Sara Bickal, an employee of the Farm House Museum on campus, said she’s not afraid of ghosts, unless they are shaking a dresser in one of the rooms.

“I heard this rattling noise coming from another room, so I was freaking out,” said Bickal, junior in history, who said she doesn’t believe in ghosts. “I went into the room and there was a dresser that was shaking. I put my hand on it, and it stopped. When I let go, it kept going, so I left right away.”

Another em-ployee, Danelle Zellmer, said there are several ghosts rumored to be haunting the museum.

The “strangest of all the stories” took place in the Civil War Room on the second floor, said Zellmer, freshman in public service and administration in agriculture.

“Someone locked all the doors upstairs when no one was in the house,” she said. “When my boss went into a room she had just shut the door [when] she saw rose petals spread all over the pillows on the bed. The thing that is so weird is no one was in the house at the time.”

She said another “haunting” took place in the little boy’s bedroom on the second floor.

“Every night someone would shut the window curtains before they left. The next day the curtains would be open again,” Zellmer said. “It was thought to be one of the Curtiss girls who kept doing it.”

The girls were the daughters of Charles F. Curtiss, dean of the College of Agriculture from 1902 to 1947. The family resided in the house from 1897 to 1947.

Zellmer said it was later found that a janitor kept opening the curtains at night so he could look out the window while cleaning.

The story that Zellmer said “freaks me out the most” is one about the wife of James “Tama Jim” Wilson, Esther Wilbur Wilson. James Wilson was the first agriculture dean in 1897. He and his family lived in the Farm House from 1891 to 1897.

“Tama Jim’s wife committed suicide because being a wife of a dean was very stressful, and she was kind of weak,” Zellmer said.

According to an Aug. 4, 1892, article in the Ames Intelligencer, Esther Wilson drowned in an Ames creek. It was ruled a suicide due to insanity.

“Her ghost is supposed to wander the house,” Zellmer said.

Even though there are no known incidents of the ghost, her story still gets to Zellmer.

“That is really creepy because it is the only one we know really happened,” she said.

Zellmer said something out of the ordinary happened to her one night when she was closing the museum.

“I got to the kitchen where I was shutting everything off — I swore I turned off the light in the library. I turned around, and it was on again,” she said. “I went and shut it off, and when I turned around a hall light was turned on.”

Zellmer said one employee who used to work at the museum was so scared one night that she refused to ever work alone again.

“The girl was sitting in the office and said someone was constantly tapping her on the shoulder,” she said. “The thing that really scared her was she was working alone.”

Zellmer said some visitors have observed strange phenomena as well.

“People come in and say it feels like there are beings in the house,” she said.