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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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
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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
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