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Library Is Not Haunted

My grandmother Clara Raymond Moore was the first person to act as Deep River librarian in the current library building. Upon my grandmother's death in 1950, my mother Lois Moore Ingram became librarian until her retirement in 1980. Between the two of them, they logged 45 years in the current building and not once was it ever suggested by them or anyone else that the building was haunted.

During the 1950s, the American Legion and a dancing school rented space on the second floor. The Deep River Fife & Drum Corps kept its instruments on this floor and rehearsed in a barn that used to occupy the current library parking lot. In the 1980s, Mrs. Ruth Johnson, a retired school teacher, gave her estate to renovate and provide an addition to the original building that had been given to the town by the Richard Spencer family. The public was proud of the library as a place of learning and literature. I challenge anyone to find any reference to "a reputation for being haunted" in the archives of The New Era, the local newspaper that carefully chronicled village life from 1874 to 1977.

As the sole employee for many years, my mother worked the night hours alone. She did not hear voices or see ghosts, but knew that a large Victorian house on a windy November night can stimulate an active imagination. However, imagination is not fact and it is only recently that it is being touted that the library has "always been known" as haunted. Not so. Stories of ghosts and paranormal activities make for good copy and might improve public readership, but that is as far as it goes.

Sara Ingram

Deep River