BY JAY BUSBEE '90
William and Mary Alumni Magazine | Spring/Summer 2006, Vol. 71, No. 3/4
It starts the first day you arrive on campus, a callow freshman ready to soak up all the history the storied College of William and Mary has to offer. Your RA takes you on a tour of the College, pointing out necessary stops like the Caf, the University Center and the delis. But in between, your tour guide drops in the good stuff -- the rumors of a ghost here, stories of a rock 'n' roll connection there. And faster than you can say Christopher Wren, the legends of campus spread to a new class of students.
As with any oral history, the tale grows in the telling -- a story of, say, strange lights in an upstairs window in one generation transforms into a grim legend of a vengeful Civil War wife in the next. Some rumors are playful, some are sinister, some have recent origins, and some have histories nearly as long as the College itself.
Here are several of the more famous ones, along with their (alleged) origins -- see how many you remember from your own College days.
Rumor: If you kiss someone on the Crim Dell bridge, you'll end up married to him/her.
Status: Unverifiable, but nobody's taking any chances.
It's the most famous College rumor of all, the one that sets some hearts a-fluttering and sends some screaming in terror. True or not, its sway is powerful enough to keep many a budding College couple from even walking across the Crim Dell bridge together, lest a stray kiss seal a couple's marital fate.
So how did the rumor get started? Nobody knows, not even the man with some of the deepest institutional memory of anyone connected with William and Mary, Student Affairs Vice President Sam Sadler '64, M.Ed. '71. He notes that the rumor can't date to before 1967, when Crim Dell was built.
"I remember a magazine writing an article and naming Crim Dell as one of the most romantic spots on a campus in the country, and the rumor was included in that article," Sadler says. "I have always suspected that was the genesis of the rumor -- a little creative journalism or perhaps, in typical William and Mary fashion, students being creative in their storytelling to the author."
In recent years, a couple of Crim Dell corollaries have sprung up. Should you kiss someone on the bridge and later change your mind, you have to throw your former beloved off the bridge in order to break the curse. And women shouldn't walk across the bridge alone, lest they be doomed to a life of spinsterhood.
Of course, none of the rumors yet address what happens if you walk across the bridge backwards ... or on one foot ... or at a dead run. ...
Rumor: Ghosts haunt several buildings on campus.
Status: We're not going to say they're false. Ghosts have memories too.
If you believe all the legends, William and Mary's got more ghosts than Paul's Deli has sandwiches. A book published last year by Daniel Barefoot entitled Haunted Halls of Ivy recounts the tales behind the ghosts that fairly swarm Old Campus. For instance, students began hearing mysterious footsteps in the Wren Building shortly after the Revolutionary War; the ghost was said to be anyone from a French soldier who died in the building to Sir Christopher Wren himself. They've apparently got Civil War-era colleagues stationed at the President's House, which was used to house captured Southern soldiers.
And generations of theater students are familiar with "Lucinda," the ghost of a student who, according to legend, won the lead role in Thornton Wilder's Our Town but died in a car crash two weeks before the play's opening. She continues to wander the halls, one of many: "Some rumors suggest there are several -- one in the light booth, one in the scene shop, one in the costume shop, one in the scenery storage/trap room," says Theatre Professor Patricia Wesp '76. "We try not to play favorites -- they're mostly benevolent. Especially the one in the costume shop -- I've fallen off ladders back in the stockroom numerous times over the years, and I've never been injured."
Rumor: William and Mary has the highest student suicide rate in the nation.
Status: False.
The real problem with this most notorious of all campus rumors is that it reduces suicide to a mere statistic, ignoring the tragedy for the sake of mere shock value. That said, the legend fortunately wilts in the hard light of truth. Dr. Kelly Crace, director of the College's counseling center, notes that the most recent surveys on suicide place the annual figure at 10 per 100,000 15-to-24-year-olds. Reduced to William and Mary's enrollment of 7,500, that would correspond to an average rate of 7.5 suicides every 10 years. But the College has recorded a total of 11 suicides since 1968 -- far below the national average.
The question of how the rumor got started in the first place is murkier. Crace notes that one possible origin could be "guilt by association." The College has had in place for 30 years a proactive policy designed to intervene when students threaten to harm themselves. Now called the Medical Emotional Emergency Policy, it was once called the "Suicide Policy," and received national attention for its progressive nature. Of course, it's possible that many people assumed the College wouldn't have in place such a comprehensive policy if there wasn't already a problem -- hence the pervasive rumor.
Rumor: Members of the group Steely Dan attended the College, but left in disgust and recorded the song "My Old School" (lyrics: "Oh, no, William and Mary won't do ...").
Status: False.
The first time you heard jazz-rock legends Steely Dan sing your alma mater's name in their 1974 tune "My Old School," you felt a surge of pride -- hey, U.Va. doesn't have any popular songs written about it. And between the W&M shout-out and the apparent reference to Annandale, a Northern Virginia suburb, it's easy to assume there's a connection between Steely Dan and Our Old School.
Unfortunately, the song has no more to do with William and Mary than William Hung. An early-1980s Flat Hat investigation reportedly found that Steely Dan writers Walter Becker and Donald Fagen selected the College's name simply because it fit the cadence of the song ("Guadalajara" fits the same space in a later chorus), and the Annandale in question is in New York. Even so, the classic "William and Mary won't do" line has been used in roughly half a billion Flat Hat headlines, kiosk flyers and dorm-door signs.
Rumor: If you live with your freshman-year roommate all four years, you get invited to dine with the president.
Status: True.
It's the rare pair of roommates that can make it through four years together without killing one another or splitting off when a better offer comes along. But for those who do, rewards await. Former President Timothy J. Sullivan '66 began a tradition of hosting a luncheon for the long-term roomies. President Gene R. Nichol continues the tradition and in fact dined with 40 students -- that's 20 pairs of roommates -- on April 18 in the Wren Building's Great Hall.
Rumor: Miles of catacombs run beneath Old Campus.
Status: True -- sort of -- but you didn't hear it from us.
The legend of catacombs running beneath the bricks and grass of Old Campus is one of the College's more fascinating rumors. What's down there? Graves? Treasure? Caches of blue books and Psych 101 notes? The truth would disappoint Indiana Jones -- yes, there are tunnels, but they're designed for steam and maintenance pipes -- most definitely not people. The College administration begrudgingly acknowledges their existence, but does nothing to dispel the rumor that getting caught in them means instant expulsion.
As a side note, there is indeed a crypt beneath the Wren Building, but there's no indication it has any connection to the tunnels. Another rumor -- that the tunnels were part of the Underground Railroad -- doesn't hold up to close inspection, as it's unlikely the railroad was running escaped slaves from, say, Ewell Hall to Jefferson Hall.
Rumor: The Dillard Complex used to be a mental hospital.
Status: False, but close.
Eastern State Hospital built what is now known as the Dillard Complex in 1949 to house nursing students who were doing rotations at the hospital. Jess Raymond, residence life area director for Dillard, notes that during the 1965-66 academic year, William and Mary began leasing the buildings to meet the needs of a growing student population; the College finally purchased the buildings in 1980. Dillard itself was never a mental hospital, though patients from Eastern State -- still a fully functioning facility -- have occasionally ventured into the complex.
Rumor: Playboy loves us! Playboy hates us!
Status: False on both counts.
Playboy and William and Mary -- a couple of classic institutions that aren't often mentioned in the same sentence. And yet two major campus rumors connect them. The first one holds that the magazine named Crim Dell the second most romantic spot on any college campus. (Could it have been the one that Sadler was reading in the Crim Dell question above? Hmmm...) The second rumor doesn't exactly jibe with the first -- sometime in the mid-1990s, Playboy apparently named the W&M student body one of the ugliest in the country.
Both are complete nonsense. A recent investigation by the Flat Hat found that as best Playboy researchers could determine, the College and its students have never been mentioned -- or, to the best of our knowledge, displayed -- in its pages.
Rumor: If you touch the statue of Lord Botetourt in front of the Wren Building, you'll get a good grade on your next test.
Status: Unverifiable.
Certainly at a school as competitive and achievement-driven as William and Mary, students would want any advantage they could get -- and rubbing the boots of Botetourt, no matter how strange, would certainly qualify. Unfortunately, College historian Louise Lambert Kale notes that she's never heard of such a tale. And, of course, if there was any truth to the rumor, there'd be lines all the way down to the Capitol Building during exam week.
Jay Busbee '90 is the president of the Atlanta Chapter of the William and Mary Alumni Association. He writes for ESPN.com, Atlanta magazine and many other publications.
