This is a ghost story. Kind of. It's also a cautionary tale: be careful who you argue with in life, because the results can come back to haunt you.

Our story starts in Ironton, Ohio, with a dead doctor, missing organs, a murder investigation, and a shifty undertaker.

During the turn of the century, Ironton, Ohio was to America what Silicon Valley is now: the heart of a thriving industry that supplied the world with needed goods. From 1850-1890, countries such as England, France and Russia bought iron ore from the busy iron foundries of the Hanging Rock region. This iron was shipped through the riverport town of Ironton.

Drive through Ironton today, and you can still see evidence of the city's glorious past: a pipe organ donated by the Carnegies here, a stained glass Tiffany window there.

It's slightly after this prosperous time that our story is set.

The spirit of the story is one Dr. Joseph W. Lowry, who is said to haunt the Briggs, Lawrence County public library. The library is built on the site of Lowery's old home.

Is the library haunted? Hard to say. In 2000, I visited the library looking for Lowry's ghost and came up empty. But the library staff say that Dr. Lowry keeps them all busy by rattling keys, closing doors and playing with the computerized card catalog.

Pretty tame stuff for a spirit. Particularly once you know Dr. Lowry's story.

To hear the tale, Dr. Lowry was a well-respected physician who practiced in Ironton his entire life. However, this well-respected physician had a sticky reputation in the local courts system.

According to the Ironton Register, in June of 1896, Dr. Lowry sued the Ironton Board of Health for $500 (quite a tidy sum) for services rendered throughout the previous year as a city medical examiner. The city council refused to pay the bill, on grounds of its illegality.

Dr. Lowry was again in court in February of 1899. This time the doctor was being indicted for making false statements as a medical examiner.

But whatever Dr. Lowry's character, the story actually begins in 1931, when Lowry's wife died. It's said that the grief-stricken doctor ordered a custom-made casket for his petite wife.

That's when the trouble started. When the casket arrived, Dr. Lowry was unhappy with it (or perhaps with the bill), and refused to have his wife buried in it, or even to pay for it. Instead he stuck the local undertaker with the bill for the costly casket.

Not a problem for our mortician. After all, he was the only game in town. Sooner or later, Lowry would need his services again. At that point, all bills would come home to roost.

As it turns out, the funeral director didn't have long to wait. Barely two years later, Dr. Lowry passed away under suspicious circumstances. He was found in bed at home, in the middle of summer, with his heat turned on.

Suspicion fell on Dr. Lowry's heirs, but the case was ultimately deemed a stroke and the doctor's remains were turned over to the undertaker.

This was the moment our wily mortician waited for. Not only could he settle his old grudge with the good doctor, but in the process, he could also get back all that money that Dr. Lowry had cheated him out of two years prior. He would simply bury the doctor in the casket, and charge the bill to his estate.

If the doctor was too tall for the custom-made casket, well he wouldn't exactly need his legs, would he? And if he was too fat for the lid to close, he wasn't using those internal organs, anyway.

The undertaker would have gotten away with it too, if not for the growing suspicion that Dr. Lowry's heirs had offed the old man for his money. An investigation soon followed. And when the authorities exhumed the body, our mortician had quite a few disturbing questions to answer. Like why Dr. Lowry's legs were broken? And while we're on the subject, where were his organs?

Unfortunately for Dr. Lowry, (or perhaps fortunately for his heirs), by the time the undertaker led the authorities to the place where he had hidden the doctors internal remains, they were so badly decomposed that they could not be tested for signs of poison.

These days, it's said that Dr. Lowry roams about the halls of the library and Woodland Cemetery, searching for his missing organs and possibly regretting that he got on the wrong side of the one man who could get the last word in the argument.