Harvard Porcellian Club

The oldest and most exclusive of Harvard's final clubs, founded in 1791. The secretive organization has included Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt among its members. The club's private nature has bred numerous legends.

The Porcellian Club is Harvard's oldest and most secretive final club, founded in 1791 after undergraduate Joseph McKean served a group of friends a dinner of roast pig in his dormitory room. What began as the "Pig Club" evolved into the Porcellian, whose Latin motto "Dum vivimus vivamus" -- "While we live, let us live" -- belies the darker legend that clings to its five-story brick clubhouse at 1324 Massachusetts Avenue. Designed by club member and architect William York Peters and completed in 1890 at a cost of $32,000, the building sits directly across from the McKean Gate, the only entrance to Harvard Yard funded by a student organization, its limestone keystone carved with the club's signature boar's head.

The ghost story associated with the Porcellian traces back to a tale reportedly told by Washington Allston, the celebrated painter and Harvard student for whom Boston's Allston neighborhood is named. According to his account, which appeared in the 1865 collection "Ghost Stories; Collected With A Particular View To Counteract The Vulgar Belief in Ghosts And Apparitions" published by James Miller in New York, a group of Harvard students gathered one evening to share ghost stories. One student loudly proclaimed his complete disbelief in the supernatural, boasting that no apparition could ever frighten him. A fellow student decided to test this claim by dressing in white and entering the skeptic's darkened chamber late at night. Knowing his friend kept loaded pistols beneath his bed, the prankster had secretly removed the bullets beforehand.

When the sleeping student awoke to find a spectral white figure looming over him, he seized his pistol and fired at point-blank range. The figure remained standing. Confronted with what appeared to be proof of the supernatural -- a ghost that could not be killed by a bullet -- the student's mind broke. According to the account, he went into violent convulsions and never regained enough consciousness to learn the truth. He died without ever knowing the "ghost" was merely his classmate in disguise. The story was presented as a cautionary tale about the psychological dangers of exploiting fear, but over the generations it became attached to the Porcellian Club itself, with the victim's restless spirit said to haunt the clubhouse as a warning.

Members and visitors over the years have reported cold spots in the upper floors of the clubhouse, objects shifting position during late-night gatherings, and an unsettling feeling of being watched. The club's legendary secrecy -- "the doings of the club are shrouded in secrecy," noted one historical account -- makes it nearly impossible to verify these claims, as the Porcellian rarely acknowledges outsiders. The building features a one-way mirror that allows members to observe Massachusetts Avenue without being seen, adding to the atmosphere of concealment that feeds the haunting legend.

The Porcellian's roster of members reads like a who's who of American power: Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Justice Louis Brandeis, and poet James Russell Lowell all passed through its doors. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who desperately wanted to follow his cousin Theodore into the club, was blackballed -- a rejection he later called "the greatest disappointment of my life." Whether the ghost of the frightened student still walks the club's upper rooms is a question only the Porcellian's tight-lipped members could answer. The Harvard Square Ghost Tour, which passes by the clubhouse on its route through Cambridge, includes the legend as one of the area's most enduring supernatural tales. According to tour guides, some visitors have reported feeling a sudden chill near the building's entrance even on warm evenings, though whether this is the work of a restless spirit or simply the suggestive power of a good ghost story remains, as with most things Porcellian, a closely guarded secret.