Staff at the Main Library in downtown El Paso report a small child, a nurse, and a figure in an old military uniform moving through a basement that runs two stories deep. The block was a burial ground first, and the graves hauled out in the 1880s were not all found.
The Main Library at 501 N. Oregon Street in downtown El Paso keeps a basement the staff say is not empty. Library employee Jack Galindo told CBS4 in 2015 that it runs two stories deep and is closed to the public, and that people who had worked there for years kept reporting the same three figures: a small child, a nurse, and someone dressed in an old military uniform. Margaret Neal, the main library's manager, said staff hear voices and hear their own names called. Lights switch on and off. Doors close. Someone walks past a doorway, and then there is nobody.
Assistant manager Mary Michals had been there more than a decade when she got hers. A snowstorm in 2011 shut the library for several days, and she was alone in the late afternoon when a long, tall man in an old-fashioned big coat appeared. "It just walked by slowly from the base of the stairway and disappeared," she said. "I don't know what it was. I have no explanation for it."
The ground under the building explains the crowd, if anything does. When Fort Bliss was reestablished in 1878, the government set aside two blocks east of the old Campo Santo and labeled them the U.S. Cemetery Reserve. The fort moved on, the city took the land, and the blocks became Buckler Square and Cleveland Square. Starting in the mid-1880s the downtown dead were carted out to Concordia Cemetery, but as the El Paso County Historical Society tells it, the burial records were spotty, the markers had rotted or been vandalized, and nobody knew where the old cemeteries actually ended. Graves were missed. How many is still unknown.
They kept coming back up. In 1899, workers digging at Cleveland Square, the surviving half of the reserve immediately beside the library, unearthed a skeleton. A railroad crew found several more under Main Street in 1901. In 1910 an excavation at Main and Chihuahua turned up bones again, one skull carrying bullet holes.
Buckler Square got the library. The Carnegie building went up atop it in 1904, and the historical society notes that the Buckler name disappeared from the map the moment it did. SAH Archipedia's building survey puts the 2006 addition on the same footprint.
The Paso Del Norte Paranormal Society has worked the building more than once, and CBS4 filmed one of those nights. A dozen investigators spent half an hour salting the reported rooms with infrared cameras, recorders and K2 meters, then killed the lights. In the basement the meters climbed green to yellow to orange while the team asked questions about a small child. Upstairs in the Border Heritage Room, an investigator asked about someone named Maria and got several taps back on the wall, with none of the motion-activated lights tripping. No source explains who Maria is.
A week of audio review turned up one more answer, high and small, to a question asked into an empty room: "I'm over here."
