rustling clothing, and windows opening and slamming shut.
    On a cold January night in 1877, the lady of the house was home alone with her infant child.  While sewing she was startled by the sounds of slow, heavy footsteps on the kitchen porch and what sounded like several men carrying a heavy object.  Frightened, the woman listened to the sound of the kitchen door opening, footsteps crossing the wooden floor, and a heavy crate or box hitting the floor.  The footsteps then traveled out the back door.  Silence followed and the woman sat in her room, afraid to look in the kitchen.
    Soon the noises started again with the sounds of wooden panels being ripped, pounded and torn apart.  The baby, in an upstairs bedroom, screamed in fright.  The mother bolted from the sewing room and ran upstairs.  She grabbed her child and latched the bedroom door as the terrible cry of a woman's incomprehensible grief erupted from the kitchen, echoing into the night.  The scream gave way to a series of mournful sobs that slowly faded away into silence.  A later search revealed that the house was locked, empty and undisturbed.
    The kitchen referred to in the account was formerly the dining room where Byram's casket was set in front of the fireplace.  At the time of this incident the story of Dr. Byram and Phyllis Parker was not publicly known, only later uncovered by local historians.
      Various stories circulated about the house over the next several decades, but the next fully documented cases was nearly a century later, on a January evening in 1974.  By this time the public library was in operation at the site.  A staff volunteer walking from her car to the library entrance saw, through the front window, an apparition of a man dressed in eighteenth-century clothing.  A search revealed that the building was

empty.  Haunting phenomena has continued sporadically since then.
    Former library employees Martha Hamill and Maria Mandala individually reported unnerving encounters in the early 1980s.  One winter evening, Hamill was working alone after hours preparing an annual report when she heard murmuring voices coming from somewhere in the building.  Thinking someone may have entered the library, she searched the building but found it empty, with all the doors and windows secured.  Returning to her report, she heard the mumbling voices again, which she compared to "children talking, sharing secrets."  The only place she had not checked was the basement, which she remembers as being too frightening to enter.  Feeling very apprehensive, Hamill put her work away and left the building.
    Staffer Maria Mandala also regularly worked alone after the library had closed.  On several occasions she reported hearing what sounded like a woman softly humming or singing, but when she searched in and around the building there was never anyone there.  Mandala claimed she was not upset by the ethereal music, but one incident did frighten her.  She was alone in the building one night having coffee when she noticed all the extension indicator lights on the library's several telephones were lit, implying the lines were in use.  Mandala picked up one of the phones to listen, but no one was on the line.
    Former library director Geraldine Burden told FATE that while strange sounds and events continue to this day, the last report of an apparition was in late November 1989.  A three-year-old boy was attending the library's story hour with his mother and older brother.  While his mother was checking books out at the circulation desk the child wandered to the doorway of the reading