• There was no more sleep for me that night, and I was thankful when daylight came. Another story to print and read in a sunlit place, Edith Wharton’s “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.”
(Previous Halloween installments: Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” and Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat.”)
• This catalog of haunted libraries in the Northeast makes a good companion to the Wharton. The case of the ghost who habituates the U.S. Capital Building Rotunda (former near neighbor to the Library of Congress) is particularly poignant. He’s said to be the ghost of a librarian who is looking for “$6,000 he stashed in the pages of some obscure volumes.” The library of course has long since been moved, the money found and (one assumes) dispersed … and still the poor guy wanders. One wonders, Can no one tell him? Can’t a collection be taken up? And what exactly were the titles of those obscure volumes? I picture the librarian alive and stalking through the stacks all, “Population Fluctuations on the Lapsang Peninsula (1812-1843)? Ain’t no one looking in there.” (Via Maud.)
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
