Skull and Bones Tomb

In the middle of Yale's campus in New Haven, Connecticut, there's a brownstone building with almost no windows. Members of the secret society Skull and Bones call it the Tomb, and for more than a century it has been accused of hiding a stolen human skull behind its locked door.

The society was founded at Yale in 1832, and the Tomb went up at 64 High Street in stages: a windowless first wing in 1856, a matching second wing in 1903, Neo-Gothic towers in 1912. Portland brownstone, an Egyptian-tomb face, no way to see in. Its members are called Bonesmen. They've included William Howard Taft, both George Bushes, and John Kerry — in 2004, both candidates for president were Bonesmen.

And the building is accused of holding skulls. Martin Van Buren's. Pancho Villa's. But the one that won't go away belongs to the Apache leader Geronimo.

The story is that in 1918, a handful of Bonesmen stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma dug up his grave and carried the skull back to the Tomb. One of them, the legend says, was Prescott Bush — father and grandfather of two presidents. There is even a letter. In 2006 a historian found it in Yale's own archives, written in 1918 by a member named Winter Mead: the skull "exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club," he wrote, "is now safe inside the T—."

But Mead wasn't there. The man who found the letter, Marc Wortman, said it plainly: "Historically, it may be impossible to prove it's Geronimo's." Geronimo's grave was unmarked and overgrown in 1918, so the raiders may not have found the right one at all. Yale calls the whole thing a hoax.

In 2009, twenty of Geronimo's descendants sued to get the remains back. A judge threw the case out — not because the skull wasn't there, but on procedural grounds. He never ruled on what's inside.

And nobody has ever opened the door to check.