The Invisible Ink Collection, housed at the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green [OH] State University, currently consists of over 2,000 volumes of true and fictional ghost stories. The collection was founded in 1995 by Chris Woodyard, author of the Haunted Ohio series, and founder of the Invisible Ink: Books on Ghosts & Hauntings catalog. She attended Bowling Green from 1971-73, majoring in Library Science. The focus of the collection is non-fiction ghost books like Woodyard’s Haunted Ohio series, although some fictional titles and general Forteana are included.

In a 1-17-96 article announcing the donation, curator Allison Scott said, "We were delighted by her donation. It is a magnificent addition to our collection." She added that the Invisible Ink Collection is important because it addresses parapsychology and popular religion, two areas in which the library is very interested. "We are always interested in works on parapsychology, the occult, folklore and fables. But this collection also addresses popular religion in the sense of a quest for the beyond and life after death. Other libraries have books on these subjects, but we are the first to have a good, solid library on them."

Woodyard herself has said that she hopes that the Collection will become "the Library of Congress of Ghost Books." Books that have been included in the Invisible Ink Catalog are at the core of the collection, followed by rare and out-of-print titles such as The Sorry Tale, a story of the time of Jesus by Patience Worth, a Puritan spirit who spoke through a St. Louis housewife’s ouija board; The Company of Avalon, by Frederic Bligh-Bond, who believed that his excavations at Glastonbury were directed by dead monks; and The Autobiography of an Occult Hoosier, sketches of a 19^th-century midwestern spiritualist’s life.

The Invisible Ink Collection may be viewed and used for research in the reading room of the Popular Culture Library on the fourth floor of the Jerome Library at BGSU. For a complete list of titles that have been catalogued (not all titles are yet), access the BGSU catalog through OHIOLink.

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