Halloween in the Old Library

Every town has a ghost story. But what if the ghost was never a ghost at all?

Twelve-year-old Gabrielle Boudreaux has known the legend of the Lady in the Stacks for as long as she can remember.

They say a mysterious woman once wandered the back of the Mousse Grise library, moving books from shelf to shelf and speaking in a language no one understood. Then one day, she disappeared.

Now the old library is closing.

With one final Halloween storytelling contest approaching, Gabrielle thinks she has found the perfect story to tell. This year, she won't simply repeat the legend.

She's going to discover who the Lady in the Stacks really was.

But Gabrielle's investigation leads her somewhere she never expected.

Behind a door painted shut for decades lies a forgotten room with its own entrance, its own shelves, and a history the town stopped talking about. Gabrielle discovers that during segregation, Black children entered the library through a separate door and were allowed to use a small reading room only a few hours each week.

Her own grandmother learned to read there. Halloween in the Old Library FI...

And the mysterious woman everyone turned into a ghost?

She had a name.

As Gabrielle searches old records, family memories, library cards, and parish documents, the frightening legend begins to change into the story of a remarkable woman whose work shaped generations of children.

Now Gabrielle faces a harder question.

Is this her story to use to win a Halloween contest, or is it a story she has been trusted to tell correctly?

Halloween in the Old Library is a moving LightKeeper Series chapter book about Louisiana Creole heritage, forgotten history, segregation, libraries, Kouri-Vini, family memory, and one girl's determination to return a woman's name to the community that forgot it.

Because sometimes the scariest thing about history isn't a ghost.

It's how easily a real person can disappear from the story.