Letters from GIs to their sweethearts during war. Family Bibles, with generations of births and deaths carefully inscribed. Children's toys. Nineteenth-century quilts. Photographs. Diaries. Clothing. Jewelry. Furniture. All these and more can be found in the Kentucky Library and Museum, which for sixty years has preserved historical materials relating to Kentucky and Kentuckians.

Do the spirits of the long-dead owners of these artifacts hover nearby, still attached to the books, papers, clothing and amusements they valued in their lifetimes? Staff in the Kentucky Building have experienced a "feeling of being watched" as they go about their duties. A weekend curator reported that she once glimpsed a vision of a dark-haired man dressed in old-fashioned mourning clothes. A later photograph of her taken in the building showed that this gentleman may have taken another form: a mysterious white haze visible over her right shoulder.

A student worker has felt rushes of cold air and heard unidentifiable noises in the building. Books in storage areas have inexplicably been found left open, as if a spirit had been revisiting the life and times it once knew.

During a visit to the Kentucky Building, a psychic once explained that the artifacts it houses can carry "attachments"–associations with the life of a particular person that have been imprinted upon them. The energy given off by these attachments can be detected by inhabitants of the living world in numerous ways–vaguely uncomfortable feelings, strange noises, cold air streams, even actual apparitions. The psychic picked up the presence of a female spirit in a stairwell, and an entire group of people, including a child, in a storeroom. These presences aren't negative, she points out, just curious–wondering, perhaps, how we came to possess their diary, letters, business ledgers, favorite rocking chair, cigar case, treasured family photographs . .