Shhh! There's GHOSTS in the Library!

Demo: 12-17

Format: One Hour Segments

Tone: A cozy cottage-core mystery

Logline: “There are two sides to every story.”

ABOUT

Libraries are places of magic that have the power to transport you to places unknown! But what happens when those pesky books transport their strange otherworldliness into our world?

Toni is the newest librarian at the Magnolia McDyeberry Memorial Library. This place has been her home away from home all her life and now it’s her turn to give back some of the love it’s always shown her. Toni always admired Charlotte, the grizzled librarian with a hard edge and a soft “hush.” Toni is bright-eyed and has a million ideas on how to breathe new life into the quiet stacks of Oleanderwood, but old-fashioned Charlotte has an obsessively particular way of doing things, her own ritual to keep the library…quiet.

When an odd scrap of paper tucked into an overdue book sends Toni on a wild goose chase through the stacks, she finds a secret basement and a dark mystery awaiting her in the form of Magnolia “Maggie” McDiberry’s library–and worse, her restless spirit is now free to roam the library as she pleases. Toni had always believed Maggie to be an urban legend kids used to tell each other to scare them into being quiet in the library–the story of Oleander McDiberry and the founder of Oleanderwood’s own daughter’s mysterious disappearance.

Maggie has an insatiable desire to help the community, and thus her curiosity leads her to intervene in the lives of the ordinary library patrons. It would be fine if Maggie were like any other pesky poltergeist, but she has a strange effect on the books she loved so well in life–her uncanny ability to relate them to the lives of her victims causes their characters to enter the ordinary world and overcomplicate even the simplest solutions to a situation.

All Toni wanted to do was get more people interested in what the library had to offer, but with Maggie running amok Toni spends most of her days cleaning up after Maggie’s messes and trying to hide her existence from Charlotte. If Toni can solve the mystery of the missing pages of Maggie’s diary, maybe she can finally leave the library in peace. Toni has her hands full juggling her responsibilities to the library, impressing Charlotte enough to let her take chances on new programs, and playing detective in a centuries old cold case. Worst of all, it appears the weekly book club of seemingly harmless old grannies may play a more sinister role in the strange and ghostly occurrences in the library than Toni realized.

SETTING

Magnolia McDyeberry Memorial Library is exactly what you’d expect of a library–in fact, it’s almost unnerving how commonplace it is…at first glance. Beneath the banal exterior there’s something amiss in this little library. Perhaps it’s the fungus sprouting from the fiction section, or maybe it’s the fact that the travel section is never where you remember seeing it last. As the former home of town founder Oleander McDyeberry, the library is full of hidden passageways and generations of family secrets. When the secrets of “The Book Club” are revealed, the books of the library take on a life of their own, merging elements of their world with the quaint fixtures of the library.