This Halloween, check out a book at one of these ten literary haunts .Spooky!
Oh check it out, that’s Pattee Library right on the front.
This is the main library building for Penn State University. I worked in this building for several years, on the top floor of that tower sticking up from the middle. And I can tell you the truth about Pattee Library.
This is the university library where a girl actually WAS murdered in the stacks. It happened on the first basement level in 1969, and the girl was a student shelving assistant named Betsy Aardma. She was stabbed from behind with an ice pick. No one is sure why, though there’s some possibility it was Mafia-related. The police suspected that her father might have had Mob connections, and the attack was, from appearances, very clean and professional.
Though there has been many a seance held on the first basement level (with lit candles in some cases, the fuckwads), no sign of Betsy as a ghost has ever been seen by a reliable witness. (Unreliable witnesses include students who are drunk or high, the obsessive dude who’s been stalking her spirit for over 15 years, and members of the campus ghosthunters’ society—they are not sensible ghosthunters, they’re crackpots whose founding member had five restraining orders out against him from women he had decided were his reincarnated wives from a past life.)
The unearthly screams from the bottom basement level, though? My roommate was working in circulation when that howl rose up through the stairwells one day. She watched as students came crashing up out of the door to the stacks like terrified lemmings in its wake. She said there was no possibility that it was made by a human throat, and it wasn’t the steam pipes—which is a sound familiar to everyone who works in the library. This sounded like the howl of a very large, angry animal.
Another friend of mine, who still works there, told me about one day when he was shelving books up on one of the upper floors of the Paterno wing extension (offscreen to the right here), and ran into a young Asian woman, standing at the window and thumbing through a book. She looked up, smiled politely, and vanished.
Other than that, and probably the scariest thing in the building: there are unholy fucktons of cockroaches on the lower floors. The campus still has a lot of old steam tunnels that bugs and squirrels find very comfortable for winter habitation. The staff like to take new trainees down there when the building’s settled down for the evening, and turn the lights on so that the newbies can listen to the chitinous scurrying back into the shadows.
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