Alpha Theta Fraternity

Nine Dartmouth brothers died in a carbon monoxide accident on February 25, 1934. Basement laundry-room walkers describe a party full of tuxedos.

Students doing laundry late at night in the Alpha Theta basement describe the same thing, over and over: a room that isn't there, and a party full of young men in tuxedos and women in ball gowns. The faces match photographs of the nine brothers who died on February 25, 1934.

Alpha Theta, then the Dartmouth chapter of Theta Chi, occupied a wood-frame house on North Main Street in Hanover. That Saturday night, someone banked the coal furnace but let the center of the fire go cold. A small explosion cracked the metal flue pipe. Carbon monoxide pooled in the basement and rose through every floor of the sleeping house. By the time janitor Merton D. Little arrived at 4:30 the following afternoon to make the beds, nine of the seventeen residents were dead. A white collie, curled at the foot of one of the beds, had died with them.

The dead were Edward F. Moldenke (the chapter president), his brother Alfred, vice president Americo S. DeMasi, William F. Fullerton, John J. Griffin, Wilmot H. Schooley, William M. Smith Jr., Harold D. Watson, and Edward N. Wentworth Jr. The eight survivors happened to be away for the weekend. It remains the deadliest accident in Dartmouth's history. The March 1934 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine covered the accident at length.

The brothers rebuilt in 1941 on the same lot, but they kept one piece of the original structure: a stretch of the basement containing the laundry room. Same stone walls. Same floor where the gas first settled. That's the part nobody quite trusts.

The laundry-room encounters are the signature story. A student walks in late, turns a corner, and finds a doorway that doesn't exist on any floor plan, opening onto a formal party. When they look away and look back, the doorway is gone. Other residents have described rooms that appear and disappear along the basement corridor, always in the unreconstructed section. A few have said they heard a phonograph playing swing music through the wall, with no phonograph in the house.

Alpha Theta is gender-inclusive now, and the house has evolved in every way a house can. The newer basement is just a basement. The older one is where the tuxedos keep showing up.