We stood in the foyer of Panarchy, staring at a patch of brown water damage on the ceiling. "People think that's where a ghost has been," Panarchy member Caroline Brandt '09 told me. Cocking our heads to the side, we searched for the profile of a face. After rotating a couple of times, I finally saw it; a long nose and an eerily faded eye appeared in the plaster. "It looks like water damage to me," Brandt said.
Our isolated College on the Hill -- and in the middle of the woods -- seems like the perfect habitat for specters to roam. Historical reports and more recent first-hand encounters indicate that Dartmouth has acquired its fair share of ghosts throughout its 200-year history.
It's hard to prove whether the doors mysteriously locking and the creaks in the house owned by Panarchy that some members reported is the work of the ghost or is merely due to the house's old age, but the winding staircase and dizzying architecture of the house certainly make it seem like the perfect territory for a presence.
Panarchy isn't the only haunted Greek house on campus; Alpha Theta Coed Fraternity has its own tragic history. On Feb. 25, 1934, a nighttime carbon monoxide leak took the lives of the nine brothers sleeping in the house. Some say that the boiler exploded, but according to the house history, the boiler was fine; the gas may have seeped in because the flue accidentally closed. The names of the brothers who died that night are displayed on a plaque above the mantelpiece in the common room to memorialize the winter tragedy. It has been said that there were female victims of the accident that night as well, but they remain unidentified.
After the deaths, a number of members of the house, convinced that the house was haunted by the ghosts of the dead fraternity brothers, decided to take drastic measures. In an emergency meeting held in 1939, alumni decided to raze Alpha Theta completely. The entire house was torn down and rebuilt by 1941; the only part of the original house that remains today is a foundation wall in the basement laundry room.
Believers claim that the laundry room is still haunted, and I decided to inspect it for myself.
Beside the inevitable joke about "spirits in the basement," the members of Alpha Theta I spoke to didn't report any face-to-face encounters with the ghosts -- perhaps because their ability to roam the halls was severely curtailed after the razing. When I looked into the laundry room, it appeared relatively normal, with neon bottles of detergent and missing socks. The stone wall from the original foundation is the only giveaway that this is the oldest part of the house.
Even though the ghosts don't seem to be actively haunting, some members reported feeling spooked. "In general, the house makes noises, and when you're downstairs and it's dark, you know, something could be hiding down here," member Casey Lauderdale '09 said.
A suicide and tragic accident might have increased Dartmouth's ghost population, but violent murders also haunt the College's past. In 1920, Theta Delta Chi member Henry Maroney ran into trouble with spirits of a different kind. According to the 1920 article in The Dartmouth, he purchased and consumed a quart of whiskey from classmate and campus bootlegger Robert Meads, and when that ran out, he attempted to purchase another. The $20 cost exceeded his budget, so he seized the bottle from Meads and scrambled out a window, with Meads firing his pistol after him as he fled.
Later that evening, Meads found Maroney in his bedroom at Theta Delt and shot him through the heart. The incident made national headlines; the front-page headline of The New York Times on June 17, 1920 read: "DARTMOUTH SENIOR KILLED BY JUNIOR -- WHISKEY CAUSE OF TRAGEDY."
Reports of Maroney's ghost haunting the halls of Theta Delt are virtually nonexistent, but he made an imprint on the house in a different way -- as a result of the shooting, the house earned the nickname "The Boom Boom Lodge."
The death of a freshman football player in 1949 was just as violent, if not quite as deliberate. A group of eight football players and members of Delta Kappa Epsilon arrived in the bedroom of Raymond Cirrotta '49 in a drunken rage. Cirrotta played for the freshman football team, but had made a habit of wearing a varsity letter, and to punish him, Thomas Doxsee '50 punched Cirrotta three times. Cirrotta fell and hit his head on a desk; at the time, the injury did not seem serious, but by 5 a.m., Cirrotta was dead. So, does his ghost still haunt his old dorm room? You'll have to ask the lucky residents of Mid Massachusetts Hall 207.
Not all Dartmouth ghosts can be explained by murders or tragedies -- some have popped up in rather unexpected places. A staff member in the Office of Residential Life said she'd heard rumors that administrators and students had encountered a ghost in Parkhurst Hall. According to an article in the Alumni Magazine by Joseph Citro, witnesses described the man as "wearing a broad-rimmed hat." The same ghost has reportedly been spotted in the Zimmerman Lounge at the Blunt Alumni Center.
Dartmouth Hall also hosts a restless spirit. An anonymous member of the class of 1871 wrote an account of his encounter with "a small, wizen-faced man standing in the middle of the floor," in a piece called "The Dartmouth Hall Ghost."
"On his forehead were two small horns, his feet were unmistakably cloven, and a slender barbed tail curved gracefully around his left leg," he wrote.
Most who encounter ghosts do so inadvertently, but in the 19th century, two medical students dug their own graves, so to speak, when they actively disturbed the dead. Dartmouth medical students commonly stole recently buried bodies so they could practice surgical procedures on them, and in 1895, two of them were caught. John P. Gifford and Jack McDonnell were found guilty of body-snatching, causing an outcry from the community against the medical school.
McDonnell and Gifford were both excellent students, and Gifford was named valedictorian at his commencement ceremony. But it was the decision made a few nights after the burial of Joseph Murdock, a Norwich man who had recently committed suicide, that tainted their reputations forever.
Four days after his burial, family members reported seeing footprints in the snow leading away from Murdock's grave, only to find that the man's body had been stolen from the Norwich cemetery.
An article published in the Granite Free Press at the time of the incident said, "Further investigation developed the fact that the body had been dragged over the snow through the cemetery, thrown over the fence, and then dragged over the fields, stone walls, and barbed wire fences to the main road, about half a mile away, where the ghoulish thieves probably placed it in a wagon and drove away." The body was found in the basement of one of the College buildings, not having been mutilated at all.
It is difficult to be certain about the existence of supernatural presences -- is the mark on the ceiling at Panarchy actually a ghost? -- but when one is told of the grave-robbing incidents, there's no avoiding a slight shudder.
The original version of this article ("Suicides, murders and grave robbers: the skeletons in Dartmouth's closet," Oct. 26, 2007) incorrectly reported that William Thayer Smith, the original owner of the mansion at 9 School Street now inhabited by Panarchy society, allegedly kept his abused daughter in the attic of the house in an anecdote about the alleged daughter's ghost's presence. In fact, Smith had no such daughter; he had two sons.