McFarlin Memo

McFarlin Fellows: A Legacy of Philanthropy and Intellectual Enrichment

The McFarlin Fellows, founded in 1992, is the longest-standing giving society associated with the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library. Members generously donate $2,000 annually, directly supporting the Department of Special Collections and University Archives. While university funds cover staffing and overhead, the acquisitions of rare books and manuscripts depend solely on these donations.

The society’s influence extends beyond material collections, funding a distinguished lecture series that has brought Nobel Laureates, national leaders, and celebrated authors to Tulsa. Speakers have included Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, former Irish President Mary Robinson, and renowned documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. By fostering a vibrant intellectual environment, the McFarlin Fellows help elevate Tulsa’s academic reputation.

The roots of the Fellows’ philanthropic efforts stretch back to the 1940s when Tulsa Bibliophiles, a group of local book collectors, began donating significant literary collections. This spirit of generosity was formalized in the early 1990s when then-Provost George Gilpin and Professor Hermione de Almeida, along with Curator Sidney F. Huttner, hosted informal gatherings with like-minded supporters of literature and history. These meetings soon evolved into the establishment of the McFarlin Fellows, whose dependable contributions have enabled McFarlin Library to act quickly on special opportunities and acquire valuable materials from respected book dealers.

By contributing both financially and intellectually, the McFarlin Fellows have significantly shaped the library’s esteemed collection, ensuring its growth and continuing relevance within the academic community. Their support also helps preserve McFarlin Library’s status as a cultural hub for scholars, students, and bibliophiles alike, promoting intellectual development in Tulsa and beyond.

This year, the McFarlin Fellows host three speakers

• B.H. Fairchild, Award Winning American Poet– December 3, 2024
• Melissa Kunz, Director of Special Collections – February 4, 2025
• Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award Winner – March 11, 2025

For more information about the McFarlin Fellows and the upcoming speaker series, please contact Jeannine Irwin Jeannine-irwin@utulsa.edu

One of the most famous ghosts at The University of Tulsa is the one affectionately known as Farley, who wanders the McFarlin Library. It seems no one knows who Farley is, and many speculate it could be the ghost of McFarlin himself. 

Teri French, Tulsa's Haunted Memories

The autumn and winter seasons tend to alter our perceptions of the waking world. These seasons create an environment with fewer daylight hours, but more time for the dark atmosphere that welcomes in the unexplained and (possibly) paranormal. Whether it's the Halloween season or simply the dropping of leaves and temperatures, this time of year sends many in search of something to chill our bones and test our bravery. For some this experience can be derived from a haunted house or moonlight stroll. Others will seek out a classic horror film, or a dark and twisty novel. And yet, for a select group at the University of Tulsa, that spooky experience might be found in the halls of McFarlin Library. There are those who believe this nearly 100 year old building could be housing more than old books.

It's no secret that old buildings have quirks, but some visitors cannot accept the notion that “it's just an old building." It's not enough to explain the vibes of a dark hall, the creak of a stair, or the cold spot in a room. While most students and staff who fill the spaces of McFarlin are working in the warm autumnal sunlight of the browsing floor, or the ambient table lighting of a reading room, there are times when the darkness of this building rushes at you and fails to part around your presence.

Take the automatic lights in the main and intermediate level book stacks. These lights are set to detect your presence, responding with a click and illumination. However, I myself have had moments when I am halfway down a side of the stacks and the light fails to respond. Worse still, I was working in the periodicals section when the lights clicked on around the corner. Stepping out from the aisle to see if there was a patron who needed help, I waited and listened for steps. None came. I stepped around the corner looking for source of the motion, and the lights suddenly clicked off behind me. Was this most likely a sensor not detecting my movement? Yes. Did it make me snap a glance over my shoulder and shiver? Absolutely. 

There is something almost gothic and romanticized about working in a space with so much history and architectural beauty. Knowing that there many departed scholars who walked the same routes, touched the same books, deepens the sense that something more than fingerprints could be left behind. Though it is easy to logically dismiss any apparent creepiness of an old space, it is also easy to get too comfortable and fail to consider that you may not be the only presence in a room. With the help of a unique Tulsa history book, and the input of current and former students, staff, and professors, I set out to see if I was the only who thought McFarlin Library could be haunted.

Speculation of a ghost is the simplest form of haunting. Due to it's age and rather strange construction phases, it is no extreme stretch to consider that an unsettled spirit may haunt these halls. Author Teri French collected some lore on McFarlin's specter, Farley. Whoever the “ghost” might be, people have attributed many unsettling experiences to the presence of this ghost: books found rearranged when no one is in the building, items going missing with no explanation, and strange noises. 

French also details two specific paranormal encounters of a former librarian and a janitorial staff member.
While working late one evening, a former librarian heard whistling. When she went to investigate the sound (believing it to be a patron who was present after hours), she found no one. After returning to her desk and beginning to work again, the whistling started back up. This continued throughout the evening, but no person was ever identified. In what is now called The Learning Studio on the main level of McFarlin, a janitorial staff member was cleaning the room when she looked up and saw a phantom form that appeared to be wearing graduation regalia. She fled the room and did not return. However, others have also noted the appearance of a man in similar garb that appears to be waiting in the corners of various rooms (96).

As any modern-day investigator should, I also pulled my resources and took this question to the online social platforms. From those responses I learned that many people believe McFarlin has a weird vibe, especially at night and in the original parts of the building. 

Below are some of the stories that anonymous staff and former students wanted to share…

• In the fourth floor women’s restroom, to the left of the sinks, there is a door that leads to the bathroom stalls. One day I opened the door, and all the stalls were available. I went into the first one. A moment later, I heard the most plaintive, sad, and prolonged sigh from the adjacent stall. No one had opened the main door to access the stalls. Seeing as they would have walked by my stall, I would have seen them through the crack of the door. When I finished I looked into the other stall, and it was still empty. It was so unsettling that I haven’t been there since.
• Sometimes when I've used the ladies' room on the fourth floor, I have thought I saw a shadow pass by me. It is, of course, only ever out of the corner of my eye.
• After spending more than a quarter of a century on campus, I've seen it, heard it, and felt it: ghost lights, secret stairwells, Farley, underground tunnels to ghost buildings and many more.…
• Years ago, when I worked at TU, we had a staff development meeting in the Library's Faculty Study. We were all quiet and seated while the VP of Student Affairs was talking of past history and TU’s vision of the future. All of a sudden, a floor lamp that was in the corner came crashing down! 

• All I know is that we heard some weird noises in one of the upstairs study rooms in the middle of the night during finals my junior year.

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  This fall I challenge you to be aware of the season's eerie nature. Whether you go looking for it, or just happen into a quiet space, listen in the silence. Take a moment to recognize the atmospheric weight of an old room. Acknowledge the peripheral flashes of movement near you. And whenever you are in McFarlin Library, be leery of the fourth floor bathroom.

  

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For more information

French, Teri. “Tulsa’s Haunted Schools.” Tulsa’s Haunted Memories, Arcadia Pub, 2010, pp. 95–96.

History of McFarlin Library

Behind an unmarked door on the 4th floor of McFarlin Library, there is a storage room which is dark – some might say it is haunted. Stored here are works of art and books made of rare materials…and some of those materials might be laced with poison. In current rhetoric, the contents of many books are considered “harmful." As an academic library, we promote reading and access to all books with the exception of books that might be an actual danger to your health. Many of these Victorian-era book covers were created using heavy metals and other hazardous substances that helped them capture vibrant colors.

I interviewed McFarlin Special Collections Cataloging Librarian, Brandis Malone, to discuss a little of the history behind these poisoned books as well as how McFarlin is handling these materials in Special Collections.  

Kathryn: Can you tell me a little bit about what makes these “poisoned” books?

Brandis: Yeah, for sure. So, we're specifically looking at books from the Victorian era. Generally, these are books from the 19th century from about 1800 to 1900, about 100 years. But some poisoned books are generally more from like 1830 to 1870. And that's about the time when the Victorians loved throwing poison into everything. They put it into medicine, they put it into wallpaper, and they were putting it into book cloth as well to make it super vibrant and colorful. They would put arsenic into book cloth to make it this beautiful emerald-green color. They would put chromium and lead with Prussian blue to create this dark, forest-green color. And then they would put chromium and lead and, there's some other chemical I'm forgetting, to make this nice yellow-orange. And obviously, lead and arsenic are not safe for people. So, you know, you're not supposed to touch it with your bare hands. You wouldn’t go around licking books or something. But also, you try not to breathe in those sorts of things. And little bits of exposure are technically fine. It's just if you're working in a library and cataloging or paging books, it can be pretty dangerous. 

Kathryn: Why is Special Collections participating in the poison book project?

Brandis: Lots of libraries are doing it all over the world. It's not like a conglomerate we’re joining essentially. It's kind of just this movement around libraries to identify these poisonous materials because, for a long time, people didn't know they were there. And so now we're like, oh, this is actually like a health hazard, we should probably start seriously tackling this issue.

Kathryn: Are you guys reporting the findings?

Brandis: There is this website called the Poison Book Project from the University of Delaware. And they do have a reporting feature. So, like, if you test something and it does test positive, you can submit it. And hopefully, we can do that once we start doing some serious testing.  Currently, they're only tracking arsenic, though. And we're branching out into the chrome yellows and the chrome greens, which I'll show you.

Kathryn: Were these books purchased by McFarlin because they were poisoned, or did you find out after?

Brandis: No. Particularly literature, and children's books, but these books span every genre.

Kathryn: Okay, so it's not like a specific type of book or anything like that?

Brandis: No. Now it's becoming a collecting area where people want to get cool poisonous books. But previously it was just, “Oh, look at this pretty green book.”

Kathryn: So, what has been the most unique find in terms of the content within these poisonous books that you guys have kind of looked through?

Brandis: That's a good question. I don't know. We haven't looked through the books to see what the content is. We're mostly worried about the actual binding itself. Most of it is literature.

Kathryn: Okay, so most of the poisonous material is in the binding, though it's not in the pages itself necessarily?

Brandis: It can be. So, the binding is what we're mostly worried about, but it can also be on the edges of the books. Sometimes they'd stain the edges in different colors. That’s something we're looking at. And then also the endpapers of a book. Because they would do that for the pretty endpapers.

Kathryn: In terms of what you guys have looked through already, have you found one that's super dangerous?

Brandis: We’ve done a little bit of testing, but we haven't gotten the results back yet. I'll show you this downstairs, but the current plan is to bag them in Ziploc bags. We're going to put them through testing. And then once we have some that are confirmed poisonous, we're going to put them in more long-term plastic bags that are a little bit thicker. So they're more resistant to puncture – more like polyethylene bags. It’s never going to be anything like locked in a lead case. You’re not going to drop dead if you touch a poisonous book.

Kathryn: So, for you to keep testing, are you guys partnering with someone else or do you have to run the test yourself?

Brandis: No, we're trying to do a collaboration with the chemistry department. We've reached out to a professor there and we did some initial testing. We're hoping to eventually get access to an XRF, which is a kind of chemical testing gun. It would tell you exactly what the chemical makeup of the binding is. We haven't gotten to that yet. You need special training and stuff to use that. We'd also need approval and it's expensive. But yeah, we're mostly doing some other sort of fluorescent microscopy. He has his whole system over there.

Kathryn: Okay, so when you handle these books, which I'm sure I'll see downstairs as well, what particular manner do you handle them?

Brandis: So, you want to handle them safely, like any sort of rare book. You just want to make sure that you have gloves on. We generally ask people to wear a mask if they're going to be handling them a lot. It's mostly the gloves we're worried about. You want to wash your hands after, even if you are wearing gloves. And then we also have precautions for like surfaces. So we have polyethylene sheeting to put down. We have a special kind of book cradle that's made of acrylic, which is easily cleanable. And it's just making sure that we're clearing up the residue.

Kathryn: So, you’re making sure people are not transferring it or anything like that?

Brandis: Yeah, that's the problem too with arsenic because it's super friable. So even if you don't see it, it's transferring to everything pretty much.

Kathryn: Is there anything else you want to share about this project or that you found interesting that you'd like people to know about?

Brandis: We're kind of in the beginning stages. So, it's new, but I think the whole thing's cool. It’s just a really interesting part of book history that people don’t talk about. 

For more information on Poisoned Books and the history of arsenic green, please consider the following sources:

• This article from The Washington Post - “Old books can be loaded with poison. Some collectors love the thrill.”
• This article from Heritage Science - “Hidden in plain sight: revisiting the synthesis, characterisation, degradation and the intricate relationship between Scheele’s green and Emerald green”
• Bitten by Witch Fever by Lucinda Hawksley
• The Arsenic Century : How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work, and Play by James C. Whorton