Some archives claim to be haunted. Some archives probably are haunted. The Indiana State Archives is fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your view of things) not haunted.

Despite the lack of hauntings, we still encounter scary things on a regular basis. We gathered a list of the top 5 scariest things our archivists have come across.

No empty carts

Picture this: You have to transport some boxes. Maybe they’re going to a patron waiting in the reading room or maybe you just finished a big project and want to shelve the records. Either way, you desperately need to transport boxes and there’s not an empty cart in sight.

What do you do? Shift items off a full cart? But then you have to put those items back on the cart...

Do you risk using one of the perpetually empty small rickety wooden carts that seem to have existed before the dawn of time?

Hopefully you never have to make that decision.

Records in the wrong location

You talked to the patron, you understand what they’re looking for, and you’ve identified the necessary records in the database. Now all you need to do is pull the records and let the patron get on with the fun part (searching through the records).

Arriving at its location you discover its not where it’s supposed to be. You double-check the shelf. You triple-check the location. Check the shelf again.

Your heartrate is slowly creeping up. Your eyes dart over the surrounding shelves. It must be around here somewhere.

Shelving that won’t move

Our stacks consist of electric high-density compact mobile shelving. If a sensor senses an obstruction, the shelf won’t move, which keeps our staff and interns safe from accidental crushing. Sometimes an aisle won’t move because it detects something invisible in the way.

Could it be a ghost? A lingering spirit who wants to cause chaos and mayhem? Maybe.

Could it be that a combination of an aging mechanical system and dust and red rot from records can interfere with the sensor’s ability to detect an obstacle in the way? Likely.

Record Damage

As a processing archivist you just found your new perfect project. You’re refreshed, you have all your supplies ready, and you’re excited about this project. You’re set to begin processing and you open the box - oh no. What’s that?

Maybe its water damage. Maybe its bug damage.

You rush the records into the conservation lab, feeling like an ER doctor. This is an emergency after all.

The conservator peeks into the box and exclaims ‘what happened to this?!’

The records will spend a month in the conservation lab. They will get cleaned up, the damage repaired, and the records stabilized. In the meantime, you’re prowling the stacks again, on the hunt for a new perfect processing project.

Ominous Notes

If you thought interns are safe from hair-raising supernatural entities, rest assured that they are fair game. (The intern supervisor may have struck a deal...)

Intern Piper has been working on a seemingly never-ending collection of Governor McNutt correspondence. Interns before her have stood in front of this monster of a project and failed to subdue it.

And like an obscure tomb curse, tucked away from sight of the unsuspecting adventurer, our dutiful intern found the note.

It was a sneaky trick to tuck the warning into box 292 and not box 1. By then it was too late to heed its warnings. Piper had processed the collection differently than the note’s author had demanded.

Reading the note aloud awakened Governor McNutt’s ghost. He crawled out of the box and placed a curse on Piper!

And then she turned into a frog.

Post by Meaghan Jarnecke, Archivist