Episode 53 (October 2026) Libraries After Dark

Libraries have always been more than the sum of their shelves. After hours, when the last patron has gone and the lights go down, something else takes over. Maybe it's a lock-in group shrieking through an escape room in the stacks. Maybe it's a paranormal tour winding past the periodicals. Maybe it's a prom, a wedding, a midnight book release with people in costume lined up around the block. Libraries have been hosting the unexpected for as long as they've existed and some of what lives in their collections and histories is stranger than anything you'd find in the fiction section. In this episode, we embrace the season and explore the wonderfully weird, the surprising, and yes, occasionally spooky, side of library life. Because it turns out that the world's greatest keeper of human knowledge has, over several thousand years, accumulated more than its fair share of things that go shhh in the night.