MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History

The MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History in Little Rock keeps hearing a piano that isn't there. Slow, deliberate notes come from the East Room on the second floor and stop the instant a door opens. There's no piano in that room anymore. When a paranormal team walked the building in 2005, their psychic gave the player a name: Katharine, friendly, just wanting to play. She's the gentle one.

The building was made to hold things in. It went up in 1841 as the Tower Building of the Little Rock arsenal, built to store munitions, with exterior walls about three feet thick and an octagonal tower that began as a hoist for moving powder and shot between floors. A place built to contain an explosion has a way of holding onto whatever's inside it. After the Civil War it was officers' quarters, then a women's club, then a museum.

The other ghosts aren't gentle. The one the staff call Sarge keeps to the tower, where visitors report cold spots, flickering lights, and voices — and where a recording is said to have caught him telling investigators to get out. A closing employee once found the solid figure of a man in a dark uniform stretched across the theater chairs. She went to get a coworker, and when they came back, he had turned to face them. Then he was gone.

The program coordinator has heard the place too — footsteps on the tower stairs late at night, locking up alone with no one else inside. His approach is to leave the ghosts alone and trust they'll do the same. He says he's never actually seen one.

Paranormal investigators have all but adopted the building. There's an annual ghost expo here, and a ghost-hunting class that brings students into the most active rooms with recorders and meters. The museum doesn't shy from it. Admission is free — the WWII Jeep, the wartime photographs, and whatever is upstairs working the keys.

It's three feet of brick, built to keep an explosion in. What it ended up keeping was the people.