Item Seed: Eleanor Twitty Memorial Library

Eleanor Twitty Memorial Library 

Name: Eleanor Twitty Memorial Library

Function: Ghost Library

Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Collection Size: 60,000 books; 40,000 multimedia

Staff: 20

Funding: Private endowment

The library itself is not particularly astounding: it is about as good as a regular public library with no children’s section, with a special emphasis on all those books that people always mean to read, when they had the time.  The Old Nellie’s regulars now have that time, and they flit through the shelves contentedly enough. Don’t annoy them, of course. Annoying a ghost rarely works out well.

Oh, yes, the patrons are almost all ghosts.  Some days, the staff doesn’t even bother unlocking the front doors.  Not many living people visit the Eleanor Twitter Memorial Library (usually called ‘Old Nellie’ by the staff), although the staff doesn’t really discourage mortal visitors.  The regular library patrons can do an amazingly good job at that themselves.

Not that the regular patrons are actually awful, per se.  Even if they’re ghosts, they’re not so much haunting the place as they’re there just to read books and watch TV.  The Old Nellie has a remarkable number of automatic page-turning machines, and a wing of soundproofed rooms where TV shows and movies play on perpetual loops.  The staff’s just there to swap out titles and DVDs, set the machines to optimal scrolling speed, and handle special requests.

Mind you, taking requests can be tricky, but it turns out that the average ghost can learn how to push around cigarette ash.  Combine that with a specially-waxed and designed Ouija board, and a determined spirit can spell out the name of a desired text or multimedia object in a reasonable amount of time.  Plus, ghosts just plain like cigarette smoke; also rum, chocolate, and fresh animal blood, which is why the Old Nellie is the only library in North America with an under-the-table crudo bar (Deetzes’) in the basement. 

The bar (and the general setup) endures because certain individuals in the federal government have decided that encouraging worryingly powerful ghosts to congregate in one place where they’re out of the public eye and not bothering the living is preferable to the ghosts haunting a bunch of libraries.  The Old Nellie’s benefactors are also not going to be amused if somebody goes to the library looking for trouble. Anybody who riles up the spirits there will soon find that they have mundane worries now, too.

On the other hand, if the party is looking for a ghost with an academic and/or bibliographic bent, it’s almost certainly ‘haunting’ the Old Nellie.  Assuming that someone can communicate with ghosts more effectively than by spilling cigarette ash everywhere, some discreet business can be done at Deetzes.’  The real trick is finding goods that a ghost would be willing to trade for services; then again, sometimes even the promise of something to do might be enough. Sometimes even they don’t feel like reading twenty-four hours a day every day.