In Brief
The Alpha Theta fraternity in Hanover, New Hampshire is built over one surviving room of an older house, where nine Dartmouth students died in their sleep in 1934. House tradition says the dead still walk that basement, the room they call Appalachia.
The Full Story
At the Alpha Theta house on North Main Street in Hanover, New Hampshire, there is one room the brothers keep apart from the rest. It's a basement laundry room, near the back stair, that the house calls Appalachia. House tradition holds that the dead walk there, and the dead in question have names and a class year. They are the '34s.
On the morning of Sunday, February 25, 1934, nine Dartmouth undergraduates were found dead in their beds. The house on that spot was then the Alpha Theta chapter of Theta Chi, and the cause was hidden in the basement. The smoke pipe of the coal furnace had blown off in a small explosion overnight. Someone shut the furnace door again without noticing the displaced pipe, and carbon monoxide from the banked fire seeped up through the floors while the brothers slept. A white collie curled somewhere in the house died with them. It is the most fatal accident ever to happen at Dartmouth.
The janitor, Merton D. Little, had come by the house at 6:30 that morning and again at 1:30 in the afternoon. The bodies were not found until 4:30 p.m.
Eight other residents lived only because they had gone away for the weekend. The nine who stayed included William Fullerton, the two Moldenke brothers, Edward and Alfred, and Americo DeMasi. Edward Moldenke was the chapter president. A plaque to all nine was later set over the fireplace in the house library.
In the years after, the house could not shake the dead. Its own history puts it plainly: a number of members "apparently seriously believed that the house was haunted by the ghosts of the dead '34s, and that the only way to remove the curse was to raze the house to the ground and start from scratch."
So they did. Between 1940 and 1941 the original building came down and a new one went up. But they did not erase everything. One part of the old basement was kept, the section that leads to the back stair and holds the laundry room they call Appalachia. The new house was built over it.
That fragment is where the tradition lives. The dead '34s are said to walk it, and in 2007 a ghost-hunter tried to get inside the room. What he found, if anything, nobody wrote down. The house that razed itself to be rid of its dead kept the one room they're said to haunt, and built the rest of itself on top of it.
