In Brief
At the Grand Rapids Public Library in Michigan, staff say a man in a dark green military uniform turns up in the basement stacks, quietly re-shelving books. They believe he's Samuel Ranck, who ran the place for 37 years and went to war as a librarian.
The Full Story
The Grand Rapids Public Library, in the Ryerson Building on Library Street in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, has a ghost who never clocked out. Staff working the basement stacks after hours say a man in a dark green military uniform is down there with them, cataloguing and re-shelving books along the lower shelves. He doesn't acknowledge anyone. Look away, look back, and he's gone.
They have a name for him. They say he's Samuel Ranck, the man who ran this library for 37 years.
Ranck took the head librarian's post in October 1904 and held it until July 1, 1941. He was born in 1866 and died in 1952, and for a good stretch in between, this building was his life. He served as president of the Michigan Library Association in 1906. The uniform in the basement sightings points back to the strangest chapter of his career.
In the middle of that long run, he left for a war. During World War I he served as a librarian through the American Library Association, first at Camp Custer in Battle Creek, then shipping out to France in December 1918, supplying books to the camp libraries and hospitals around St. Nazaire. He was hurt in a car accident over there, a broken arm and a cracked skull, and came home, and went back to his library, and kept the job for two more decades.
The building suited him. The Ryerson Building was raised between 1902 and 1904, its cornerstone laid on the Fourth of July, a Beaux-Arts pile of rusticated Bedford limestone designed by the Boston firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. It carries Ryerson's name and not Carnegie's for a plain reason: Andrew Carnegie pledged the money to build it, then pulled the offer, and a Chicago industrialist named Martin Ryerson, a Grand Rapids native, paid for the place instead.
No newspaper account or named witness backs the sightings. They come from the city's ghost tour, which begins on the library steps and runs about a mile through downtown over a couple of hours, and from the writers who collected the local hauntings into a book. Nobody has confirmed Ranck ever wore that dark green uniform in life. It's a story stitched from a real man and his real war, told as the gentlest haunting on the route.
So picture it the way they tell it: a man in his old wartime uniform, back at his post, quietly fixing the shelves someone else got wrong. He spent 37 years getting the books in order. The story says he still isn't finished.
