Ida Day Holzapfel, Hutchinson Public Library’s Librarian Ghost

Ida Miranda Day was born on 20 April 1888 in Colony, Kansas, and became one of the most important figures in the history of the Hutchinson Public Library. The library’s own history page says she was hired in 1916 at $75 a month with two weeks of paid vacation, and over the following decade built a complete cataloguing and classification system, began reference help, sent books to soldiers in the First World War, started outreach to shut-ins and introduced Sunday hours. She left in 1926 to study at the University of Kansas. As reported by the Hutchinson Collegian, she married John Holzapfel in 1940 at the age of 52; he died in 1948.

She came back in 1946 as Ida Day Holzapfel, and the library says she oversaw the move from the old Carnegie building to the present building at 901 North Main in 1951. She resigned as director in 1953 or 1954; the two sources the library and the Collegian give differ on the year. She had accepted a post in the library system around Visalia, California, and according to both she died in a car accident in California (at 65, the Collegian says) without ever filling the job. The library says it happened on her first day.

Stories that she remained behind are old enough to have made the newspaper. The library’s history page says a 1975 Hutchinson News article reported staff hearing and seeing a ghost, supposedly Ida Day, and that staff joke that she takes whatever is misplaced. The Collegian’s 2018 feature quotes Kate Lewis of the library’s marketing and communications staff, who believes Ida had “unfinished business” and is most active in the basement, and business manager Tina Stropes, whose payroll calculator printed zero over and over around 2003 until she told Ida she was not being paid because no hours were worked. Other staff and visitors report being poked when no one was there, feeling watched or hearing footsteps below. The ghost is almost always described as friendly, even mischievous, rather than frightening.

Footsteps and a sense of being watched in the basement, objects going missing, a calculator that printed zeroes, visitors poked by an unseen presence and a woman said to match Ida’s appearance. Accounts come from staff and visitors, mostly without dates.

The basement and the Children’s Services room, in the oldest part of the 1951 building at 901 North Main, a public library.

Hutchinson’s library is described by the college newspaper as often ranking high in searches for the most haunted places in Kansas. Ida Day’s story is told on the library’s own history page and in Hutchinson Community College’s student newspaper.