Old Bernardsville Public Library

Phyllis Parker opened a pine box in the old Vealtown Tavern and found her husband's body. Her ghost still walks the second floor in white.

Captain John Parker ran the Vealtown Tavern during the Revolutionary War. His daughter Phyllis married Dr. Byram after a short courtship. Byram, as it turned out, was a British spy operating under the name Aaron Wilde. When a pouch of secret documents went missing from General Anthony Wayne during a stop at the tavern in 1777, Byram was arrested, tried for treason, and hanged. His body was returned to the tavern in a pine box. Phyllis opened the box herself. Most versions of the legend agree she never recovered.

The tavern is still there. It sits on Route 202 in what used to be Vealtown, which got renamed Bernardsville before the 19th century was out. For more than a hundred years, beginning in 1877, the building served as the town's public library. The Bernardsville Public Library eventually outgrew the space and relocated to 1 Anderson Hill Road, but the old tavern still houses the library's local history collection, and the original reading room is still open to the public.

The first documented ghost sighting came during a 1974 library renovation. Workers reported seeing a woman in a long colonial-era dress moving through rooms they had just emptied for construction. The sightings continued after the renovation finished. Librarians working alone after closing have described Phyllis near the local history section. In 1989, a child visiting the library with a parent reported seeing a woman in a white dress standing between the shelves.

In 1987, local paranormal investigators held a seance in the building and recorded the session on video. The footage is kept in the library's local history room and can still be viewed there. The investigators say they made contact.

The staff's relationship with Phyllis is the strangest part of the story. The librarians and local history volunteers treat her as part of the institution's provenance. The library's own programming has included events specifically about "what we do and don't know about Phyllis." When a child says they've seen her, nobody on staff corrects them.

The Wayne connection adds a layer. Anthony Wayne was the Revolutionary general whose stolen documents set the Byram arrest in motion; he went on to die of a stomach ulcer in 1796, and the folklore around his own ghost (riding U.S. 322 in Pennsylvania looking for bones lost during an 1809 disinterment) is its own separate Jersey-Pennsylvania legend. At the Bernardsville library, he's just the general who caught a spy in the tavern dining room.

The building is quiet most days. The second floor is where most of the Phyllis reports happen. If you sit at a table in the local history room and a chair across from you creaks, it probably isn't her. But the people who work in the building have been describing the same woman in the same white dress for more than fifty years, and the seance tape is still on the shelf.