History & local legend
The Carnegie Free Library in Connellsville was built on land once used as the Connell Grave Yard. Historian Bernadette Lear discovered that description in a transcription of the property deed while researching the library in October 2013.
Library director Casey Sirochman confirmed the former cemetery and told Lear about an unsettling moment during a book-clearing project. While she and volunteers were discarding old volumes, Sirochman joked that the library’s ghosts would dislike their work. At that moment, an object flew from a shelf.
Staff had also heard footsteps and other unexplained sounds around the building. Lear recorded the director’s account alongside her own discovery in the deed, bringing the library’s archival history and its workplace stories together.
