After the tour, Stroud and three other women walked around outside the building.

"One girl just stopped in her tracks and turned around. She said, 'Did you see them? There were two there at the window, just staring at us. They weren't doing anything, just following us,'" Stroud recalled.

The women kept close together as they returned to their cars.

People who take the Seminary Hall ghost tour hear the story of Florence Wilson, longtime principal of the Cherokee Female Academy. Wilson had hoped to be married, and some people say they've seen a woman, clad in a long, white wedding gown, staring out the windows of the stair landing and smiling.

But Florence's beau, Pleasant Buchanan, never arrived, and she devoted much of the rest of her life to the school and to her girls there.

Girls from the wealthier families occupied the more spacious rooms on the second floor, while poorer girls from rural areas lived on the third floor. The infirmary also was on the third floor, and a number of students died there during epidemics of diphtheria and other ailments.

Seminary Hall is even haunted by food. Some people say they've smelled food baking on the eastern wing of the first floor, where the kitchen was.

The Murrell Home, the most elaborate antebellum home in Cherokee County, naturally has its share of ghost stories.

"I'm not going to tell them to you, though," Site Superintendent Shirley Pettengill said. "You'll have to wait for the ghost stories."

People attending that event will be greeted by candles in jack-o'-lanterns carved that Thursday by Girl Scouts. They'll hear from storytellers such as Al Herrin, Martha Ray and Beth Herrington.

Pettengill has never had any supernatural experiences while in the Murrell Home.

"I have had something weird happen this past month, but you're going to have to wait until the ghost stories to hear about it," she said. "I'm the world's original skeptic. Probably a ghost would have to come up and sit in my lap. But I have had people tell me they've felt things."

People attending the ghost story events will be treated to tales from six storytellers in different rooms on the first and second floors.

Herrington, Tahlequah's best-known historian, will tell different tales each evening. One will feature yarns about Murrell Home ghosts. The other evening she'll focus on the "Jack stories," an oral tradition in mountainous areas of the South, focusing, of course, on a character named Jack.

"They're not really ghost-ghost stories, but they're pretty scary," she said.