GREEN RIVER – There’s a large, black three-ring binder at the Sweetwater County Library that, at first glance, wouldn’t look out of place in any office. Opening it up however reveals a record of unusual activity dating back more than 30 years.
The library’s ghost log began in 1993, where a two-sentence log by former librarian Micki Gilmore was entered February 2. It reads:
Gate at the doors swung open. No one there.
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The Sweetwater County Library has been known as a hot spot of spiritual activity for a long time and as cliche as it may sound, was in fact built on land that used to be Green River’s cemetery. Gilmore said she started the log after starting as a substitute at the library a year prior to that first entry. She said she started noticing things on day one and wanted to learn more about what other people had experienced. When the head librarian told her they didn’t keep a record of those experiences, Gilmore opted to begin one and received permission to start the Ghost Log.
Even before that first entry, stories of strange noises, objects moving on their own accord, and even mysterious faces appearing in walls were shared by employees and patrons. Librarian Tiffany Kennah said she witnessed an apparition known as the angry lady while in the women’s bathroom in 1983. According to Kennah, the spirit gets its name from the stern expression she is seen displaying. Kennah said she saw the face of an old woman’s face coming out of the tiled wall. While she was only nine years old, Kennah wasn’t scared of what she looked at.
“I didn’t think too much of it,” she said.
Kennah said she returned to the bathroom multiple times after the experience hoping to get another look at the angry woman, but never saw it again. She said she later learned of a concept known as “matrixing,” where people see familiar shapes in complex images and thought that would explain the face she saw, but admits the tiles are all one color and don’t feature designs on them.
The log contains a wide variety of experiences that have been reported over the years. The log isn’t a comprehensive record of everything that people have experienced, Also, the log sometimes identifies people by their initials or by their job as not everyone is willing to have their names attached to a supernatural experience. Some reports come across as fairly benign, such as a report Feb. 9, 1993, of an alarm being triggered while a custodian was vacuuming sometime between 6:30-6:45 a.m., and once turned off, it activated a second time. Others are a bit more bizarre. An entry by library patron Lacey Hart entered Aug. 15, 2012, reads:
When I went to the restroom, there was the sound of a woman crying, and I went through every stall and no one was there, and when I asked if someone was there, the crying stopped.
The log also contains reports made by staff and patrons during the library’s Ghost Walks, tours of the library hosted by staff and volunteers where they explain the history of the building and talk about some of the common experiences people reported at the library while attempting to gather evidence of the haunting using tools created to detect the alleged physical signatures spirits create when they’re active. SweetwaterNOW has previously participated in these tours. The tours were started by Ellie Davis, a former youth services librarian who had started the walks as a teen activity, which grew to include adults interested in paranormal activity. One entry made by librarian Shannon Fetch mentions seeing a shadow of a top hat while with a group in the women’s bathroom, something that’s reportedly worn by a shadowy figure multiple people have said they’ve seen. She wrote:
I was on the dinner and ghost walk tour the night of July 28, 2012. We were in the ladies’ room and someone took a picture. When the flash lit up the room, I could see the shadow of a top had behind Ellie. I recognized the hat from pictures I has seen of a man in the same hat. Right after the picture was taken Ellie said there was someone right behind her.
While Kennah described the working at the library as a job like any other, just with extra employees, Fetch is quick to describe the ghosts more as troublemakers.
“I wouldn’t call them coworkers, maybe troublemakers,” she said. “They sometimes give us extra work to do.”
Fetch and Kennah said librarians have recently started dealing with situations where books have been knocked from the shelves, sometimes hard enough to break a book’s spine, requiring librarians to repair the book.
The spirits and ghosts inhabiting the building have become a popular means of fundraising for the county library system’s foundation, an organization that manages an endowment used to fund activities and events throughout the library system. Ghost Walks are hosted by a group known as the Ghost Walk Crew, a collection of volunteers and employees who are interested in the library’s paranormal nature. Gilmore authored the book “Spirits in the Stacks” after she retired in 2016, which details the library’s history and contains reports from the Ghost Log. The proceeds from the Ghost Walk tickets and books sold go directly to the foundation.
