Sweet Briar College's ghosts keep thinking up new ways to spook students, staff and faculty going about their daily routines. Of late, it's a 19th-century harp whose strings vibrate as if invisible hands are trying to play the instrument.

For the third year, Sweet Briar Museum is inviting visitors to come along as student guides — some with their own eerie encounters to speak of — lead them through favorite spectral haunts on campus. The Ghost Tours will be held at 5 and 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27 through Monday, Oct 31.

The approximately 45-minute tours start out in the museum, where an array of artifacts reflect the school's sorrowful beginnings a century ago. Indiana Fletcher Williams and her husband, James Henry, arranged to establish a women's institute on the family plantation after their deaths. It was to honor their only daughter, Daisy, who died years earlier at age 16. She is believed to have suffered from a genetic lung disease that is curable today.

"That is why a lot of people feel there is ghostly activity here," said Christian Carr, SBC museum director.

Most "sightings" involve Daisy or her mother, Indiana. The daughter is perhaps the most mischievous — and thought to be the prankster behind the latest manifestation of an otherworldly presence. Her harp is displayed in a room at the museum where Carr conducts a program for Girl Scouts called "Daisy's Day." Recently, in the middle of the programs, the strings suddenly begin to vibrate.

"The Girl Scouts just go nuts. [They scream] 'Oh, my gosh, Daisy's trying to play for us!' " Carr said, noting that this particular apparition didn't happen until the museum began offering the Daisy's Day activity to Scout troops last year.

Or, try to imagine digging through boxes in the Rare Books Room in the College's Mary Cochran Library and finding to your surprise the only known image of Indiana Fletcher Williams. Seeing Indiana's name on the back of the 1844 daguerreotype, the museum curator who found it called excitedly to a nearby colleague — and was rewarded with a long, low laugh from behind her. But no one was there.

"Lots of things happen in the Rare Books Room," Carr intoned.

It's not the only library chamber frequented by ghosts. After a visit to Sweet Briar House, the antebellum home where Daisy lived with her parents, the tour winds up in the Browsing Room of the library. It was from this warm, wood-paneled study that one librarian reported hearing laughter and the clinking of glasses emanating through the closed door and echoing up the marble stairs that approach it. Believing she was about to bust an illicit student gathering, she crept to the door as the noise grew louder — and burst in on an empty room.

The Browsing Room has other stories that await those on the tour, and guests can enjoy hot cider and cookies served up with the creepy, but light-hearted tales.

"We don't have people popping out from behind gravestones and stuff like that," Carr said, so it's appropriate for children of all ages. In fact, the museum will conduct special tours for Girl Scout troops every hour from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29.

The tours are not strenuous but guests do need to climb stairs. Admission is $5 for the general public, free for SBC students, staff and faculty. Reservations are recommended. Please call (434) 381-6246.