Raymundo Rodriguez-Jackson, a self-described “logical” worker at the Elting Memorial Library.
'Ghost in the New Paltz Library'Was it was a spirit looking for something to read in the middle of the night? Or was it, as some killjoys suggest, just a spider?
A surveillance tape picked up the image about a week before Halloween, and the mystery has deepened rather than dissipated with time. The video, called “Ghost in the New Paltz Library,” has been viewed on YouTube by some 4,385 people so far, while library employees and patrons continue to debate the possibilities and recount the coincidences.
Not only was it almost Halloween. Not only did the “anomaly,” as the library officially calls the shadow, appear in the oldest part of the building, where the shelves are filled with ghost stories. But the library had erected a temporary altar, or ofrenda, used in celebrating the Day of the Dead in Mexico. The altar was built in conjunction with a communitywide reading of Rudolfo A. Anaya’s “Bless Me, Ultima,” a coming-of-age novel filled with magical realism.
“Some people say that since we had an ofrenda here, maybe that conjured up some spirits,” said John A. Giralico, the library director, noting that some people had left notes on the altar to loved ones lost, along with photographs.
It all started on Oct. 25, when Jesse Chance, the circulation director, noticed that the library’s alarm was turned off. He then saw that the door on Main Street that leads into the old stone and clapboard part of the library, dating to at least 1802, was ajar.
So Mr. Chance checked the surveillance tape from the room inside, with its wooden staircase, crooked door frames and mustard-colored bookshelves. He saw that a board member had left the door open after a meeting the night before: one mystery solved. But as he was rewinding, he also saw “this weird squiggle on the screen,” he recalled. The time stamp reads 3:30:09 a.m. as an amorphous gray smudge moves jerkily from the staircase over to the shelves and then disappears through the wall. “The first time I saw it, the hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Mr. Chance said. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s really eerie looking.”
Mr. Chance, who said he did not believe in ghosts, told Raymundo Rodriguez-Jackson, a clerk who does believe, as he put it, that “entities and spirits can exist.” Mr. Rodriguez-Jackson, who grew up with a grandmother who had an ofrenda in her home, set out to duplicate the image on the tape. He placed a finger against the glass dome protecting the camera, as well as a rubber band and a paper clip.
“We’re logical people — we’re library people,” Mr. Rodriguez-Jackson noted. “Whatever I put up there fuzzed up a little, but you could still tell what it was.”
For a while, the story of the enigmatic shadow stayed among the stacks. Some library workers came down on the side of a spider that somehow slipped under the dome and, at such close range, might appear blurry. Others argued for a ghost or at least some unexplained electrical energy.
“It’s definitely not a spider because you can see right through it,” said Avery Jenkins, a library volunteer, as he studied the tape on a computer at the library’s front desk. “If it was a solid object like a spider, there’d at least be a dot you couldn’t see through. I just think some people don’t want to believe.”
Carol Johnson, coordinator of the library’s local history and genealogy section, the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection, unearthed information about two deaths that occurred in the Main Street house, where the library took up residence in 1920. There was one obituary for Oscar C. Hasbrouck, who owned the home and died in 1899 of what was then called consumption. A second obituary reported the death of Charles V. Auchmoody, a boarder in the house who died in 1908 after suffering “a stroke of paralysis.”
But after The Times Herald-Record wrote about the puzzling videotape in March, interest spread in this village, 75 miles north of New York City, where hippie culture and New Age enlightenment meet easily. On Main Street, tie-dye is the fabric of choice and drum circles converge and disband at whim. One patron told Mr. Rodriguez-Jackson that she wanted to bring in dowsing rods, which supposedly can detect not only the presence of water, but ghosts as well.
After seeing the video, Ms. Hedley said, “Something about the movement is not buglike — it’s more purposeful.”
But another patron, who gave his name as Sneakers Daystar and his occupation as entrepreneur, declared it a shadow, possibly from a bat. “I’ll believe it’s a ghost when I see this book on the floor,” he said as he pulled on a binding with his finger to demonstrate.
New Paltz, founded in 1678 by 12 Huguenot families who had fled religious persecution in France, may be home to other spirits. Every Halloween, Historic Huguenot Street, a nonprofit group, gives a haunted-house tour of its National Historic Landmark District, with its seven original stone houses, the earliest built in 1705, and burial ground.
And students from the State University of New York at New Paltz invariably wander into the library looking for confirmation that the house they are renting is haunted. Ms. Johnson directs them to a long shelf of books with detailed records about older houses in the area.
“People come in and say they hear noises or books fall off the shelves or they just get a funny feeling,” she said. “They don’t realize that if you live in an old house there’s a good chance someone died there. The only time I felt sorry for a student was when we looked up the address and found out that it was a funeral home in the 1890s. He was pretty creeped out.”
Ghost or no ghost, Mr. Giralico, the director, sees a delightful subplot in the whole mystery. “Look what else goes on at libraries besides our usual offering of books, films, periodicals and programs,” he said with a gleam in his eye. “It’s great publicity.”
