Ghostbusters (1984)
In 1984 the ghost disturbed the stacks of the New York City Public Library. As a librarian named Alice passed a card catalog, the ghost made the drawers open on their own and sent cards flying. Alice fled through the stacks and came face to face with the ghost just as it transmogrified, blowing her hair back. Roger Delacorte, the head librarian, contacted Columbia University for help, and Ray Stantz and Egon Spengler investigated later that day.
Egon confirmed the ghost's presence with the P.K.E. Meter; the valences buried the needle. Down in the stacks the team found symmetrical stacking and ectoplasm left behind, which Peter Venkman collected for analysis. They tracked the ghost with the meter and found her reading a book. Ray and Egon voted to make contact. Peter greeted her, introduced himself, and asked where she was from, "originally," but she only shushed him. Ray then told the others to stay close and follow his lead, crept forward, and suddenly shouted, "Get her!" The ghost transmogrified into a monstrous form and roared at them, and all three bolted from the library.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
The Library Ghost returns in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024). In the summer of that year, a possessed trash bag fled through the library carrying a wax cylinder recording of a chant that could free Garraka. Phoebe Spengler, Podcast, Dr. Hubert Wartzki, and Ray chased it through the stacks. The Library Ghost appeared in one of the rows, shushed them, then shifted into her second form and charged Ray, who screamed and kept running.
The new performance was assembled from original 1984 material rather than a fresh shoot. While preparing the film, visual effects producer Nicole Rowley went through the entire log of the 1984 film's post-production office, where assistant editors had recorded every scrap of archived footage. She found a single log entry marked "70mm librarian" and had the reel pulled from storage. The pristine 70mm film, which had not been unspooled since 1984, held raw, unused takes of Ruth Oliver performing the shushing scene, and those takes were used to build the Frozen Empire appearance.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game
In the realistic versions of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, the ghost is named Dr. Eleanor Twitty, head librarian of the New York City Public Library and overseer of its Special Collections of ancient artifacts, stone tablets, and forgotten parchments. She was seduced by a rare-book collector named Edmund Hoover, known as the Collector, who was using her to reach the rare books in her care, including the Gozerian Codex. When she discovered his motives and broke off their engagement, he murdered her in March 1924 in a secret section of the library built by Gozer's architect and worshiper, Ivo Shandor. Twitty was reported missing, and despite repeated police searches of the underground stacks her body was never found. She was the fifth woman to vanish under mysterious circumstances that year. At least twelve bodies of women were later discovered beneath the library in a search led by Detective Sergeant Ambrose Hannigan, and Hoover was convicted and sentenced to hang.
In 1991, the Ghostbusters heard of a ghost outbreak at the library while en route to the Natural History Museum and stopped to settle an old score, Ray in particular still bitter about their first encounter. While Ray scouted the archives, Winston Zeddemore found old newspaper clippings that revealed Twitty's history and tied her to the Cult of Gozer, relaying the information over the radio while Ray, Egon, and the Rookie chased her. They found her quietly reading the Gozerian Codex in an underground room, and she allowed the Rookie to take it before vanishing, leading Ray to think they had helped her pass on. She instead reappeared in her transmogrified form and used the scattered Gozerian books to generate an energy shield.
After the team broke her shield and trapped her, Ray realized the capture had been too easy, as though she had wanted them to take the codex. Egon explained that the energy from the fight had opened a portal to an alternate dimension, and they concluded she had led them toward her own murderer, now a powerful ghost called Azetlor the Destroyer. The Collector himself appears as the boss The Collector later in the game.
A cut scene from an October 8, 2007 draft of the game's script would have had the Gray Lady sacrifice herself, hurling herself at the Collector so the two exploded into a ball of energy and opened the portal to the Ghostworld.1
Player strategy
In the realistic version, once the Librarian returns and transforms in the room where the Collector killed her, throw out a Trap, use the Shock Blast to destroy the book stands generating her shield, switch to the Stasis Stream to freeze her, and capture her with the Proton Pack stream when her P.K.E. is low. The stylized version plays similarly: drop a Trap, use the Shock Blast to destroy the book stands and her summoned Book Bats, then wear her down with the proton stream and slam her into the Trap.
In Egon's notes for the stylized game, he reflects that the Library Ghost was one of the first manifestations the team scanned at close range, and that her intensity let him structure their first containment system, crediting much of their early progress to her.
Insight Editions and IDW Comics
The account of Eleanor Twitty in this section is drawn from the Insight Editions Tobin's Spirit Guide.2
The Insight Editions Tobin's Spirit Guide and the IDW comics share a continuity in which Eleanor Twitty, head librarian of the New York Public Library, went missing inside the library in 1924, with police unable to find her in the building or her apartment. Her body lay undiscovered in secret catacombs beneath the library. In 1925 staff and patrons began noticing her presence: her favorite books appeared on the front desk each morning, anyone who spoke above a whisper was shushed from the shadows, and reference-section users felt watched. This continued until 1929, when she went dormant.
Years later she began manifesting in the lower levels, harassing staff and patrons and leaving ectoplasm in her wake. Peter, Ray, and Egon had their first paranormal encounter here and tried to rush her, hoping to force her to disperse, but she shifted into an aggressive bestial form and screamed, and they retreated. The data they collected helped them design and calibrate their equipment. Egon and Ray later did cursory research and identified her as the former librarian Eleanor Twitty. They returned to the library more than once afterward but failed to trap her.
After Winston was hired, the situation worsened and the ghost actively harassed patrons. Roger called repeatedly, and when the Ghostbusters finally came after hours, books levitated and attacked them. Ray grabbed one of the flying books, addressed the ghost by name as Eleanor Twitty, and threatened to destroy Ptolemy's Cosmographia unless she materialized. She appeared in her transmogrified form, Peter wrangled her, and Winston trapped her. During the later Shandor incident, the team was led to the secret catacombs, found Twitty's corpse, and captured her when she attacked again in her bestial form.
This sequence is covered in full on the Ghostbusters Year One #2 story, which restages the 1984 library investigation panel by panel, including Peter's attempt to communicate, the "Get her!" moment, and Ray calling the ghost by name.
Other appearances
In the Ghostbusters Beeline mobile game, the Tobin's Spirit Guide entry warns that despite her meek demeanor the Grey Lady has a deadly throw. In Ghostbusters: The Board Game by Cryptozoic Entertainment, she appears as a two-sided ghost card, the Librarian and the Grey Lady, neither of which can be trapped; her line of sight reduces nearby Ghostbusters' move actions or proton rolls, and being hit moves her toward the nearest Gate.
Development
Development details in this section are drawn from Don Shay's Making Ghostbusters.3
Ruth Oliver played the library ghost's quasi-human form. Because only a semi-transparent torso was needed, her scenes were shot on a stage at Richard Edlund's Entertainment Effects Group facility and then optically treated and composited into the live-action library footage. Ivan Reitman and the effects team wanted an "in-and-out transparency," so rather than using a blue screen they filmed Oliver against black, letting the shadows in her costume go black so that areas of her would read as nonexistent when the matte was pulled. This also made her lower half appear to dissolve away, and the team nuanced her density shot by shot. For an added effect, John Bruno had Oliver act the scene out in reverse and added the "Shh" gesture, since it was a library.
The demonic form she transforms into was a mechanical puppet that replaced the live performer at the key moment. Mark Bryan Wilson built the mock-up from PVC pipe, wooden sticks, glue, and screws fitted with the first rough foam-latex skins cast from a mold of Ruth Oliver. Steve Johnson wanted the head to lower and flatten, the shoulders to raise, the arm and wrist to elongate, the fingers to grow, and the mouth to widen, all within a 36-frame shot. Realizing the transformation would otherwise need dozens of puppeteers working in concert, Johnson brought in John Alberti to mechanize the puppet; Alberti took measurements and built a mechanical understructure so that, in the end, a single puppeteer could pull a lever to drive the change. The puppet was also shot against black and composited into the scene.
The ghost was meant to deliver a librarian's "Quiet!" The idea came from artist Berni Wrightson, one of several comic-oriented artists hired to draw transformation concepts, who annotated a vivid rendering with a cartoon balloon reading "Quiet!" The gag stuck and was written into the script, though the final cut replaced the line with a simple roar. A planned second, even more demonic stage of the transformation, with pushed-out muscle and sharp teeth, was sculpted and nearly finished before Richard Edlund cut it for budget reasons. The discarded design was later reused for the 1985 Columbia Pictures film Fright Night, whose effects Edlund's team handled back to back with Ghostbusters.
Trivia
In the August 5, 1983 first draft of Ghostbusters, the library ghost was the 73rd apparition the team investigated while still at the university.4 Alice Drummond, who played the librarian scared in the stacks, recalled that the brief scene took four days to film, with Ivan Reitman standing in for the ghost and waving his arms to try to scare her.5 During earlier tests at Boss Films, one of the cameramen, a man "you would never expect to see in a dress," stood in for the library ghost.5 To keep her book from looking ghostly, Richard Edlund's team had the technical animation crew rotoscope it so it read as a real, solid object against her diffused form. The library ghost costume ended up with the wife of model shop supervisor Mark Stetson.5
The 1984 encounter is referenced in The Real Ghostbusters. A scripted exchange for "The Collect Call of Cathulhu" had Peter joke about finding another phantom librarian as Ecto-1 left for the library, but it was cut from the finished episode.6 A short exchange between Peter and Egon about the library incident appears in "The Haunting of Heck House."
