ghostbusters… it runs a story about a haunted library.

This is the paper’s evidence:

“I’ve had books fly at me, so I’ve seen it. I mean, you’re just standing there. You just say, ‘OK, it’s because I walked by.’ You always justify what it is,” librarian Colleen Gorman said.

Does any of that make sense? If the librarian saw a book flying around, shouldn’t the reporter ask when it happened and if anyone else saw it?

Or if, besides being incoherent, she’s just nuts or a big liar, shouldn’t she be kept away from kids?

The rest of the story descends into the parodic; there’s a lot of scenes of some alleged paranormal investigator looking at lights flashing on an “electromagnetic-field meter” like some bumpkin version of Dan Ackroyd in Ghostbusters—except Dan Ackroyd didn’t have a newspaper reporter following him around and hanging on his every word.

Or a daily newspaper editor willing to print it.

The Republic, as we’ve seen, likes paranormal stories almost as much as it likes dog stories.

In March the paper ran a story about how psychics were getting more popular. That’s what the hedline said, anyway: The actual story offered no evidence of it.

And last year the paper ran a similar story.

News not so much.