If you’ve ever roamed some of UBC’s historic buildings and gotten the strange feeling that the walls might be hiding secrets, you aren’t the only one.
Take the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, which is built around the refurbished core of the 1925 old UBC Main Library. With its stained glass windows, wooden arched ceiling and marble tiled floor, it’s filled with a sense of history—and its walls do hide a fireplace, while old underground service tunnels still run beneath its floors. But speak to long-time staff of the IKBLC and you might start to believe that spirits could lurk here too.
It’s been whispered that librarians here have been spooked by books flying off shelves and, at times, the ghostly apparition of an elderly woman in a white robe. These rumours are unconfirmed—but one person who has experienced something a tad unusual is Julie Mitchell, Assistant Director, Student Engagement, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Julie, who has been at UBC for over a decade, says that in her previous role as managing librarian of the Chapman Learning Commons, she would sometimes wonder if she wasn’t completely alone whenever she worked late in Room 203. As she sat in her cubicle, she would hear an unexplainable typing sound, as though someone was working in the room with her. Curious, and a little spooked, she would peek over her cubicle walls and call out to see who was there—but no answer ever came.
“I can’t count the number of times I would hear this tick-ticking sound,” she shares. “But other than security, I was the only one in the building.”
Her colleagues, too, heard the eerie typing when they worked late, but it was most often Julie who would work there alone in the evening. They often joked together about whether they were being visited by the spirit of a former staff member. Julie says she and her colleagues aren’t convinced the library is haunted—but could the typist have been the same spirit who is said to have haunted University Boulevard for the past forty years?
Vancouverites have long been familiar with the tale of the young woman who appears along University Boulevard, asking for a lift. Her presence goes back to the 1960s, when a couple is said to have gotten into an argument while driving to the UBC library on a wet Vancouver evening. The young woman left the vehicle in anger and began walking, only to be struck and killed by a passing car.
On cold rainy evenings, drivers along the boulevard might see the figure of a young woman hitchhiking. If picked up, she passes a slip of paper to the driver...and disappears into thin air. Written on that slip of paper? The address of the old UBC Main Library.
