York College Bookstore — York, NE
York College, a little, private liberal arts college where I did my undergrad degree in history was right for me at the time. The tree-lined campus on red brick streets is idyllic, even romantic. My parents met there. Three generations of my family have attended and worked for the college, including a one-time president, who was a first cousin of my grandfather’s. I love the place. However, the less said about the bookshop, though, the better. It’s a cartoon of a college bookshop and not a funny or flattering one. But, it does come with a ghost story.
I can vaguely recall the college’s bookshop in my pre-school days when my parents came back for alumni events. We only lived an hour or so away, and my paternal grandparents lived in a nearby town that was even smaller than York. For decades the bookshop was in the basement of the oldest building still standing on campus. It had that old basement smell mingling with the smell of new books and creaky wire spinner racks of postcards and bumper stickers. The building it was in was wonderful. Hulitt Hall was built in 1903 and when I was there as a student myself, it still had the original wood trim featuring the college’s first mascot: the pansy. As a history major, most of my classes were in that building’s single classroom.
At the basement level, at that time, was the mailroom for the campus, which included all the student P.O. boxes, and the bookshop. But, there was a new, large building on campus under construction at that time, and the college bookstore was slated to be housed in the new building. My roommate and I had work-study jobs in the maintenance and grounds department of the college, so it fell to us to dismantle the bookshop’s fixtures, shelving, and furnishings and move them into storage. New fixtures, shelving, and furnishings were planned for the new bookshop. There were no plans to use the old junk, but a thrifty ethos of “waste not, want not” hovered over every task. We did a lot of schlepping crap into storage.
This particular job had no precise schedule. We had a key to the building, so we decided it would be good to go over after dinner one evening and do the job. There would be no classes, and probably fewer professors to disturb, who had offices on the upper floors. Almost all the professors of the various humanities had their offices in the building beginning two floors above us. After gorging on cafeteria food the way only college freshmen can, we went over to Hulitt to see the job ahead of us. The place was deserted. The basement level had two ground-level entrances. One walk-out basement door, and another up a staircase that was then approaching 100-years worth of herds of students stomping up and down to the one and only mailroom on campus for decades. The threadbare carpeted wooden stairs were the creakiest stairs I’ve ever heard in my life.
I checked upstairs on the office floors to see if anyone was around and let them know we were in the building. I had some regulars and favorites already, but no one was around. My roommate and I recited to each other the fact the creepy old building had been built as the music conservatory with tiny practice rooms on the third floor and that a female student one winter’s night in the 1950s left via the fire escape from one of those rooms and slipped on some ice and fell to her untimely death.
We went back into the former bookshop, now empty of books, t-shirts, and a few tchotchkes for alumni. I saw the buzzer on the door to alert a bookshop worker who may be alone in the back that they had a customer. No need for that thing anymore, so I yanked the wire out of it, disconnecting it from the electricity in the building. We didn’t need the annoyance as we went in and out.
We started to work, dismantling metal shelving units. There were posts and shelves. All of it made a clatter as we tossed them into banging-clanging piles of like things and sizes, to make loading and organizing easy on ourselves. We found a radio in a back room and turned it on to keep us company as we banged around.
We’d been working for a couple of hours and the music on the radio shifted formats as the sun went down. By the time it was dark, we had to just shut it off. We worked with only our din and conversation for the company.
Then, the radio, still in the back room and both of us together in the main area, snapped back on at full blast to blaring static. We were dumbfounded and both went and looked in the back room where the radio had been the whole time. The sound shifted horribly and was warbling and was frankly eerie. My roommate snapped it off. Just as he did so, the buzzer on the front door, that I had disconnected, started buzzing. Not a normal in-and-out, door open and close buzz, but a fast-paced staccato.
We ran out, and no one was there. No one was in the hall, no one was on the stairs. No one was there, yet someone seemed upset, perhaps using a ruckus to bother us the way we’d been making a racket that night.
My roommate and I maintain that we don’t believe in ghosts, but something we were never able to explain happened that night.
We went back and finished the job in the broad light of day. In four years there, we never had anyone tell us they pulled a prank on us. In fact, we told very few people of that night until much later.
We helped install things over at the new bookshop in the new building. It was soulless from the start and has since been kicked out to another building with less prestige, a thing no one knows what to do with, and no ingenuity to make it into something great. At least it’s probably not haunted.
About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.