[CTRL] Campus has many skeletons in closets
-Caveat Lector- http://elsinore.cis.yale.edu/ydn/paper/3.31/3.31.95storyno.KC.html Campus has many skeletons in closets By Graham Boettcher Contributing Reporter Given Yale's age and the often fantastic imaginations of its students, it is surprising that ghost stories have not really entered the school's oral tradition. To be sure, every Halloween various student publications manage to dig up a ghost story (such as the spectral presence in the School of Music), but one could hardly call Yale haunted. That is not say, however, that Yale and its students have not had a bizarre affinity for death and its trappings. In 1832, Yale College entered into an agreement with the painter and patriot, Colonel John Trumbull. In exchange for his series of paintings of the American Revolution, Yale consented to pay Trumbull $1,000 each year for the remainder of his life. In addition to this sum, Yale promised to keep the remains of Trumbull and his wife, Sarah, beneath his favorite painting, his portrait of "George Washington at the Battle of Trenton." Upon Trumbull's death in 1843, Colonel and Mrs. Trumbull were interred in the Trumbull Gallery, which was at that time on Old Campus. Today, their bodies can be found, marked by a worn tablet, in the old sculpture hall connecting Street Hall with the Yale University Art Gallery. To be sure that his wishes would be forever honored, Trumbull stipulated that if Yale ever reneged on its commitment to serve as his final resting place, the painting should go to Harvard. Harvard has not yet had the pleasure of owning the works. In the same year that Yale was entertaining Col. Trumbull's bizarre request, fifteen Yale students met for clandestine evening rites, forming what would be known to its members as "Eulogia" or to the rest of Yale as "Skull and Bones." Skull and Bones, by its very name, evokes a sense of the macabre. The name is not in vain. According to Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg, in his 1871 book "Four Years at Yale," actual human remains were involved in tap rituals and other society traditions. He writes, "It is said that formerly the fifteen Bones men, at midnight, silently moved from their hall to the rooms of the chosen ones, when the leader, in each case displaying a human skull and bone, said simply, 'Do you accept?' and whatever was the reply, the procession as silently departed." Bagg goes on to write that after tap night, the new members were photographed "in front of an antique clock whose hands point to the hour of eight -- about a table on which lies a skull ... the thigh bones are held by certain members." Another persistent rumor about Bones is that its members must lie in a coffin as they give their biographies. This may have some basis in fact. According to a turn-of-the-century article in The New York Times, an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus arriving at the Port of New York had been purchased by the Russell Trust Association. This is Skull and Bones' corporate moniker, named after its founder, Gen. William Huntington Russell. A short-lived secret society of the 1860s shared Skull and Bones' obsession with mortality, at least in name. Lyman Bagg describes the group, called "Spade and Grave," writing "[t]he 'Bed and Broom' it was first called by outsiders; and by more respectful ones, the society was known as 'Graves,' and its members were 'Graves men.' None of these names were ever popular, however, and 'Diggers' soon came to be the only title by which the society or its members were referred to." Perhaps the supreme expression of Yale's fascination with death was the ritual known as the "Burial of Euclid." As early as 1843, members of the sophomore class, having become intimately acquainted with Euclid by way of their math lessons, would gather for the "funeral" of the Greek mathematician. In lieu of a body, the students used a mathematics text. According to Bagg, the ceremony proceeded in the following manner: a huge fireplace poker was heated and driven through the center of the book, so that the students may at last "see through" the content. The smoking volume was then passed over the students' heads so that they could "understand" it. Finally, the assembled sophomores stepped on the book in a "solemn processio n" to prove that they had "gone over" the material. The body [i.e. the book] was then laid on a bier, decked out with sable pall and carried with great pomp to an open grave, where it was laid to rest with three coins, so that it might pay the ferryman as it crossed the river Styx. In later years, an effigy of Euclid was burned in grand funeral pyre while the sophomores gathered by torchlight wearing "fiendish masks and satanic habiliments." Though Euclid was last buried in 1861, the event lives on in the lyrics of a traditional Yale song: "In soph'more year we have our task -- Fol, de rol, de rol, rol, rol! 'Tis best performed by torch and mask -- Fol
[CTRL] Campus has many skeletons in closets
from: http://www.yale.edu/ydn/paper/3.31/3.31.95storyno.KC.html - Campus has many skeletons in closets By Graham Boettcher Contributing Reporter Given Yale's age and the often fantastic imaginations of its students, it is surprising that ghost stories have not really entered the school's oral tradition. To be sure, every Halloween various student publications manage to dig up a ghost story (such as the spectral presence in the School of Music), but one could hardly call Yale haunted. That is not say, however, that Yale and its students have not had a bizarre affinity for death and its trappings. In 1832, Yale College entered into an agreement with the painter and patriot, Colonel John Trumbull. In exchange for his series of paintings of the American Revolution, Yale consented to pay Trumbull $1,000 each year for the remainder of his life. In addition to this sum, Yale promised to keep the remains of Trumbull and his wife, Sarah, beneath his favorite painting, his portrait of "George Washington at the Battle of Trenton." Upon Trumbull's death in 1843, Colonel and Mrs. Trumbull were interred in the Trumbull Gallery, which was at that time on Old Campus. Today, their bodies can be found, marked by a worn tablet, in the old sculpture hall connecting Street Hall with the Yale University Art Gallery. To be sure that his wishes would be forever honored, Trumbull stipulated that if Yale ever reneged on its commitment to serve as his final resting place, the painting should go to Harvard. Harvard has not yet had the pleasure of owning the works. In the same year that Yale was entertaining Col. Trumbull's bizarre request, fifteen Yale students met for clandestine evening rites, forming what would be known to its members as "Eulogia" or to the rest of Yale as "Skull and Bones." Skull and Bones, by its very name, evokes a sense of the macabre. The name is not in vain. According to Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg, in his 1871 book "Four Years at Yale," actual human remains were involved in tap rituals and other society traditions. He writes, "It is said that formerly the fifteen Bones men, at midnight, silently moved from their hall to the rooms of the chosen ones, when the leader, in each case displaying a human skull and bone, said simply, 'Do you accept?' and whatever was the reply, the procession as silently departed." Bagg goes on to write that after tap night, the new members were photographed "in front of an antique clock whose hands point to the hour of eight -- about a table on which lies a skull ... the thigh bones are held by certain members." Another persistent rumor about Bones is that its members must lie in a coffin as they give their biographies. This may have some basis in fact. According to a turn-of-the-century article in The New York Times, an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus arriving at the Port of New York had been purchased by the Russell Trust Association. This is Skull and Bones' corporate moniker, named after its founder, Gen. William Huntington Russell. A short-lived secret society of the 1860s shared Skull and Bones' obsession with mortality, at least in name. Lyman Bagg describes the group, called "Spade and Grave," writing "[t]he 'Bed and Broom' it was first called by outsiders; and by more respectful ones, the society was known as 'Graves,' and its members were 'Graves men.' None of these names were ever popular, however, and 'Diggers' soon came to be the only title by which the society or its members were referred to." Perhaps the supreme expression of Yale's fascination with death was the ritual known as the "Burial of Euclid." As early as 1843, members of the sophomore class, having become intimately acquainted with Euclid by way of their math lessons, would gather for the "funeral" of the Greek mathematician. In lieu of a body, the students used a mathematics text. According to Bagg, the ceremony proceeded in the following manner: a huge fireplace poker was heated and driven through the center of the book, so that the students may at last "see through" the content. The smoking volume was then passed over the students' heads so that they could "understand" it. Finally, the assembled sophomores stepped on the book in a "solemn procession" to prove that they had "gone over" the material. The body [i.e. the book] was then laid on a bier, decked out with sable pall and carried with great pomp to an open grave, where it was laid to rest with three coins, so that it might pay the ferryman as it crossed the river Styx. In later years, an effigy of Euclid was burned in grand funeral pyre while the sophomores gathered by torchlight wearing "fiendish masks and satanic habiliments." Though Euclid was last buried in 1861, the event lives on in the lyrics of a traditional Yale song: "In soph'more year we have our task -- Fol, de rol, de rol, rol, rol! 'Tis best performed by torch and mask -- Fol, de rol, de rol, rol, ro
