Perhaps the most enduring spirit is the one evoked by the Jack O’Lantern, the college’s humor magazine that was founded in 1908 and welcomed the wry observations of Theodore Geisel, Class of 1925 who created his pen name Dr.
Even the Inn has a few ghosts who interact very selectively with guests. The grand Greek Revival building at 9 School Street that is headquarters for Panarchy, a Dartmouth undergraduate society is said to be haunted. Ghosts also are said to haunt the room beneath the famous bell tower in Baker Library. The women – who would have been unauthorized guests – are not identified. Further investigation revealed that the faces of the apparitions matched the photographs of the nine who died. More than one Dartmouth student, alone late at night in the laundry room of the new basement finds himself face to face with a room that isn’t there and a party of young men in tuxedos and their dates in ball gowns. The Alpha Theta house on North Main Street was razed in 1940 and a new one built on the spot, which is where the ghosts, literally come in.
The most prominent among them is the sad tale of nine undergraduates who perished in 1934 in a carbon monoxide accident while sleeping in their fraternity house attic. Deep in the storied history of Dartmouth College, one of the oldest colleges in America, founded in 1769, are the scattered ghost stories of youth and romance torn asunder.