Armstrong Browning Library

A magnificent library and museum at Baylor University dedicated to the works of Victorian poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The building features 62 stained glass windows and houses the world's largest collection of Browning materials.

The Armstrong Browning Library on Baylor University's campus houses the world's largest collection of works by English poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, along with the largest collection of secular stained glass on earth. It also, according to decades of witness accounts, houses the spirit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself—a woman so attached to her possessions in life that she apparently followed them into eternity.

The library's Austin Moore-Elizabeth Barrett Browning Salon contains personal items from Browning's collection: her letter tray, mirror, fan, sofa table, chairs, and numerous other artifacts that defined her material world. Visitors to this room consistently describe an eerie, electric coldness that persists even in the heat of a Texas June. The sensation of being watched is overwhelming, and some have fled the salon unable to shake the feeling that its original owner still presides over her treasures.

Elizabeth's silhouette has been spotted peering from second-floor windows at night, her form so recognizable that the library's Instagram account has playfully capitalized on the legend by moving a cardboard cutout of her throughout the building. Near the clasped hands sculpture depicting Robert and Elizabeth, visitors have reported sensing both poets' presences. One employee working alone at closing felt intensely watched, and then witnessed a heavy drawer fly open on its own—when he looked up, Elizabeth's bust seemed to stare at him with terrifying lifelikeness.

The basement harbors a different presence—the ghost of a construction worker whose "poltergeist activity" has been documented by staff. The gift shop's metal security gate unlocks itself, cash registers malfunction, and electronics go haywire. The Pippa statue outside the library generates its own mystery: at night, its shadow shows arms raised above its head, though the statue's arms hang at its sides.