Sonya Knisley, head of children’s services at Clark County (Ohio) Public Library (CCPL), has seen it happen over and over again. Someone walks into her location and applies for a library card—with one obvious aim.
“As soon as they get their card, they immediately place a hold on a ghost-hunting kit,” Knisley says.
Like many libraries, CCPL has begun loaning out collections of specialized electronic items said to help seekers of the supernatural track down spirits. These kits usually consist of a backpack or carrying case filled with items such as a “spirit box,” which scans radio frequencies in hopes of encountering ghostly voices; an electromagnetic field (EMF) meter, on the theory that ghosts can manipulate EMFs; and a recorder for capturing electronic voice phenomena (EVP), aka messages from beyond the veil.
If you’ve got it, haunt it
Public belief in the supernatural has surged over the last two decades. In 1990, a Gallup poll found that 25% of respondents believed in ghosts; in 2019, a poll by global market research company Ipsos found that number had risen to 46%. Meanwhile, dozens of television and YouTube shows like Ghost Hunters, Ghost Files, and Living for the Dead have made ghost hunting a popular pastime among the public.
Knisley was inspired to start offering ghost-hunting kits at CCPL after seeing one on display at the Ohio Library Council Convention and Expo in 2022. As it happened, she was already familiar with the kits’ technology, thanks to her 23-year-old daughter, who had introduced her to Ghost Files and similar shows.
“I got very excited, so excited that I emailed my boss immediately and said, ‘Hey, what do you think?’” Knisley recalls. “Turns out he has a daughter around the same age, so he was familiar with them as well. He’s like, ‘I’m all for it. Get me a quote.’”
CCPL debuted three of the kits in January 2023 and was promptly spooked by their popularity. In a year and a half, the kits have circulated more than 90 times. “We’ve never not had holds on them,” Knisley says. She soon added two more kits to meet demand.
To make them available to as many patrons as possible, the kits are available for one-week, nonrenewable checkouts only. And because each kit costs the library about $250 (not including replacement batteries), they are checked out only to adult patrons, who must sign a waiver and return the kit to the CCPL circulation desk, rather than leaving it in the library’s dropbox.
Two of the kits, however, have recently gone missing. “They didn’t make it back to us once checked out,” Knisley says. “I’m not certain if ghosts took them.”
Ghouls just want to have fun
In September 2023, Wilsonville (Ore.) Public Library (WPL) added a ghost-hunting kit to its Library of Things and watched as it joined the list of most popular items for checkout. “It’s almost never on the shelf,” says Angelika Heidelberger, WPL support services coordinator for technical services.
Like WPL’s other high-demand items, such as a pressure washer and a metal detector, the ghost-hunting kit represents “specialized equipment that’s not always affordable for someone who wants to try it,” Heidelberger says. “That’s the purpose of our Library of Things.”
The EMF meter was going off a lot in our videogame section, so we did find it’s possible that that section is haunted. —Lauren Walker, director of Coventry (R.I.) Public Library
That said, she worried at first about potential pushback to the kit’s availability—either from patrons with religious concerns, or from those who might object to a public library offering equipment for a pseudoscientific activity.
“We put a disclaimer on all our items anyway, that the library has no liability in the consequences of using them,” Heidelberger says. Regarding the ghost-hunting kit in particular, “this is recreational. The burden of deciding what proper use is lies with the person who checks it out.”
A year later, however, WPL hasn’t received any complaints regarding the kit. Neither has Coventry (R.I.) Public Library (CPL), which introduced its version in 2018. “For the most part, people just think it’s a fun thing to do,” says CPL Director Lauren Walker.
In addition to an EMF meter and EVP recorder, CPL’s kit includes an infrared motion sensor, a thermometer (for shifts in ambient temperature), and a geophone, a device that measures vibrations and seismic activity, “but in the context of ghost hunting can be used to listen for footsteps and moving objects,” Walker explains.
Unlike CCPL and WPL, CPL didn’t see its ghost-hunting kit achieve instant patron popularity. “I don’t think it circulated much when I started in 2019. I don’t think a lot of people knew that we had it,” Walker says. So in 2022, just for fun, she—along with CPL Teen Librarian Kylie Woodmansee and CPL Head of Adult Services Kiki Butler—made a short video promoting the kit in the style of a ghost-hunting TV show. (Butler plays the ghost.)
Since then, the kit “gets checked out all the time, not just around Halloween,” Walker says. In addition, CPL has used the kit to conduct a teen program in which participants undertook a ghost hunt in the library itself.
“The EMF meter was going off a lot in our videogame section,” Walker recalls, “so we did find it’s possible that that section is haunted. The teens named the ghost Barry, I believe. That’s our joke now sometimes when we can’t find something—maybe Barry took it.”
