Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainHead librarian Ida Day Holzapfel served two terms here, 1916-1925 and 1946-1954, before dying in a car accident the year she left for California — workers have reported her apparition in the basement ever since
901 N Main St, Hutchinson, KS 67501
Research updated June 2026
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Ida Day Holzapfel Career · Hutchinson Cultural History · Public Library History
Ida Day Holzapfel was born in Colony, Kansas in 1888 and had already taught school in Colony and Iola by the time Hutchinson Public Library hired her in 1916, at age 28, for $75 a month and two weeks of paid vacation. The library then stood at 5th and Main, in the building now known as the Union Labor Temple. During a 1917 remodel Holzapfel and her assistants catalogued and classified the entire collection, work a library history later credited as the first time it had been done. She also mounted and classified 3,000 pictures and, in 1918, organized book shipments to soldiers overseas.
Holzapfel served as library director from 1916 to 1925, then took a year's leave to study at the University of Kansas and resigned in 1926. The break lasted two decades. She married John Holzapfel in 1940 at age 52, and in 1946 returned to the Hutchinson library as director a second time, overseeing the planning for a new building as the city's population doubled. She wrote about the project for Library Journal in 1949. Her husband died in 1948, the same year as her sister, Sarah Elizabeth Mather.
Holzapfel resigned from the Hutchinson library on February 1, 1954, to become head of the catalog department at the Tulare County library system in Visalia, California, a post she was to start March 1. She kept her Hutchinson home at 430 East 12th, now a Hutchinson Community College parking lot. She died in a car accident in California at age 65, the same year she left. The Hutchinson Collegian, reporting on the library's ghost lore in 2018, referenced a 1975 Hutchinson News article that documented worker accounts of an apparition and footsteps in the basement.
The library building at 901 N Main St, built during Holzapfel's second term, has served Hutchinson continuously since. The basement, identified in staff accounts as the primary location of the phenomena, dates to that same building campaign.
Sources
The haunting of Hutchinson Public Library centers on the basement, where staff members have reported two primary phenomena: the apparition of a woman consistent in description with Ida Day Holzapfel, and the sound of footsteps with no physical source. The earliest documented press account of these reports appeared in the Hutchinson News in 1975, more than two decades after Holzapfel's death, describing worker accounts of her presence.
The Hutchinson Collegian revisited the legend in 2018, drawing on the 1975 article and additional staff accounts. Inside Edition subsequently included the library in a national roundup of haunted places across the fifty states, giving the Hutchinson location wider exposure.
The framing in staff accounts has been consistent over the decades: Holzapfel's presence in the basement is described as associated with her long identification with the library rather than with anything unresolved or threatening. Workers who have experienced the phenomena tend to characterize her as a familiar presence rather than a frightening one. Her two terms as director, 1916 to 1925 and 1946 to 1954, would have made the building's physical spaces as familiar to her as any place she knew.
Notable Entities
Browse the public library where head librarian Ida Day Holzapfel served two terms, 1916-1925 and 1946-1954, before her death in a 1954 car accident. Library staff accounts of her apparition in the basement were documented in the Hutchinson News as early as 1975 and have continued since.
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