In Brief
At the Albright Memorial Library in Scranton, Pennsylvania, staff say books leave the lower-level stacks on their own — falling on quiet afternoons with no one in the row. The library doesn't deny it. It runs a podcast about it.
The Full Story
At the Albright Memorial Library in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the haunting staff lead with isn't a draft knocking one book askew. It's volumes leaving the lower-level stacks on a quiet afternoon, falling with nobody in the row.
The building has been Scranton's public library since it opened in 1893, on the exact corner where the Albright family home once stood. Joseph Albright came to the city as a coal sales agent for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, and after he and his wife died, their children gave the land to the city for a library. The old house was torn down in 1890. What went up in its place was unlike any library in Pennsylvania: John Albright asked the architects to model it on the Musée de Cluny in Paris, and they did, in Indiana limestone and Spanish black roof tile, with lion sculptures and carved owls on the facade. Frederick Law Olmsted laid out the grounds.
It opened as a working library and never stopped being one. Henry Carr was the first librarian, the shelves held 10,600 volumes, and more than 1,500 cards went out in the first few weeks. During the war the place ran a Victory Book Campaign that pulled in some 35,000 books across Lackawanna County in a single year. A century and a third of people checking books out, carrying them home, bringing them back.
The phenomena cluster low and along the stairs. Shadows move through the basement. Doors open and close with no one near them. Orbs turn up on the staircases. And the books fall.
There's no name to put to it. No documented death in the building, no tragedy the lore hangs on. The reports are ambient, recurring, and old, with no origin story to explain them. "Whether these incidents are the result of ghostly hands remains a mystery," the regional haunted trail writes of the place.
The strange part is that the library agrees with you. The Lackawanna County Library System partnered with Wyoming Valley Ghost Tours, a pair named Carrie Ann and John who run paranormal investigations down in the basement. The library system put out a podcast interview with them, and titled it "Tales from the Albright." This is the institution itself, the one that catalogs and shelves and reshelves, hosting the people who go looking for whatever takes the books down.
The haunted trail ends its writeup on the Albright with a line that reads like a shrug and lands like a confession. "Who would've thought," it asks, "that ghosts like to read?"
