Welcome to the series of Haunted Libraries (and Bookshops) Around the World. In which I will highlight a library (or bookshop) and its stories of ghostly apparitions, and maybe suggest a book along with it.
Moravian Book Shop is currently located in Bethlehem, PA and boasts the title of being the oldest and possibly first bookstore opened in America. I’ll spare you most of the history, but to say that the bookstore itself has changed its location and name many times. So this little ghost tale probably doesn’t have anything to do with the original owners.
The staff have felt like they were being watched in the basement and just generally don’t like being there1, but more spectacular was when the ghost led the store manager back to the kitchens, where she had discovered the stove was still on.
Jane Clugston, who sells children’s books and has been with the store for almost 30 years, can corroborate. She told me that one night, while closing the store with a fellow employee, she saw a dark figure in a back hallway of the store, going into the kitchen. She and the coworker followed the figure back. Then, she says she realized the back kitchen stove was on, as well as the fan.
“I don’t know why this person, ghost, spirit drew us back there, but I guess to turn off those appliances,” says Clugston. “I’d never thought of it until I told someone else and they said a ghost led you back there. But in that back hallway a lot of people have said that they’ve felt things and they’ve seen things.” It’s like something out of a book.2
Besides then general sightings of thinking there may be patrons waiting is a story of how another manager saw a woman sprinting from one room to the other and had assumed that she was a shoplifter. He went to go investigate and discovered that he was the only person to have seen her.1