A team of ghost hunters who spent the night of September 9 at the allegedly haunted Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana, didn’t see anything spooky, but their equipment registered some odd geomagnetic spikes and valleys. Local clinical psychologist Timothy M. Harte and some volunteers placed infrared, ultraviolet, motion, and magnetic-field sensors in several locations within the library in an attempt to detect any anomalies.
“On almost all sites the static sensors show something,” Harte said in a special report by the Evansville Courier and Press September 14. “Basically if someone would have been nearby during one of those they are going to feel like someone is watching them or they are not alone.”
Willard Librarian Greg Hager told American Libraries that the stakeout was prompted by an odd event in the children’s room September 7 when two staff members discovered that a row of neatly ordered books had suddenly been disarranged. “Every fourth book or so was pulled out and tilted at an angle,” he said. “No patrons were in the area, and one of our staffers was very shaken up by it.”
The ghost, a “lady in gray” first seen in 1937, was observed most recently in 1997. The library has installed two Web ghostcams to monitor any apparitions.
Posted September 25, 2000.