It came from the library

“Don’t go in the basement,” a dire warning left unheeded by thousands of grisly horror-movie victims, means nothing to Ben Ackley.

As Capital Area District Libraries’ local history outreach librarian, Ackley happily dwells among dusty boxes of arcana buried 6 feet under at the downtown Lansing branch, and he’s sharing the worst and weirdest of it with everyone.

“It Came from Lansing,” a warped little zine hand-collected, photocopied, clipped, sutured and stapled together by Ackley in his subterranean lab, is full of oddball items culled from the local history vaults. The sickly green zine, available for free at all CADL locations and a scattering of hip local stores, includes an account of a human skull found on Barnes Avenue, a recipe for chocolate spiders and a 1902 guide to hypnotizing people, with poses demonstrated by a frightening fellow who looks a lot like Loki from the Marvel movies. There’s a cemetery headstone that reads “Just Jim” and another one with an email address chiseled below the occupant’s name: MysticPete@heaven.org. 
(Efforts to reach the addressee have been unsuccessful.)

Of course, no compendium of oddities is complete without an account of a man surviving a horrific auto accident in which a 20-foot steel rod hurtled through the windshield, “pushing his necktie out through his back.” (It happened on Christmas Eve 1978 as the driver returned home from dinner at the Knight Cap.)

The scholarly list of sources at the back of the zine (Ackley is a librarian, after all) is nearly as strange as the contents, from assorted personal scrapbooks that have drifted into the library’s hands over the years to records from the Ingham County Tuberculosis Sanatorium to the truly horrific files of the Lansing City Planning Division.

Ackley hatched an unholy plan to dig up and assemble clippings and excerpts from motley sources shortly after he was hired in early spring.

“There are a zillion amazing things in our collection, and people just don’t know that they’re there,” he said. “I figured a zine would be a way to highlight a lot of cool things at once.”

He loves the horror genre “and weirdness in general,” and he made sure “It Came from Lansing” included a list of 10 locally produced horror flicks (like 2007’s “Weenie Roast Massacre”), with notes on which ones can be found on streaming services.

He was inspired to create a Halloween-y zine when he stumbled upon “Kabala’s Skeleton Key,” a baffling religious-mystical text published in 1937 by Lansingite Gail H. Hines.

“It appears to be entirely self-published, typed on a typewriter, and it’s from Lansing,” he said.

The manuscript’s weird inscriptions and charts mix the zodiac with arcane economic and political doctrines and abstruse moral sermons.

“I couldn’t understand a lick of it at all,” Ackley admitted. The zine invites anyone with a clue as to what it’s all about to contact him.

Ackley’s boss, CADL local history specialist Heidi Butler, helped him flesh out the zine with accounts from local newspapers and various ephemera.

“It Came from Lansing” is the followup to another zine, “Obsoleat: Recipes Both Succulent and Strange,” which came out in September. (Both zines are still available.)

“Soon after I was hired, I saw that we have six boxes of local cookbooks,” Ackley said. “There’s no great way for people to use those. Researchers aren’t getting into that, and it’s not like we have a kitchen down here.”

Most of the recipes evoke a less healthy, less fussy, more playful era of cuisine that would horrify diners today. Cherry Michigan is little more than a sludge of cherry pie filling glopped onto fried chicken. (“A feast for the eyes as well,” promises Carl Olson of the state Department of Agriculture.) A recipe for circus peanut salad with orange gelatin, crushed pineapple and Dream Whip may stimulate a gag reflex in some readers, while others will rush to the store for the ingredients without stopping to put on their shoes.

Another recipe features shredded corned beef suspended in lemon Jell-O.

“I knew from thrifting and antiquing, which I love to do, that when you’re looking through old cookbooks from the 1970s, you’re going to run into weird aspic recipes — meats suspended in Jell-O and all kinds of nasty stuff,” Ackley said.

He enjoyed finding local connections at the gut level of food. There’s an authentic recipe for Upper Peninsula pasties, complete with lard and pork butt. Raccoon meatloaf and squirrel pie represent “Good Eating from Woods and Fields,” courtesy of the Michigan State University Extension Service circa 1943.

Some of the recipes have links to prominent local figures. Alfreda’s pound cake, a golden slab of eggs, margarine and sugar, comes straight from hat-wearing, do-gooding Lansing icon Alfreda Schmidt herself.

The sources for “Obsoleat” range from the Lansing chapter of Women of the Moose to the Republican Business Women’s Club and even CADL’s crosstown archrival, the Friends of the East Lansing Public Library.

Most of the recipes are meant to be used; others, like “elephant stew” (courtesy of the Oldsmobile Girls’ Club), are strictly tongue in cheek.

“I thought this material would be more useful if people could pull it into their kitchen,” Ackley said.

Born in Mason and now residing in Lansing, Ackley has lived in the capital area all his life, with the exception of two years spent earning a master’s degree in library science from the University of Illinois.

He’s happy with the local response to the zines and plans to publish them quarterly. The next entry, due in spring 2025, will probably have a romantic theme.

“We have lots of small collections with scrapbooks, yearbooks, little ephemera from local students over the last 150 years, and a lot of them have love letters and poetry and things like that,” he said.

The surest sign that the zine is about to appear is a pile of clutter on Ackley’s desk.

“It’s a giant mess for a week or two,” he said. “But it’s worth it.”