5. LO
LO
A fter saying my goodbye to Annalise for the evening—she’s booked out for the night with a screening of a friend’s movie—I followed behind Stevie and Andrew’s van all the way to the library.
We aren’t going to the local one that I sometimes stop into whenever the books I already own aren’t speaking to me; instead, the Paranormal America team reserved a late-evening filming slot at the largest library in the county.
It’s dark now, but it feels better on the road than it did at my house.
I’m too proud to admit it to Stevie—I’ve been enjoying being better equipped at handling ghosts than paranormal investigators—but my house does scare me at night.
Not enough to want to leave and go somewhere else, but enough to unsettle me.
My nighttime routine consists of making sure I’m in my bedroom with the door locked before eight p.m. as many nights as possible.
It’s a silly attempt at protection since it feels like an obvious truth that ghosts can just go through walls whenever they want. But it makes me feel better, since I really don’t know for sure there is a ghost in my house.
But I am feeling a little vindicated that not only did people other than me have paranormal experiences in my house, but it was all caught on camera. And Stevie and Andrew—about as expert as someone can be at something like spotting a ghost—seem to think there’s something paranormal going on.
After finding street parking a few spots down from the Paranormal America van—a giant black one with their logo covering the entire right side—I walk down the sidewalk to meet them.
“Hey.” I raise my voice slightly so it’ll carry to them over the light city noise around us.
The air feels different here than it does inside my house, like it always does.
Being forty minutes away from my place—the Los Angeles equivalent of a quick ten-minute drive down the road—lifts a weight off my chest.
Stevie greets me with a slight head nod. “Have you been to this library before?”
“I don’t usually come downtown, honestly,” I say. “Too far and too much traffic.”
“Spoken like a true Los Angeleno,” Stevie agrees. “I dated a girl in Culver for a while, and it was basically a long-distance relationship.”
I brush off the feeling that Stevie mentioning an ex stirs up in me. The image I have in my head of her did not include any actual exes, just a long list of conquests. But it’s stupid of me to feel even a little bit jealous. “You live downtown?”
“I do, but I try to spend as little time at home as possible. Home means I’m not working.”
“Spoken like a true Los Angeleno,” I echo, and Stevie’s lips turn up in a small smile that makes me feel annoyingly victorious.
I hate that I want her approval. It’s the curse of meeting someone hot: it doesn’t matter who you are, how successful you are, how beautiful you are—a hot person wanting you is the only validation that seems to really mean anything.
Or at least, that’s how it’s always been for me. But that’s also coming from someone whose first kiss was on screen and didn’t have a crush like me back until I got on a wildly popular TV show as an adult.
“Alright, let’s get it,” Stevie says and heads up the sidewalk toward two outdoor staircases. They lead to a building with no identifying information, at least in the low light of the evening. It’s completely tucked away from this angle.
“This is the library?” I ask, surprised.
“Yeah, it looks a little cooler from the other side, but this is where the good street parking usually is,” Stevie explains. “It also looks a little better during the day. It’s kind of creepy at night.”
We head up the stairs and up toward the massive front entrance doors. When we go inside, it starts to look a little more like a library. The familiar scent of books and the sweetness of lingering perfumes from throughout the day feel like coming home.
Despite being there just before closing, it’s still pretty busy.
It makes sense why there are so many people around—the library is massive.
It’s easily the biggest library I’ve ever seen.
From the lobby, hallways extend out in all directions.
Various entrances and exits, side rooms identified for teaching, and different sections based on the genre of interest. It’s nothing like the library I’d grown up with, which was basically just one very large room. This seems to go on forever.
“I love it here,” I admit.
“Yeah, you would,” Stevie says, and when she sees the expression on my face, she furrows her brow slightly. “I saw the books in your room. This is probably every reader’s paradise. I’ve just always been more of a movie person.”
She then walks off like that wasn’t the nicest thing I’d heard her say over the several hours I’d spent in close proximity with her.
I think I’m starting to understand the rhythm of her communication style and the kind of person she is. But then again, it seems like Stevie is someone who’s full of surprises, even when she doesn’t mean to be.
Stevie and Andrew lead me down one of the hallways, and we head into a massive room with tall ceilings and windows on top of windows.
“Oh my god,” I mutter under my breath.
“Cool, right?” Stevie says.
We step onto an escalator—I can’t even believe a library in the world is large enough to justify an escalator, nonetheless several —and head up.
“The woman who runs the archives is pretty cool. We haven’t shot a ton in LA, but she’s hooked us up in other cities. Librarians are surprisingly well-connected.”
It’s annoying how hot it is to hear Stevie praising librarians.
It doesn’t exactly align with her cool-girl attitude to be nice to them, and the surprise makes it all the better.
I can’t tell if I’m relieved she’s a good person, or annoyed because it means I can’t use it as a reason to write her off. Either way, I feel like I’m losing.
Or maybe winning. But only if Stevie feels similarly intrigued by me—which is not a vibe I’ve gotten so far.
“Cool,” I say, a beat too late because I was too busy stealing glances at Stevie’s full lips.
When we make it to the top of the escalator, offering a full view of the several stories of the library below us, Stevie opens the door to a side room with glass walls. There’s a sign up on the glass that says Closed for Filming!
“Thank you,” I say as I step through.
“Ah, Stevie! Andrew! Welcome!” a woman with streaks of gray through beautiful chestnut hair greets us.
She offers a wide smile and readjusts her giant, thick-framed glasses.
She’s standing behind a massive circular desk, piles of books surrounding her.
“And we have a new friend this time. How’s your ghost treating you? ”
“Not particularly well, but we’re coexisting.” She throws her head back with a laugh.
“I’m Farrah. I’m part of the History Department staff here at the library. You guys will be looking at my personal favorite section, which is the California Index.”
“Dr. Houston is very knowledgeable about the history of Southern California,” Stevie offers.
Farrah brushes off the comment with a smile. “Too nice to me,” she says. “We’re just excited to have the opportunity to share our archives with you. We get a decent amount of foot traffic, but not as much as the other sections of the libraries.”
“Excited to be here,” I say.
“You know where to go?” Farrah asks.
“Yeah, we’re good,” Andrew answers politely, a smile also on his face.
“Alright, let me know if you need anything,” she says.
Stevie gestures for me to follow her. Andrew and I head back into a far corner of the archives.
The deeper we go, the darker it gets. If I hadn’t already been living in a supposed haunted house, this would send shivers down my spine.
It’s eerily quiet and isolated—just us and books and low lighting for what feels like forever.
Eventually, we make it to the furthest possible wall in the room. I turn back and can’t even see Dr. Houston anymore. There aren’t any windows this way, and I can’t tell if that’s intentional for the books or a design choice.
Machines I don’t recognize line one of the walls, and I frown. “These are for microfilms. I don’t think the history of your house will go back so far that we’ll need them, but we’ll see,” Stevie says when she sees me looking at the machines.
“They look good on camera, so we might get some b-roll using them,” Andrew says. “Even if we don’t actually end up needing them.”
“Cool,” I say, as if I’m not freaking out a tiny bit at getting to see this part of the library. “I had no idea this was here.”
“Most people don’t,” Andrew says as he sets up his camera. The shoot is obviously meant to be casual—it’s just him with his camera and some lighting. I haven’t seen a setup this casual since I was in film school and working on sets for student projects.
“What’s the budget for an episode?” I ask. “Genuinely curious.”
“Even lower than you’re probably imagining,” Stevie admits.
“And people like this? All of the ghost hunting stuff?” I ask.
Stevie snorts out a laugh as she helps Andrew get the lighting set up. “I mean, yeah. It’s not a bad market. It’s pretty hit or miss, especially against the big dogs of the industry. But if you can keep it interesting, people will tune in.”
“Do you have goals for it?” I ask. My face flushes a burning hot red. “Sorry, I don’t mean for this to be twenty questions. I’m just curious.”
“I guess our goal would be wider production. The more money that flows into the show, the more we can do and the more money that comes toward us. It’s kind of a win all around. But the lifespan of a show right now, even with a cheap budget, is short, as I’m sure you know.”