In Brief
The Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana keeps a Grey Lady in the basement — a woman in grey said to be the founder's disinherited daughter. In 1999 the library wired the building with public ghost cams. You can watch for her right now.
The Full Story
The Willard Library in Evansville, Indiana keeps a ghost in the basement, and you can watch for her on a webcam right now. Staff and visitors call her the Grey Lady — a woman in a long grey dress, sometimes veiled, who arrives on a wave of perfume and then is gone.
The first person to see her was a janitor. The story goes that one night in 1937 he was stoking the basement furnace when a woman in grey stood watching him in the dark, then dissolved into it. He quit. He is the only employee ever known to have left because of her. The basement has stayed her place ever since. The most recent confirmed staff sighting was in August 2010, when an assistant children's librarian reported her in the basement hallway.
The library opened in 1885, in a Victorian Gothic building of steep roofs and turrets, its terra cotta exterior carved with owls for wisdom. Its founder, Willard Carpenter, never saw it. He died in 1883, after a stroke, having left nearly his whole fortune to the library and almost nothing to his daughter Louise. In the 1890s she sued the library board to break the will, arguing her father wasn't of sound mind when he wrote it. She lost. The legend says the Grey Lady is Louise, still keeping the grudge.
She's blamed for small things, mostly. The library reports the scent of perfume, sudden cold, faucets turning on and off, flickering lights, books and furniture moved. As Book Riot put it, she plays "tricks on library visitors by turning faucets on and off, making lights flicker, and, most egregiously, by misshelving books."
The witnesses are not only night janitors. The library names staff, and lists police, a patron, university lecturers, a local weathercaster. In 2005 the Ghost Hunters team brought their equipment in and found a puzzling mist and unexplained footsteps. They explained away most of it. They would not say the Grey Lady didn't exist. The library has leaned in for years — the first public ghost tour drew about 800 people, and October tours have run since.
So in 1999 the library did something no library had done before. It pointed cameras at the basement, the stairway, the children's room, and put the feeds online for anyone, day or night. The library is careful about what it promises. The only thing you're guaranteed to see, it says, is the resident hamster, Willie.
