Tuesday, October 19, 2010

So I've been thinking and thinking about this ghost.  After all, ghosts just don't haunt buildings randomly, right?  There has to be some reason that the ghost is here. 

I started thinking about this last week. I came to work one day and found all these articles spread out on my desk. Needless to say, I hadn’t left them there.

After glancing through the papers, I started to put a potential story together about our ghost  Some of it is based in fact, and some of it is strictly my opinion.  I’ll try to let you know what’s fact and what’s my opinion.

FACT: All the newspapers left reference the murder of H. Hugh Craft, a prohibition officer in Huntsville in 1929.  FACT: Rumors in the papers state that back before Huntsville was anything like it is now, a bunch of moonshiners got together and drew straws to determine who would murder the local Prohibition Officer.  However, this is all based on rumors.  The problem is that all the witnesses to this murder mysteriously “disappeared”.  See the article from the June 13, 1929 Huntsville Daily Times here.


FACT: Someone saw the moonshiners murder the officer.  Otherwise, how would the moonshiner story have gotten out?  After the story got out, several of the moonshiners confessed.  So a witness (OPINION: maybe a local kid on the farm) saw what happened. OPINION: Maybe the moonshiners couldn’t catch the witness, or caught the witness and let them go (when the promised to be quiet) or maybe they didn’t know there was a witness until the police started sniffing around.  Think of where it would be easy to dump a witness’ body.  The only real places I can think of are: creeks/ravines or town dumps. FACT: There is a creek that runs by the Library, OPINION: I don’t know if it’s close enough to haunt the Library.  So I started researching where the old town dump is.  And guess where?  FACT: The land that the current Huntsville Public Library is built on! 




You can see the article where they talk about building the library on the garbage dump here.





OPINION: I think that the witness to the H. Hugh Craft murder was killed and dumped in the town dump, and the Library was built on top of it.  So now, the witness is haunting the Library.  And from the things I’ve seen and heard, I think it might be a young female witness (high heeled boots and I keep thinking I see a long haired ghost). 

Maybe now that I know her story, and have told it, she’ll leave me alone?





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Danse Immortelle: A Masquerade Ball
Friday, October 29, 2010 @ 8pm
Huntsville Public Library
Tickets: $10 in advance, $20 at the door
Tickets available after October 4 at any library location
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Friday, October 8, 2010

Moving Cart



This happened the other day while I was shelving some books.  Little things like moving carts, falling books, closing doors, and the crazy microfiche keep happening.  After awhile you sort of start to get used to it, and that's the scariest part!

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Danse Immortelle: A Masquerade Ball
Friday, October 29, 2010 @ 8pm
Huntsville Public Library
Tickets: $10 in advance, $20 at the door
Tickets available after October 4 at any library location
__________________________________________________________________

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Haunted Microfiche


Okay so here's the deal. We'd been getting some complaints from patrons about Microfiche Machines (those machines you read old newspaper archives on) running by themselves. It's really creepy when it happens. The machines you see on the right (they look like computers) are all automatic electronic machines- those actually have a program to run by themselves.  So they could theoretically run by themselves on purpose.  However, the big brown machines on the left are handcranked. They don't run by themselves. I was walking by the Microfiche area the other day, when the man in the blue hat told me that one of the machines was malfunctioning. I whipped out my camera to see what was up. And you can see in this video that it's a handcranked machine definitely running itself. CREEPY!!!!

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Danse Immortelle: A Masquerade Ball
Friday, October 29, 2010 @ 8pm
Huntsville Public Library
Tickets: $10 in advance, $20 at the door
Tickets available after October 4 at any library location
__________________________________________________________________

Friday, September 17, 2010

Does this seem like the longest week or what?  I just feel that this week has taken FOREVER!  Anyways, about the spooky stuff.  The latest is: books that go missing.  I was working with some old yearbooks today, and I found a really cool one.  It was called “The Crucible” from some school in 1929.  It had the best old pictures in it!  Well, I set it aside to come back to it and went looking through some of the other yearbooks.  When I came back to where I had set it, it was gone.  I looked through the entire stack, and it was totally missing.  I hadn’t moved from the table.  I still have no idea where it went.

I had to work late one night this week.  The days are starting to get shorter again, so it seems to get darker and darker at night.  I was walking through one of the upstairs area, when I saw I thought someone standing there out of the corner of my eye.  However, when I turned there was just an old plaster bust of Benjamin Franklin.  I swear I saw movement though.

Last (and most creepiest of all)- I keep hearing weird noises in this one back hallway.  Earlier this week it was a scraping.  Then yesterday it sounded like footsteps.   I whipped out my trusty cameraphone and took a picture.  I’ve been doing that a lot lately.  And most of the time I don’t get anything.  However, I did get something weird in this picture.  Take a look.  CREEPY!



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Danse Immortelle: A Masquerade Ball
Friday, October 29, 2010 @ 8pm
Huntsville Public Library
Tickets: $10 in advance, $20 at the door
Tickets available after October 4 at any library location
__________________________________________________________________

Friday, September 10, 2010

Sorry I haven’t written in awhile. It’s been super crazy at work. There’s been more weird stuff going on, of course. But the weirdest by far is this picture I took. Remember how I said I keep seeing stuff out of the corner of my eye? Well I was in the Main Library atrium the other day, and I swear I saw something in one of the windows. So I whipped out my cell phone and snapped a photo. I’ll post it here for you to see. It could be some strange shadow on the window, but I don’t think it is.




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Danse Immortelle: A Masquerade Ball
Friday, October 29, 2010 @ 8pm
Huntsville Public Library
Tickets: $10 in advance, $20 at the door
Tickets available after October 4 at any library location
__________________________________________________________________

Friday, August 27, 2010

I’m seriously starting to get really freaked. This week was the worst. I had to work one night, and you know how we’re open kinda late? Well I was sitting in a staff room near the back on a break. I heard the elevator ding and footsteps go down the back hallway. I didn’t think anything of it, because I knew a co-worker had gone downstairs and I was expecting him to come back up. But then it happened again about 5 minutes later. I listened to the footsteps as they came down the hallway thinking: “For sure, that’s (my co-worker).” They stopped outside the door and I expected him to walk in. But nothing happened. So I got up and walked to the door and no one was there. I SWEAR I heard footsteps. I turned around to walk back in to the staff room and I heard kind of a scraping. There are banks of lockers in the room- and that’s where the scraping was coming from. I looked over at the lockers and the combination locks on the handles were swinging back and forth. Even though I was the only one in the room and no one had touched them in the last 15 minutes. Needless to say, I left that room and haven’t been back since.


Also, our cleaning crew has switched shifts. Remember how I said they used to come during the night? Well, they’re coming in the morning now. We even got a staff memo about it. Supposedly it’s due to an upgrade with our security system (more about that later).

However, there are rumors about the REAL reason the cleaning crew switched. Like, how they would mop the floor during the night, leave the room, and come back to find footprints on the wet floor. They said this didn’t just happen once, but multiple times. And they’d hear weird noises at night. Basically they were afraid to be alone in the building. So now they come in the morning.

Problems with our security system: we’ve had several instances of the motion detectors going off during the night. The police keep getting called because the alarm is triggered by something moving. Then when they go inside, there’s nothing there. It’s gotten so bad that the security company has been called and supposedly they’ve made some changes to “upgrade” our system. We’ll see if that works.

I’m starting to get really worried.


~ A.L.

__________________________________________________________________

Danse Immortelle: A Masquerade Ball
Friday, October 29, 2010 @ 8pm
Huntsville Public Library
Tickets: $10 in advance, $20 at the door
Tickets available after October 4 at any library location
__________________________________________________________________

Friday, August 20, 2010

Okay, so you know how everyone always jokes about the library being haunted? Well, I think it is.

I know the library would never want to actually admit that this sort of thing is going on, so I started this blog to “spread the word”. I have to keep my identity anonymous so I don’t get in trouble at work. You can just think of me like your paranormal Library Gossip Girl (You Know You Love Me!)

So here’s the sitch: I work at the main library (but no way am I telling you what floor or department I work in) and I always rolled my eyes at the “library haunting” rumors. In fact, a couple of months ago we had a self proclaimed ghost hunter come to the library and tell us he felt the presence of the ghost of Carl T. Jones. Yeah, right. Who is Carl Jones and what is he doing at the library? Please.

Then I started noticing some weird stuff a couple of months back. At night I’d clean up my department. But the next morning there would be books out on the tables. Things would go missing overnight. At the time I just thought it was the cleaning crew or something. Then I started noticing the weird stuff. Books checked out and checked back in at weird times during the night (like 1:14 am). During the day there are weird noises in some of the back halls. I swear I see things out of the corner of my eye, and yes I know I sound spastic when I say this, but sometimes I feel someone watching me.

So anyways, judge for yourself. I’ll be posting what I consider to be “evidence” of this weird stuff. You can tell me what you think.



~ A.L.


__________________________________________________________________

Danse Immortelle: A Masquerade Ball
Friday, October 29, 2010 @ 8pm
Huntsville Public Library
Tickets: $10 in advance, $20 at the door
Tickets available after October 4 at any library location
__________________________________________________________________