Strange things began to occur after the bookstore opened. People reported hearing the sounds of footsteps overhead when the upstairs rooms were presumably empty. And one piece of furniture back in a dark corner of the store is consistently found out of place when Todd opens the building in the morning.

"It must be a Kentucky ghost because it always seems to be back in the Kentucky section," Todd laughs.

Since the light switch for the second floor is in that corner, Todd says she makes a point of always putting the chair aside when she closes the store at night - a precaution to insure she has a clear path to the switch. One morning, however, she tripped over the chair, which during the night appeared to have been pulled into the middle of the floor, as if someone moved it to sit down for a good read.
"I knew I moved that chair the night before because I always walk out that way," Todd says.
Does a ghost with a taste for literature haunt Twice Sold Tales? If so, it appears to take up residence only in the fall months, as Todd reports the store is fairly quiet during the summer.
"Maybe it's too hot up there in the summer to read books," jokes Todd.

It turns out the literary ghost of Chestnut Street may have a couple of kindred spirits just a few blocks up the road at Berea College.

One of them is known as the Lady of Phelps-Stokes Chapel, a lovely young actress who, according to legend, perished in a towering blaze that consumed the building on a frigid day in 1902.
Legend has it the lady can be heard in the dead of night as she drifts about the building, crying out for her beau who reportedly escaped, leaving the young beauty behind in the burning structure. Since then, it's said that strange sounds have been heard in the building - creaks, groans and footsteps, while mysterious shadows have been sighted in the windows of the building's top floor.

While the story may be the stuff of a good legend, it isn't quite consistent with the facts. Engineers say peculiar sounds are common in an old building where aged timbers are settling, and Berea College archives reveal that no one perished in the fire that burned Phelps-Stokes a century ago… at least as far as anyone knows, anyway.

Yet another Berea College ghost story was described by the late Warren Lambert, a professor and historian who recalled a bizarre incident on campus in the mid 60s.

In a 1997 interview, Lambert recalled that the Berea Fire Department was once staffed by college students, some of whom were called to fight a gas fire in McKee one spring day in 1965.
When the fire truck rolled out of the station, student Morris Gay, a handsome redhead with a promising future, was along for the ride.

"He was a brilliant student," Lambert said. "A natural born politician."

Gay never lived to see a career in politics, however, as he was killed when the fire truck crashed and overturned on the way to the blaze.

Not long after Gay's death, a Berea College custodian was working late in Fairchild Hall, long after the building was locked up for the night. According to Lambert, the custodian noticed a young man with bright red hair who was standing alone on one of the lower floors. He told the young man the building was closed and that it was time to leave.

The custodian left the room for just a moment, but when he returned, the young man had disappeared, despite the fact that all of the doors of the building were securely closed and locked from the inside.

Lambert noted there was quite a stir on campus about the incident after it occurred, as many believed the custodian had seen the spirit of Morris Gay, a young student who came back to pay one final visit to his alma mater.

Whether the legends surrounding Berea's ghosts are fact or fiction, perhaps no one can say for sure, but as far as merchants like Karen Todd are concerned, the arrangement hasn't been too unpleasant so far.

"We've never felt threatened or anything like that," says Todd. "We've enjoyed his presence."