Skull and Bones: Inside Yale's Most Notorious Secret Society

Walk down High Street in New Haven at dusk and the building on your left simply refuses to have windows. It is a squat brownstone block with padlocked iron doors, and the students streaming past treat it the way you treat a neighbor's locked shed, which is strange, because inside that shed, allegedly, are the bones of famous men and the fingerprints of three American presidents.

Skull and Bones was founded at Yale in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft, reportedly after Russell returned from study in Germany and after a campus dispute over the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. It is a senior society: every spring it "taps" fifteen Yale seniors, who spend one year inside before graduating into a famously loyal alumni network administered through the Russell Trust Association. The clubhouse, acquired in 1856 and known as the Tomb, is exactly the building you just walked past.

The membership problem

What makes Bones irresistible to conspiracy writers is not its rituals but its roster. Alphonso Taft's son William Howard Taft became president and chief justice. Both President Bushes were tapped, George H. W. Bush in 1948 and George W. Bush in 1968, as was Senator John Kerry in 1966. That produced the genuinely odd 2004 election, in which both major-party nominees were Bonesmen and both, when asked on national television, declined to discuss it with the same line: it's a secret. Add Henry Luce of Time, Henry Stimson, William F. Buckley Jr., and a long run of bankers, spymasters and judges, and you have a pattern that needs no embellishment. Fifteen people a year from one college is a very small pipe to have carried that much power through it.

The sober explanation is selection, not sorcery. For a century and a half, Yale funneled the American establishment's sons through New Haven, and Bones deliberately tapped the ones already headed for influence. A club that recruits future senators will reliably produce past senators. The society also modernized under protest: after a bitter fight involving alumni who changed the Tomb's locks, women were finally admitted in the early 1990s.

The number, the bones, and Geronimo

The society's emblem, a skull over crossed bones above the number 322, has fed a small industry of speculation, from a reference to the Greek orator Demosthenes to a supposed German mother lodge. Internally it functions as memento mori theater: members reportedly call themselves Knights and everyone else barbarians, and meeting-room lore involves coffins, nicknames and confessional autobiographies. Former members who have talked, and journalists like Alexandra Robbins, who interviewed over a hundred of them for her 2002 book Secrets of the Tomb, describe something closer to an eccentric fraternity with an unusually good donor list than a shadow government.

Then there is the skull. Legend holds that in 1918 a group of Bonesmen serving at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, among them Prescott Bush, dug up the grave of the Apache leader Geronimo and carried his skull back to the Tomb. A 1918-dated letter between members surfaced in Yale's archives referring to such a theft, and in 2009 Geronimo's descendants, led by Harlingen Geronimo, sued the society to recover the remains. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds, and historians note the raiders likely could not have found the right grave. The society has never opened the crypt to settle it, which is, of course, the one move that would end the story.

Whether the Tomb holds stolen skulls or just old furniture and worse port, its alumni network is real, its secrecy is real, and its members really did sit at the controls of the twentieth century. Below, readers have posted their own brushes with secret societies, strange initiations and locked rooms, and the jury sorts them into True, Fake and Not sure. Add your own verdict, barbarian.