haven’t heard anything recently about apparitions at the library either.

Perhaps a festive public house, with good cheer did the trick. Or perhaps there never were ghosts or a haunting. Either way, it’s a fun story and a fun place to have worked at.

Have you ever encountered a location said to be haunted? If so, please tell us in comments.

(A slightly different version of this story appeared previously in my author newsletter.)