Since 1995, every office I have had has been in a historic building - most of them National Landmarks. One of the common occurrences have been smells that were unexplained.

At the Old Governor's Mansion in Milledgeville, GA - we would be working on the main floor and you could smell what I thought were green beans cooking with some fatback. We would go into the kitchen and find nothing - no food, nothing microwaved, no food in the building, no one eating. No special events with food the days prior that left smells. Nothing.

In one of the historic cottages on Jekyll Island - I came out of my office into the hall and smelled camellias. It was overpowering, and it seemed to come from one of the former bedrooms. There were no camellias anywhere near the cottage at the time. We knew that the original owner of the cottage had died there in the 1930s, and when we checked the date it turned out to be the day we smelled the camellias. A few weeks later a former gardener who worked for the family came to do an oral history project. When he walked by the camellia smelling room he said "That's the room Mr. Jennings was laid out in when he died. I filled the room with camellias because that was his favorite flower." We had no clue.