Lindsay Rathe woke up one night in her Linden Hall dorm room to an unusual glow on her desk.

Rathe, sophomore in graphic design, said she awoke at 3 a.m. for no reason at all and saw what she called a “glowing” yet “invisible” light.

“I thought, ‘This has to be a dream,'” she said. “Then I realized I was awake.”

She said her first reaction was not to be scared. After she got up to go to the bathroom, she started thinking and realized it wasn’t a dream.

This is just one of the many ghost stories of Linden Hall’s Merrill House, which some students say is haunted.

Rathe said she was spooked by her experience, but things got worse when she heard a rumor of a former ISU football player committing suicide on the second floor of Linden Hall.

“I used to live on the second floor, but now I live on the third,” she said. Rathe resided in room 267 but moved to the third floor because it supposedly was not haunted.

Virginia Arthur, associate director of the Department of Residence, said she has worked for Iowa State for 25 years and has never heard of a suicide occurring in Linden Hall.

Mary Yagla, sophomore in psychology, said there is another rumor of ghosts on the second floor of Linden Hall.

Yagla said she has heard rumors about three football players who lived on the second floor of Linden Hall who died in a car accident and now haunt the floor.

She said she has never seen a ghost but has heard of people seeing ghosts “suited up for game day” on Saturdays.

There are other stories from this “haunted dormitory.”

Kyle Regan, sophomore in art and design, has what he called a freaky story.

“I was in the bathroom and one of the faucets turned on full blast with hot water,” said Regan, who was in the bathroom all by himself.

Regan said he was “freaked out,” so he shut the water off and ran out of the bathroom.

This wasn’t the last sighting of the Linden ghost for Regan, who said there is a screen door that he and several other residents have noticed opens by itself when there is no wind.

“It only happens late at night,” Regan said.

Laura Halley, freshman in art and design, said there is a mirror in the stairwell of every floor in every wing except on Merrill House, the men’s side of the second floor.

“People saw ghosts in it all the time, so they took it down,” Halley said.