Was it a ghost that the security camera caught gliding through the New
Paltz library early one morning last October?
Skeptics claim a spider had crawled across the camera lens. But others
who've seen the videoclip dispute such a mundane explanation, re****ter
Lisa W. Foderaro writes in Sunday's New York Times.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/nyregion/20ghost.html>
The controversial clip was discovered when the circulation director,
Jesse Chance, arrived at the library on Oct. 25 and discovered the
alarm was off and a door was ajar.
Chance reviewed that night's surveillance tapes and found that the
door had been left open by a member of the library's board. But as he
rewound the tape, Chance noticed a "weird squiggle on the screen" at
approximately 3:30:09 a.m. What appeared to be "an amorphous gray
smudge" moved from the staircase to the bookshelves and then
disappeared through a wall.
"The first time I saw it, the hair on the back of my neck stood up,"
Chance told Foderaro. "I don't know what it is, but it's really eerie
looking."
A clerk at the library, Raymundo Rodriguez-Jackson, tried to duplicate
the image. He placed a rubber band, a paper clip and his finger
against the camera's glass dome cover. "Whatever I put up there fuzzed
up a little, but you could still tell what it was," Rodriguez-Jackson
explained.
Skeptics insist that a spider crawled inside the glass dome and
appeared blurry due to close proximity to the lens.
"It's definitely not a spider because you can see right through it,"
said library volunteer Avery Jenkins. "If it was a solid object like a
spider, there'd at least be a dot you couldn't see through."
Patrons are rather open to the idea of having a haunted library, but
then New Paltz -- located 75 miles north of New York City -- has long
been the junction of hippie culture and New Age enlightenment.
Library patron Karen Hedley, massage therapist and mother of three,
saw the video and observed, "Something about the movement is not
buglike -- it's more purposeful."
"It makes sense if you believe we're all light beings," Hedley told
Foderaro. "When you're in a physical form, you're just vibrating at a
lower frequency. Some people who die get stuck between worlds."
Reference librarians often get queries from students at SUNY New Paltz
who suspect they're renting a haunted house.
"People come in and say they hear noises or books fall off the shelves
or they just get a funny feeling," said Carol Johnson, coordinator of
the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection, the library's local
history and genealogy section. "They don't realize that if you live in
an old house there's a good chance someone died there."
"The only time I felt sorry for a student was when we looked up the
address and found out that it was a funeral home in the 1890s. He was
pretty creeped out," Johnson told Foderaro.
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