Letchworth's public library opened its doors in 1939, considerably more recent than most of the buildings that carry ghost stories elsewhere in this register, but it has nonetheless built up its own local reputation over the following decades. According to an account by local historian Gill Clements on the Herts Memories website, staff have reported strange activity there for years, most commonly books being found to have flown off the shelves for no apparent reason.
The library's most detailed single incident dates from the 1970s. Renovation work was underway on a room's flooring, and having just finished varnishing it, workers had closed the room to visitors to let the surface dry undisturbed. Two members of staff were admiring the newly finished floor from outside the room when they were startled to see a young man walking across it, apparently inside the sealed and empty space. They called out to him and one of them ran round to a side door to intercept him before he could leave, but found the room entirely empty, with no sign of anyone having been there and, more strikingly, no footprints left in the still-wet varnish where the figure had apparently walked.
The absence of footprints is the detail that elevates this from a simple mistaken-identity story to something genuinely unexplained within the account as given, assuming the witnesses' description is accurate. No identity has ever been proposed for the young man seen that day, and the library's history as a comparatively modern building gives no obvious clue as to who or what he might have been.
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