In Brief
For decades the staff at the old Bernardsville library in New Jersey reported a woman in a long colonial dress moving through rooms they'd just emptied. They call her Phyllis, and at some point they gave her a library card of her own.
The Full Story
The old Bernardsville Public Library in Bernardsville, New Jersey kept a ghost on the books. Beginning in 1974, during a renovation, employees reported a woman in a long colonial dress moving through the front rooms of the building, rooms they had just emptied. At some point the staff issued her a library card.
The building was a tavern long before it held books. Built sometime before the Revolutionary War, it was the Vealtown Tavern, run by Captain John Parker until his death in 1781. It sat on the road Continental troops took from Pluckemin toward Washington's winter camp at Morristown, near the Jockey Hollow encampment, and General "Mad" Anthony Wayne used it for overnight stays. During one of them, a guest known as Dr. Byram stole Wayne's documents.
Byram was really Aaron Wilde, a British spy. He was captured and hanged. That part isn't ghost-blog folklore. It's written into the building's National Register of Historic Places nomination, a federal document, which records that a guest "known as Dr. Byram was really Aaron Wilde, a well known British spy" and "was eventually captured and hanged as a spy."
What the federal file leaves out is the woman they call Phyllis. In the legend she's Parker's daughter, who fell for the lodger Byram and, by some tellings, married him. When his body was returned to the tavern in a pine box, she opened it herself, and the shock broke her mind. She spent her remaining years sobbing in the rooms.
The tavern stopped serving in 1840, when the village of Vealtown was renamed Bernardsville. The building became a private home, then, in 1903, the town library, opened after two local women raised roughly $12,000 to buy it. The apparition reports came with the 1974 renovation; some accounts trace the disturbances back further, to the 1870s farmhouse years. The last well-documented one was November 1989, when a small boy saw a lady in a long white dress in the reading room.
The library leaned into her. In January 1977, marking the 200th anniversary of the story, it threw a "Ghost Watch Ball." No one showed up from the other side. Paranormal investigators held a seance in 1987, and the footage still sits in the local history room. And at some point a volunteer explained the library card this way: Phyllis "was not put on our computer with the rest of us mortals, but her card is always available should she choose to use it."
The library moved to a new building around the corner in 1999. A staff manager noted afterward, "We have not had any visits from her since our move." She stayed in the old tavern, where the box was opened.
