John F Kennedy Memorial Library

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Comments (3)

• Cassidy | June 23, 2014

  Physical science is the most haunted building on campus. I have seen, heard, and felt things. Yes, felt. I was touched in the back of the neck.

• GW | January 12, 2026

  On the second floor of the library, on the south side, there’s a door that shouldn’t exist—one that seems to appear only when the building decides you’re alone enough to notice it.
  
  I’d been buried in my midterm paper for hours, the kind of late‑night grind that makes the air feel heavier than it should. Dead week always does strange things to the mind, but this felt different. Down in the basement, the hum of the vents had thinned into something faint and uneven, like a breath that didn’t belong to the machinery. After a while I had to stand, if only to shake off the sensation that something unseen had settled just behind my chair.
  
  It was close to midnight when I climbed the stairs, past the empty circulation desk where the lamps cast long, unmoving shadows across the carpet. The bridge by Special Collections was deserted. The old printing press sat in its usual place, but in the dim light it looked less like a machine and more like a figure hunched over something it didn’t want me to see. The glass cases reflected only my own outline—stretched, distorted, as if the building were trying to remember my shape.
  
  I wandered toward the stacks, telling myself I was just killing time, just stretching my legs, just trying to feel human again. But the farther I walked, the more the silence thickened. It wasn’t the ordinary hush of a library at night. It felt intentional, like the entire building was holding its breath, waiting to see what I would do next.
  
  That’s when I saw it.
  
  A door on the south wall, where there had never been one before. No sign. No handle. Just a thin, perfect outline in the dim light, as though the wall itself had decided to split open. I froze. I’d heard stories—everyone had. The young woman who looked old, or the old woman who looked young, depending on who told it. The one who whispered and laughed to herself in a third‑floor study room until someone looked away for a moment… and she was gone.
  
  I should have walked away. Instead, I pushed the door.
  
  It opened too easily.
  
  A long hallway stretched out before me, lined with old carpeting that looked older than the building itself. The air was stale, heavy, as if it hadn’t been disturbed in decades. The hallway bent sharply to the left, and I couldn’t see what waited beyond the turn. I stood there, staring into that bend, and a feeling rose in me—deep, gut‑twisting, primal. Curiosity and dread tangled together. Whatever was around that corner, I felt certain it had been waiting far longer than I had been alive.
  
  My stomach lurched. A wave of nausea hit so suddenly it felt like the floor tilted beneath me. I stepped back, then again, until the doorframe was at my shoulder. I didn’t close the door—I just turned and walked away, down the stairs, back to the basement, back to my paper, pretending the world was still ordinary.
  
  A year after I graduated, I came back during daylight hours, telling myself I’d imagined it. The south wall was smooth, unbroken. No door. No outline. Nothing.
  
  But I wasn’t the only one. Someone else saw it, months later. And then, a few years after that, the entire Special Collections and reading area was remodeled—walls torn out, floors replaced, the south side completely restructured.
  
  People said it was overdue.
  
  But sometimes I wonder if the building was just trying to hide something it couldn’t quite get rid of.

  • GW | January 12, 2026

    It was on the north side of the building, forgive me, it's been a long time since I have thought about the library it was back in the 90s.