Category Archives: spooky

That Time I Worked At A Haunted Library

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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.)

My Ghost Story

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by Michelle Gagnon

I know, I know…it’s a little early for Halloween material, but what the hey, it is my favorite holiday so I’m starting the celebration early. I kicked things off this past weekend when our local Sisters in Crime chapter took the “Official San Francisco Chinatown Ghost Tour.” I’ll describe that experience in more detail next week, suffice it to say it was well worth the money if for no other reason than I learned the true origins of the terms “hooker” and “Shanghaied.”

We opened the evening sitting around the lounge of a deserted Chinese restaurant sharing ghost stories, something I haven’t done since Girl Scout campfire time. So today I’m going to offer my best contribution to the genre. It’s been a long time since I thought of this incident, years, in fact. But it still makes a chill go down my spine…

People often ask why my books are set in New England when I’ve spent the past decade in the more temperate climes of the Bay Area. Initially it wasn’t a conscious decision, but when forced to reflect back on it I can safely say that for me, New England is just plain spooky. You get a sense of a past there that doesn’t exist in land of split-level ranch-houses and shopping malls. Add to that the fact that I grew up in a two hundred year-old renovated farm house with a ramshackle barn on the property that could easily have passed for the set of a horror film, and you’ll get some insight into my psyche.

In that barn, from the day we moved in until my parents finally left twenty-some odd years later, there was an aged, yellowing calendar on the wall. Since July 1952, no one had torn off a month. We bought the house from an elderly woman who had literally spent her entire life there, and had finally decided to move to a smaller, more manageable house.

Eleanor Cockrell told us that her father, a furniture maker by trade, had died suddenly of a heart attack in that barn mid-July, 1952. Apparently it never occurred to anyone to remove the calendar, or any of the spooky pieces of broken furniture scattered throughout. You would think that as a kid, having a barn like that to play in would have been a treat. Truth is, we barely went in the place. There was just something about it, an undeniable dark energy there.

Not that the rest of the house was any less spooky. I started suffering from insomnia when I was twelve years-old, and was therefore treated to years’ worth of odd late night bumps, creaks, and groans. Footsteps, where there shouldn’t have been any. If I closed the closet door in my bedroom all the way, at some point, maybe a minute later, maybe an hour, it crashed open again with a resounding “thump.”

“It’s an old house,” my parents would say, rolling their eyes. “Just wood settling.”

Strange things happened periodically, lights left on in rooms no one had been in, strange buzzing sounds bouncing around the house in such a way that even my parents were at a loss for an explanation.

But this one event I believe is indisputable. It was right before my parents were due to move out, and I was back home with a boyfriend clearing out years worth of old report cards and movie stubs (yes, I am a pack rat). Most of these treasured items were stored under the eaves in our attic. The Cockrells apparently hadn’t used the attic much in the winter, and Henry had built a large panel that could close off the staircase so only the bottom two floors would have to be heated. For the twenty odd years that we lived in that house, that panel had never been closed, not once. It wasn’t locked, but was almost too heavy to move, so we never worried about it.

It was one of those roasting hot, humid July afternoons that New England specializes in. My boyfriend and I were filthy from crawling around in the accumulated dust and dirt, dripping sweat thanks to the 100+ degree temperatures. As we headed downstairs to take a break, he muttered under his breath that this was the crappiest house he’d ever been in, and he couldn’t wait to leave.

That’s when it happened. Out of nowhere, the panel that hadn’t moved for decades slammed down on his head, sending him tumbling down the stairs and nearly knocking him unconscious. Hard to say if it was Henry taking offense, or another resident—I always suspected we had more than one of them rattling around, it was after all a very large, very old house. My boyfriend survived, but refused to return to the attic. And needless to say, that relationship didn’t work out in the end. Maybe Henry knew best, after all.

I love a good ghost story, so if you’ve got one to share, let’s hear it…