When Michelle Sampson pulled into work at the York Public Library on Monday morning, she noticed an odd-looking truck in the parking lot. She walked in through a side entrance, threw her bags in her office and looked out the window to find two more with bikes and pop-up tents attached.

“Is this what I think it is?” Sampson — the library’s executive director — recalled wondering.

Just as she suspected, the trucks belonged to campers. Sampson then stumbled upon a man charging several devices on the front steps of the library using an outdoor plug.

Three trucks with tents attached in the parking lot of the York Public Library on Monday morning. Visitors have evidently been using it as an informal campsite for a year. (Photo courtesy of Michelle Sampson)

Now, library employees have posted “no camping” signs around the building and have covered and locked all their outdoor plugs.

One of the things that concerned Sampson most was that campers’ use of the outdoor plugs might have been pushing up the library’s electric bill, which is paid by York taxpayers. June’s bill was $300 to $500 more than last year’s monthly average.

Sampson said when she questioned the man charging his devices and tried to tell him the lot was not a camping spot, he didn’t seem to understand her. She thought the campers might have been French Canadians passing through on vacation. She only saw three people but thought there could have been more.

One of the campers told her they’d found the spot on an app called iOverlander. The app is used for campers to find overnight sites along their route. Some of them are official sites, but others, including the library, are labeled “informal,” and anyone can enter a new spot.

The York Public Library is listed as one of six spots in York. One review from June 24 noted how nice it was that the lot is usually empty by 9 p.m., after the library closes. Another from nearly a year ago highlighted the free Wi-Fi signal and said that no one bothered them the morning after they slept over on a Saturday night because the library is closed on Sundays.

Sampson said she and her colleagues tried to contact iOverlander to remove the “camping spot” from their platform and posted their own note on the listing.

“This is a public library. There is no overnight parking and no camping. Please remove immediately,” the note read.

As of July 30, the location shows a red banner that says, “This place is permanently closed.” Representatives for iOverlander did not immediately respond to email inquiries about their campsite vetting process Thursday.

Sampson said that in her 10 years working at the library, she’s never seen anything similar happen. She’s seen fancy camper vans, but she sees those all the time.

“I don’t know, I mean, they may or may not have been staying over. I don’t think that they were, but it’s kind of hard to prove one way or the other,” Sampson said.

Realistically, Sampson said, the campers probably didn’t have as much of an impact on the library’s electric bill as she and librarygoers feared, but it was enough of an outlier that she called Central Maine Power for the first time in a few years, just to see if there was a mistake.

The campers eventually broke down their Overlander-style tents and left after Sampson told them it wasn’t a suitable campsite — though she doesn’t fault them for making it a temporary home.

“The Wi-Fi’s not great outside the building, but it’s certainly usable if you’re on the front porch. And we’ve got a laundromat just across the way, so it’s a pretty sweet deal,” Sampson said. “But we have no place to dump your dirty water, so I don’t want to think about where that might have happened.”