Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

The ghost of Reverend Thomas Robbins, first librarian of the Connecticut Historical Society, haunted the Wadsworth Atheneum until a worker dropped his portrait in 1892. A 1911 newspaper interview with four longtime staffers documented decades of phantom footsteps on the stairs and rustling papers in the empty reading room.

In 1892, a worker at the Wadsworth Atheneum was about to remove a portrait from the wall when someone warned him: "That's the building's ghost." He smiled, lifted the painting, and immediately dropped it. The canvas tumbled from the frame and curled up on the floor. Staff say the haunting stopped after that, as if disturbing the portrait finally let the ghost go.

The portrait was of Reverend Thomas Robbins, a Congregational minister born in Norfolk, Connecticut in 1777. Robbins was a lifelong bachelor who loved books the way other people love other people. He kept a diary from 1796 to 1854 without interruption and collected over 4,000 volumes on history and theology, including 385 volumes of the Journal des scavans, the world's earliest scholarly periodical. When the Connecticut Historical Society moved into the Atheneum in 1844, Robbins became its first librarian. He served until 1854 and died in Colebrook in 1856 at age 79, leaving his entire collection and ,000 to the society. He's buried in Old North Cemetery in Hartford.

By 1891, staff were convinced he never left. The story went public on July 10, 1911, when the Bridgeport Times and Evening Farmer published interviews with a group of past and present employees who gathered to compare notes on what they had experienced.

The witnesses had credentials. Caroline Hewins had been librarian of the Hartford Library since 1875. Frank Gay started as curator of the Atheneum in 1876. Alfred Bates was librarian of the Connecticut Historical Society. Alfred Clifford was superintendent of the building. These weren't tourists. They were people who had worked there for decades.

The phenomena they described centered on footsteps. Staff heard someone walking down the stairs toward the basement, but nobody was ever there. Doors slammed on their own. In the reading room, patrons complained of rustling newspaper sounds when they were completely alone, no breeze, no draft, nothing to explain it. Hewins admitted she got nervous working late, especially during winter when darkness came early and the Gothic building got very quiet.

The Wadsworth Atheneum opened on July 31, 1844, making it the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States. Daniel Wadsworth, who married Faith Trumbull (niece of Revolutionary War painter John Trumbull), built the original Gothic Revival castle out of Connecticut granite with crenelated towers and pointed arches. The architects were Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis. Today the museum complex spans five connected buildings holding nearly 50,000 works across 5,000 years, including the first Caravaggio and first Salvador Dali purchased by an American museum.

Robbins fits the building perfectly. A scholar who haunts a library is the least threatening ghost in Connecticut. He wasn't murdered, didn't die in some tragedy, didn't have unfinished business in any dramatic sense. He just loved his books and apparently didn't see why death should interrupt the filing system. The footsteps on the stairs, the rustling papers in the reading room: those sound less like a haunting and more like a man who can't stop working.