The Book House: Say Hello to Valerie
I’ve mentioned it before here several times. It’s my favorite bookstore here in St. Louis. The Book House.. I can’t visit without leaving with a book.
No, I didn’t go there this past weekend. However, this month’s Stlbloggers Blog Carnival asks for local paranormal events. And The Book House is haunted by at least one ghost.
We are located in a charming Historic Victorian House, built in 1865, about 15 minutes from downtown St. Louis where an eclectic mix of quality rare, out-of-print, new, and used books are tucked into nine rooms on three floors of winding staircases, filled with nooks and crannies and a dungeon we call the “Bargain Basement”. Our house is patrolled by two store cats Chaucer and Blake as well as at least one documented ghost.
That comes from the store website.
As legend has it, there is a small chamber on the second floor of the Book House in Rock Hill that was the favorite playroom of a little redheaded girl. It’s said she was the daughter of a nineteenth-century prostitute and may have drowned in a creek that once ran alongside the drafty farmhouse. Her restless spirit lives on, or so the story goes.
That’s from a June 2006 Riverfront Times article. That article’s main focus was the store’s pending closure. As I posted in October of 2006, the closure had been delayed “about a year or so.” We’re up to the “year or so” mark, and there are no hints on the website at least that it is pending.
I think perhaps the Ghost (whose name is apparently Valerie) not only helps patrons find books, but is helping the store stay alive.
Last 5 posts in Books
- Stupid Authors - January 7th, 2009
- Sharp Teeth - June 29th, 2008
- Putting a Critic in His Place - April 20th, 2008
- Meme: What Book Am I? - April 7th, 2008
- Literary Meme - March 29th, 2008
Last 5 posts in Local
- Fifteen Years Ago... - March 17th, 2009
- Easy Street - July 15th, 2008
- My bed shook this morning - April 18th, 2008
- Old Photos - March 5th, 2008
- 26 Years Ago - January 31st, 2008
WordCount: 275
Gunning-Fog: 8.729004329
Flesch-Kincaid: 5.8225974026
Flesch: 76.6415151515
2/26/2008 - 20 Adar I, 5768 at 2:58 am
Unlike my mother and my daughter (not to mention other family members), none of whom I would judge to be misrepresenting, intentionally, some peculiar experience, I have never seen a ghost.
Nor am I sure whether I hope to never be one….
But, if I could be one, I’d want to haunt a (big) library, not a (small) bookstore –
– or even “haunt” a world-wide-web,
if I may modernize the locus of ghosts in the machine.
Time-phased displacements of holographic-like images would fit ghosts, for a description.
Manifestations seem exceptionally weak, less than the weak force of physics — now preferably called “fundamental interactions” than “force”. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction.
I personally believe that we are a long way from being able to account for the spirit of any living being, especially of any human, by some tales of interactions. Fictions recount ghosts, at least as far back as Samuel’s ghost being called up by the witch of Endor — or the stunning legends of trips to the land of the dead, wherein some hero (perhaps) meets the ghosts (the shades) of those who were once living (eg, Ulysses). Strange it is that ghosts are said to have some knowledge of what will be, especially when we the living are generally so clueless.