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| Me sharing a few local crimes stories at our recent Hops and Haunts event. |
I guess it’s only appropriate that the bookstore I chose to work in may very well be haunted. The building our store is housed in was built in the early 1900s, shortly after a catastrophic fire swept through the town. For many years, it was home to a bustling general store. In the mid-1980s, two women turned the space into a bookstore, and the current owner purchased it with her mother more than 10 years ago.
I didn’t hear the whispers about the unusual activity in the store until I’d been there for a few months. The only thing I’d noticed was the occasional chill up my spine as I walked through the darkened hallway behind the store on my way out of the building at night. But I chalked that up to it being a very old building without the best lighting. I heard stories of booksellers finding various books on the floor when they would open in the morning.
Most of the activity seems to occur in the corner of the store where children’s picture and board books are. One day I was straightening the area when three books propped up on a stand fell onto the floor in front of me—three different times. The stand was slanted toward the wall so there was no reason for the books to fall forward onto the floor. We have one whimsical shelf from Ikea shaped like a tree that holds books featuring the character Bluey. Large piles of books fly off that shelf often.
We play Spotify through the store computer, so we have curated music throughout the day. The Bluetooth speaker constantly loses connection to the Wi-Fi, and we find ourselves reconnecting it often. One day I turned from our workstation to look at the back of the store, and a shadowy haze appeared by the back door. It was one of those moments where you blink, and you wonder if you really saw something at all. Two co-workers have seen a woman in the store in the early morning hours, near the natural sciences section, when no one else was in there. They were appropriately spooked.
Once a friend of mine who runs the town ghost tours heard about these occurrences, she began doing research. The pizza restaurant three stores down has reported seeing the spirit of a young girl in their kitchen. My friend discovered there used to be a neighborhood of houses for the mill workers on the street behind our store. In 1938, a mom in that neighborhood left her home to run an errand and returned to discover her five children had died when the house caught fire. We now wonder if it’s one of those children who likes to visit the children’s section of the bookstore, but who is the woman my co-workers have also seen? Of course, some of my colleagues are skeptics who laugh off the ghost musings, while others are more willing to entertain the idea. Now that we’re a regular story on the ghost tour, we have customers stop in to ask us questions about what we might or might not have witnessed.
So, I guess it shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that the person who has been writing scary stories for years, and created a true crime podcast, would also end up working in a bookstore with potential paranormal activity. Maybe there’s a story that will come out of it.
Until then, I’ll do my best not to upset any ghosts in the store.
Renee Roberson is an award-winning writer who also hosts the true crime podcast, Missing in the Carolinas. She also works at an independent bookstore in a cozy college town straight out of Hallmark Movie.
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