The Haunted Carnegie Library of Homestead | Ep. 88
Welcome to another episode of Believing the Bizarre! It’s Listener Submission time again and we are heading to the Carnegie Library of Homestead!
However, this very old library is much more than a place to check out books. It also has a pool, basketball court, music hall, and batting cages. Oh, and apparently it is haunted.
Tales of books flying around, shadow figures, and disembodied voices surround this iconic library. But, are they true?
Listen now to find out.
The Hauntings of Carnegie LIbrary
What would you do if you went to work every day knowing you might witness something paranormal? What if you had to convince someone that something paranormal just happened?
What’s up Bizarros? This week we let one of you take over with a listener submission! This week Beck takes us on a dive into the Haunted Carnegie Library of Homestead.
The Haunted History of the Carnegie Library
What is the Carnegie Library of Homestead? The library near Pittsburgh was founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1898.
Andrew Carnegie was one of the biggest catalysts to the expansion of the steel industry in America, which Pittsburgh being known as Steel City, shouldn’t come as a surprise.
The Carnegie Library of Homestead is one of 2500 Carnegie libraries worldwide, but, it is the third oldest Carnegie Library still in operation.
It also offers much more than books, as it has a music hall and an athletic club with a heated pool, batting cage, weight rooms, and a full-sized basketball court.
The library is called Homestead because it was originally located in Homestead but now it is called Munhall, Pennsylvania, about 15 minutes East of Pittsburgh.
According to Beck, the Carnegie Library of Homestead is easily one of the most notorious places in Pittsburgh to ghost hunt.
Let’s take a look at some of Beck’s stories about the hauntings of Carnegie at Homestead.
The Hauntings of Carnegie at Homestead
As a local to the Pittsburgh area, Beck knew a lot about the Carnegie Library and heard many of the myths and ghost stories people would claim.
“People would claim to see shadowy figures throughout the library, hear strange noises, and items would move on their own,” Beck tells us.
Many people in the area tend to believe that are multiple ghosts and/or energies that dwell in the library.
It’s rationalized that the spirits are that of mill workers since it is so rich in the area, while others believe that Andrew Carnegie himself haunts the library.
“I used to work at the Carnegie Library of Homestead,” Beck says.
“I have first-hand, experiences, as well as the ghostly encounters other employees had at the library.”
Beck claims that many of the workers he knew there felt a heavy presence around them randomly throughout their shifts.
“It would come and go as if someone would be just passing by and watching your every move,” he said.
“For minutes at a time, you would feel like someone or something was just completely and intently watching and focusing on you. Then the feeling would dissipate.”
Beck says that this was not location-specific, either. These feelings of being watched occurred all throughout the library.
In the actual, physical library section employees and some patrons would report seeing books flying or falling off shelves, while others claimed to hear disembodied voices.
The music hall we touched on earlier is also a hot spot for paranormal activity. Folks would hear music when none would be playing, hear voices, whispers, and shouts called out, and even catch apparitions throughout the audience.
Beck never witnessed this first-hand in the music hall but felt so uneasy there that he tried to avoid it as best he could.
“It felt dark and heavy there like you were meant to feel sad,” Beck said.
Beck’s Encounters At The Haunted Carnegie Library.
Where exactly did Beck work inside the Carnegie Library of Homestead?
“I was a lifeguard at the basement pool in the Athletic club, which is pretty sweet,” he said.
He initially didn’t buy into the ghost story or urban legend of the haunted library.
“I’m a fairly harsh skeptic when it came to ghosts.”
But that was before he started working at the library, and experienced the legend himself.
“For each lifeguard shift, there was only one guard on duty so I would be alone down there while another employee worked the upstairs desk,” he said.
Beck’s shift was from 6 pm to 9:15 pm, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t eventful.
Where Beck would sit on lifeguard duty, you could see through the glass doors into the pool and one of the doors went into the men’s locker room, and the other went into the women’s locker room.
“Quite often, I would catch a shadowy figure walk into the men’s locker room through the glass doors, but then never come out.”
When he would leave his post to go check, he would discover absolutely no one in the locker room.
Every now and then he would also see an odd shape at the deep end of the pool that gave off the appearance that someone was lifelessly floating, but he remained confident that there wasn’t anyone in the pool.
Talking to friends and the employees about what he was witnessing, he found out that many years before he started working there that someone did actually drown around that spot.
“In 1899, Robert Peebles was found dead under “mysterious circumstances” in the swimming pool. Was he murdered? Did he drown? Some have said that they’ve heard splashing and sounds of people crying for help from the swimming area. I really hope they checked it out instead of assuming it was a ghost.” – biblioccult – a WordPress blog
So, these were the common occurrences. These were the “normal shifts,” so to speak.
However, there are 3 specific events that he experienced that he wanted to tell us in more detail.
The Spirit in the Shower
So, Beck’s first unusual memorable encounter was based on one of the typical occurrences he had, seeing a shadow figure walking into the men’s locker room.
It kind of went according to plan – figure walks in, but it doesn’t walk out – but this time, it appeared like and felt like this was more realistic.
“It was truly like a person. But, it was the first and only swimmer that had come by so far that night, so I wasn’t really paying him any attention.”
According to the athletic club’s rules, swimmers were required to rinse off in the showers before entering the pool. And being a super old building, the pipes often banged loudly when someone turned on the men’s showers.
“You’d be able to hear the pipes ring out throughout the entire duration of any swimmer’s shower,” he said.
So, per usual, after about 5 minutes or so after that figure he witnessed walking in the locker room area, he heard the banging of the pipes.
“Then, seemingly out of nowhere, it felt like a wall of men’s cologne hit me,” he recounted.
“Like an intense, walking through the cologne and perfume section of a department store sensation.
The smell was overpowering. The only thing I’d ever really smelled was the pool and the chlorine at work, so this was incredibly strange to me.”
He stood up and almost immediately the fragrance went away. But then, his mind went back to the shower.
He realized it’s been a while, never saw the shadow leave, and the pipes were still rattling so someone was still in there. He went to go investigate this mystery.
“Everything okay?”, he yelled, but there was no answer.
He knocked on the door of the shower and yelled again, “are you okay in there?”
They get a lot of elderly folks to swim, so every now and then you’d have one slip and fall in the shower.
Making sure this person was okay and not in harm, Beck opened the door.
There was no one there. The shower faucet was running but it was completely empty.
“I turned the water off and walked back into the locker room. I started inspecting the area. There was no water on the ground or wet feet marks.”, he recounted.
Essentially, there was no evidence that anyone had entered or ever stepped foot in the shower.
Confused and creeped out, Beck went back to the pool deck and sat down. Almost immediately he started smelling the intense cologne again.
“Then, I saw the same dark figure from earlier leave the locker room,” he said.
At a later point, similar to the pool drowning, he learned of a middle-aged mill worker that had died in those showers of a heart attack.
When The Lights Go Out In The Locker Room
Beck’s second ghostly encounter is similar, in that it involves the showers, but this time he was not alone in this experience.
“It was near the end of my shift at the pool and I was locking up. But, before I could completely shut down the pool area, I had to wait for an elderly lady to leave the women’s locker room,” he said.
She was a regular at the athletic club and she and Beck were familiar with each other and had a friendly rapport.
While he was waiting outside the locker room doors, he heard a terrified and shrill scream coming from inside.
It was the old woman.
Not that he wanted to potentially run in and witness a naked 84-year-old woman, but similar to checking in the shower previously, he felt she was in danger and wanted to help.
“I entered and was shocked the locker room was completely dark. Pitch black.”
“I fumbled for the switch and quickly turned the light back on. She was just standing there, in the middle of the locker room,” he tells us.
Once her eyes adjusted to the light, she looked at Beck and started screaming, “Beck, why would you turn the lights off!? You knew I was in here! I could have gotten hurt!”
He replied, “I was outside waiting at the table for you. I knew you were in here. You’re my last swimmer. I didn’t turn the lights off.”
She continued insisting that he did turn the lights off. They argued for a few more minutes before finally, he said, “Look, you’ve known me for 3 years. I make sure nobody is in there before I walk in and turn off the lights.”
But this wasn’t good enough for her. She knew he was fibbing because she saw him. The old woman said she saw him walk by barefoot, turn the lights off, and then leave the locker room.
But it wasn’t him. And there was no way it could have been anyone else.
He never saw anyone besides the old woman enter, and even if they had, they would have had to walk past Beck as they left after turning the lights off.
Unfortunately, this led the old woman to never truly like Beck anymore.
Things That Go Bump In The Night
“The last thing that happened wasn’t crazy scary, just impossible,” Beck says.
“I was closing down the pool and locker rooms and was finishing leaning up.”
In the corner of the basement, they had one of those carts on wheels that was in the shape of a tower that held all of the pool noodles and floating devices.
“It was made of PVC pipe but was very sturdy and surprisingly heavy for how it looked,” he said.
In his 3 years at Carnegie Library, he had seen kids climb on this thing, tons of roughhousing, and it never budged an inch.
As Beck continued cleaning, he walked past it to put the ropes in the pool and he heard a squeaking noise.
He ignored it because with it being such an old building it made a ton of creaking noises.
But, then he heard the squeaking noise again a little louder followed by a deafening CRASH.
He looked over and the entire cart had tipped over and the pool noodles spilled out.
Freaking out, he walked over and picked it up, inspecting it along the way.
“Nothing was broken. The wheels were fine. And again – this thing was heavy, real heavy. There was seemingly no reason or cause for this cart to tip over,” he recalls.
Beck radioed to his boss, told him what happened, and basically said he wasn’t going to be able to lock up and ran out of there.
In Beck’s words –
“I’m not sure what goes on there activity-wise anymore, but that was enough for me. I stopped working there shortly after just because of a change in jobs, but I will definitely tell you that place is haunted and just odd overall.”
More Personal Encounters at the Haunted Library
Ghost Hunters did a whole episode on the library several years back and it was a pretty big deal locally.
A local paranormal team called the Oakmont Paranormal Society did an investigation in 2019. I don’t know the full extent of what they discovered, but one of the tour members caught a picture of a shadow figure in the music hall.
Another famous investigation was done by the library’s event coordinator Lynne Cochran and the lead investigator of the Western Pennsylvania Paranormal Hunters, T.J. Porfeli.
It was turned into a Biography documentary on A&E called, “My Ghost Story” in 2012.
I didn’t catch the actual video, but I found articles that discussed their findings. Apparently, they caught a book moving on a shelf in the fiction section.
They also captured auditory paranormal evidence on a digital voice recorder, such as a woman screaming in the music hall and a voice in the actual library that said, “don’t put the book back.”
Visually, they captured a “black mass” that was seen by an investigator creeping around the front row of the music hall’s balcony.
Cochran, who like Beck did not initially believe in ghosts, was quoted as saying, “I guess I get a feeling of what you would call ‘mischievousness’ coming from someone or somewhere. It is subtle. It is selective. But it is something that cannot be explained.”
Is the Carnegie Library at Homestead Haunted?
What do you think Bizarros? Is Carnegie Library haunted, or is the staff seeing and hearing things?
Would you explore the building at night looking for cold spots, shadowy figures, or books moving off shelves?
Let us know what you think.