MCN: The Librarian Who Never Left

I was asked to give a talk at the Osher Learning Institute at Towson University. Since the topic was Spirits and Ghosts, I chose Marcia, naturally!

“In making a living, I made a life.” So were the immortal words of Marcia Crocker Noyes, MedChi’s librarian for 50 years.

Marcia was born in Saratoga, New York in about 1870.

She attended Hunter College in New York City, and then came to Baltimore in the mid-1890s to visit her sister, Kitty, whose husband was unwell. Marcia never left Baltimore. 

Marcia and Kitty both worked at the Enoch Pratt Free Library where Marcia cataloged books. 

In 1896, when Dr. William Osler became President of the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty (known then as the Faculty), he was dismayed to find that the condition of the library and the resident librarian were both in shambles.

He kept the former and got rid of the latter. The Faculty had gone dormant during the Civil War, and the existing book collection had been boxed up and all but forgotten.

Back to Marcia. Osler called his friend who was President of the Pratt to see whether he knew anyone who could work as the Faculty’s librarian and live on the premises. That person was to revitalize the library, whose books were out of date and out of order. Marcia was hired and within two weeks, she had a brand-new job and was living at the Faculty’s building on Hamilton Terrace. 

The Faculty’s members initially saw Marcia as a young woman who knew nothing about medicine. Luckily, she had Dr. Osler in her corner. Both Osler and Marcia believed in mixing the younger and older physicians in conversation, and she subscribed to numerous medical journals, so that members would come to the Faculty to read and discuss them. 

Marcia needed to be available 24/7, so she needed to live on-site. For example, a physician might call and ask for an ophthalmology book because his patient’s eyeball fell out. Marcia would check the card catalogue, and then go find the book. The physician would arrive, read up on eyeballs and then be on their way. She was our early Google.

In 1898, Dr. Osler, Marcia, and two other librarians created the Medical Library Association, which still exists today, and whose highest award is given in Marcia’s name. 

After the Faculty outgrew Hamilton Terrace, Marcia acted as project manager for the construction of the building on Cathedral Street.

A “penthouse” apartment for Marcia was included in the planning and she lived there, often with two ChowChow dogs and her maid, until her death in 1946. 

Befitting a young woman who had her own car in the 19-teens,

Marcia was active, among many other things, in the suffrage movement, which had frequent meetings (oddly, both for and against) at the Faculty’s headquarters. She led an active and lively life, spending summers at her camp in the Adirondacks, travelling to Medical Library Association meetings around the country after she became President, and visiting friends in Europe.

As she aged, she slowed down considerably, and the Faculty members planned to host a huge party celebrating the 50th anniversary of her hiring. But being physicians, they doubted she would live until then, so in April of 1946, they held the party, regardless. 

Marcia Crocker Noyes died on November 24, 1946, just four days after her 50th anniversary at the Faculty. Her funeral was held there, with 60 physicians acting as pallbearers. She is buried at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, along with her sister, Kitty. 

And this brings me to the second part of my talk this evening. It always sounds a little bit bonkers to talk about our ghost at work, but it’s actually as much of a reality as it can be.

Marcia lives on in the building which meant so much to her.

She has been seen by members of the staff, she moves items around, finds paintings and other lost things, and is generally a good spirit.

Marcia lived in our building from the time it was built in 1909, until her death.

She didn’t actually die there, but at Eudowood Sanitarium, which was where the Target in Towson is now located. It is likely that she died of tuberculosis, but we don’t have any definitive proof of that.

Beginning in the 1970s, stories written by one of the latter librarians begin to appear in our medical journal. He talks about being in the office on a weekend, knowing that there’s not anyone else in the building, but hearing footsteps in the hallway.

At one point, he mentions hearing someone mounting the great marble staircase, and counted each step. A little while later, he takes the stairs up from the second floor to Marcia’s penthouse, counting as he went along. It matched up to the footsteps exactly!

He tells another story of the library employees hearing steps on the metal stairs of the stacks, and the squeak of the wheels of one of the old wooden book carts. It just can’t be explained away with an easy answer.

The most re-told story is about our former housekeeper, Letha, who used to come at seven in the morning to make coffee for us and clean up from the previous evenings’ meetings.

She went into our big lecture hall one day, and noticed a woman, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, standing on the dais. Before Letha could ask who she was, the figure walked across the platform and just disappeared.

When she told people what happened, someone showed her an old photo of Marcia, and Letha recognized her immediately. After that, Letha would never come into the building unless she knew someone was already there.

When I began working at MedChi, people always talked about Marcia when anything went awry. After a few months, I read that the physicians would give Marcia bouquets of flowers when she did a special favor for them. And then I heard that the highest award at the Medical Library Association, which she had co-founded, was given in Marcia’s name, but that somehow, MedChi, the place where she spent her entire career, was never mentioned in conjunction with her.

I decided to remedy that.

So, I went up to the top floor of the stacks, where Marcia had a desk, and told her, out loud, that we would be giving a bouquet of flowers to the Noyes Award winner in her name, with our love. I said that hoped it was okay with her and a second later, I heard something small drop onto the floor. Great, I said, and zoomed down the four flights of stairs.

But that was just my first interaction with her. I was doing a lot of research in the stacks which is where our archives are located. I pride myself on being pretty observant.

So, I don’t think I’d miss things like a 5’x4’ picture frame, or a painting leaning up against the end of a row of bookshelves, or a 5’x16’ rolled canvas, among many other items.

I still find things in the stacks. I was recently working on the rare books collection, and as I was walking out of the stacks, I noticed a large, rounded frame peeking out from behind a file cabinet. I pulled it out, and low and behold, it was an old portrait, and it happened to be one I had been looking for. It was of the historic physicians, who has one of my favorite names: Peregrine Wroth. Of course, I should tell you that my second favorite name is the doctor, Clotworthy Birnie.

I also know, without a doubt, that the items were not there before. How could they just have appeared? Where did they come from?

A few years ago, after the pandemic, we realized that we had a lot of extra space, since many of our staff were working from home. We shifted most of the offices in the 1909 building over to our adjacent building. We then converted some of that space into the small MedChi Museum of Maryland Medical History, open by appointment only.

A few of us spent the Saturday prior to the Museum’s opening at the office doing final installations.

 

We knew we were the only people in the building. But every so often, someone would poke their head outside the Museum doors and look down the hall. When I asked what was going on, as a person, they told me that they’d heard footsteps.

The evening before the opening, we were doing that frantic last-minute detail work. We had put light-weight drop cloths on the walls to protect the displays, and all of a sudden, they started billowing in a breeze! We couldn’t feel a breeze, but could see the plastic moving, and there is no HVAC in the museum room. It was a bit scary, but we rationalized that it must have been Marcia coming to check out what we were doing.

I hadn’t seen Marcia, only had arms-length interactions with her… until last fall. I was working in the rare book room, and walking down the hallway towards our Osler Lecture Hall. I saw someone, clearly a woman, walk across the Lecture Hall, but couldn’t discern who it was. When I walked into the room, there was clearly no-one there. But I knew I’d seen someone. It took me a few minutes to wrap my head around what had happened, but I was pleased that she’d finally made herself seen.

A few weeks later, a colleague stopped me to tell me that she and one of her co-workers had just seen Marcia. They were in a meeting to discuss confidential medical cases and saw a woman walking down the hallway with books in her arms, heading towards the marble stairs.

They didn’t recognize the woman. But because the case was confidential, one of them got up to look to see who it was. But no one was there. They checked the adjacent rooms and the marble staircase, but saw no one. Yet, they’d both clearly seen the woman in the hall.

Earlier this year, we had our 70-year-old intern working on our rare books collection.

He was bringing our rare books down from the top floor of the stacks, and cataloguing them to add to the Museum’s list of items. Every morning, as he’d enter the stacks, he’d call out a cheery “Good Morning, Marcia.” Sometimes, he told me, he’d hear a sound in return, or something rustling around. Was it a mouse, or was it Marcia?

We always dress Marcia for the holidays, so I thought I’d share some of the past ones with you. I haven’t had a chance to dress her for this year yet!

Since I switched jobs a few months ago to focus solely on the history of medicine, my new office is located in Marcia’s old office.

The person who had the office a few years ago, used to talk about Marcia turning off the music if she didn’t like it, or scrolling her screen up or down to read something.

So far, nothing like that has happened to me, but then, I’ve only been in her office for two months. However, I am planning on working on a biography of Marcia sometime this year, and I have a feeling she’s going to be sitting on my shoulder correcting things that I’m writing.

Funnily enough, last week as I was wrapping up my slide show, and getting ready to send it to Tracy, my computer blinked out for a second, and when it came back on, the only document that I lost was the slide show. Coincidence??? Who knows.

I grew up in an old house where odd things routinely happened. And then I worked in a 12th century castle on the coast of Wales, so, as they say, I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.

Especially one who is a good spirit, like our ghost, Marcia Crocker Noyes.

Thank you.