New Haven Free Public Library (Ives Memorial Library)

According to Ghosts of New Haven and two feature articles in The New Journal at Yale ('Haunted Haven,' 2015; 'Local Haunts,' 2019), a recurring report describes a quiet female apparition with long red hair seen searching the library stacks. In the most-circulated version of the legend — told most fully in 'Haunted Haven' — a Yale student becomes fascinated by the red-haired woman over multiple visits and, on the day he finally resolves to speak to her, follows her into the newspaper-archive room, where she silently shows him an open paper from the 1920s carrying her own photograph above a headline about a murder in the library.

The library is consistently included on New Haven's longest-running ghost walks. However, the underlying premise — a 1920s murder of a young woman inside the library — does not appear to be supported by surviving New Haven newspaper coverage of the period; the New Journal at Yale's 2015 piece presents the story explicitly as folklore. Within HauntBound's editorial framing the apparition story is treated as folklore-grade rather than a documented incident.

Additional minor reports — sourceless whispers in the stacks and footsteps in empty rooms — are attributed to library staff in tour-guide narratives but lack documented incident reports.