Farrar Schoolhouse

The Washington Township Consolidated School served the township from 1922 until consolidation closed it — the county zoning record lists 2002 as the official end. For five years the building sat untouched: desks, chalkboards, auditorium stage, and the basement gymnasium all left in place. In 2006 Jim and Nancy Oliver bought the property, and it is from their occupancy that the haunting file actually begins — the Olivers reported disembodied voices, shadow figures, and poltergeist-type disturbances, and began keeping a log.

The first organized paranormal investigation followed in 2007, led by psychic Jacqui Carpenter, who — per the school's own telling — confirmed the owners' suspicions. Over the next two decades the school hosted a rotating cast of television crews, radio stations, and regional paranormal groups, and the traffic was eventually formalized: Polk County planning documents show a conditional use permit sought to run tours and overnight investigations on the agricultural parcel. In 2024 YouTubers Sam Golbach and Colby Brock bought the school — reportedly after learning it was slated for demolition — and opened it to public tours and investigations.

The Olivers' account is the file's primary testimony. They reported that disembodied voices, shadow people, and orb phenomena were common from early in their ownership. Nancy Oliver reported losing her footing on the stairs and feeling a hand steady her shoulder — then turning to find no one there. The most specific sighting in the dossier is theirs: the dark, distinct outline of a small boy, roughly three and a half feet tall, standing motionless on the lit stairway down to the gymnasium, one foot on each step, hand on the rail, gone in about two seconds.

Investigators and visitors since have reported children's voices, footsteps, and a teacher-like figure, and the classroom chalkboards now carry two decades of accumulated messages from investigators — which the tour operation preserves as part of the exhibit, on the stated reasoning that erasing them would erase the record. None of it is verified; all of it is voluminous. The school's reputation now functions as its business model, a fact worth keeping in the margin of every claim filed there.

What is documented is the building: eighty years of rural Iowa schooling, a consolidation casualty, and a second career as one of the Midwest's more trafficked investigation sites. A Des Moines Register visit in late 2024 found the chalkboards still full of investigators' messages and the boiler room still doing most of the atmospheric work. Nobody has produced a documented death or tragedy inside the school to anchor the reports — which makes Farrar an honest specimen of the genre: the lore arrived after the emptiness did, and the emptiness was considerable.