Accidental Blogger

(Ideson Library, Houston)

What good is Halloween without a true blue ghost story?  So here is one from Houston about a long dead man whose music lives on – at least, so claim some Houstonians.

(Check out the photo gallery on the right for more photos of the Ideson Library.)

"On a dripping, windless night, darkness swamped a jewel-box ceiling high above the Ideson Library’s top floor. Forty windows, each with eight panes glowing like opal in moonlight, crowned the walls.

Downstairs, a dead girl gazed morosely from a framed photograph on the wall. In a portrait in the hall, a librarian gone from this life for 60 years sternly surveyed her domain.

In its early years, the Ideson, named in honor of the city’s first librarian, was home to Jacob Frank Cramer, an elderly man of uncertain past who worked as night watchman, gardener and handyman. In his leisure hours, he played the violin.

Cramer and his German shepherd, Petey, resided in a spacious if Spartan basement apartment. In the evenings, the old man, Petey at his heels, would labor up the stairs to the top floor. Then, positioning himself near the balustrade of the library’s inner court, he would serenade the building he loved.

One morning in November 1936, librarians found Cramer, thought to have been 79 years old, dead, the victim of a lung hemorrhage. Days later, he was buried in Hiawatha, Kan.

There are some, though, who swear he never left.

Library patrons claim to have heard the tick-tick-tick of dog nails tapping across the library’s polished tile floors. Others report seeing ghostly orbs or finding sheet music, normally kept in a locked room, scattered in unexpected places.

Most unnerving, visitors and library employees say, Cramer returns to pay his respects and play his tunes, filling the cavernous building once again with the beautiful waltzes of Strauss."