Ain't No Party Like a Skull & Bones Party
The Facebook privacy snafu really is the gift that keeps on giving (if you're a gossip blog). Here are the elect to Yale's Skull & Bones secretest society partying on their private island (we think) near the Canadian border.
Last night we got to see a video of their "tomb" on High Street in New Haven. But that isn't their only secret lair.
Haruko Castro is a 2008 Yale graduate who was named by both the Yale Rumpus and an anonymous IvyGate commenter as a member of Skull & Bones. One of her Facebook photo albums, that was made public because of the social networking site's new "open" policy shows her and several people who were listed by Rumpus and IvyGate as the Skull & Bones '08 class. In the album, they appear to take a ferry ride somewhere and then hang out in a wood-paneled bungalow with skull and crossbones and animal heads covering the walls. That sounds a lot like the Skull & Bones compound on Deer Island.
Deer Island is a forty-acre retreat on the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York that was reportedly given to Skull & Bones "at some date prior to 1949." According to a report in The Atlantic, the Island was once a well-appointed facility complete with "tennis courts," "softball fields," and "catered elegant meals." These days, sources told The Atlantic that Deer Island is "just a bunch of burned-out stone buildings" and "a dump." In spite of the supposedly Spartan conditions on the island, new Skull & Bones inductees reportedly still visit the Deer Island each year.
Apart from the various Skull & Bones regalia lining the walls of the cabin, there isn't much in Castro's photos that you wouldn't encounter at a typical college house party. The alleged Skull & Bones members appear in the pictures along with discarded cans of Keystone Light, liquor bottles, and a copy of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union.
The most interesting thing about these pictures is that they depict a group that looks entirely like ordinary college kids. Skull & Bones is often described as an elite, exclusive group of old white men who meet together to plot world domination. In truth, the society went co-ed in 1992 and, if these pictures are the real deal, the modern Bonesmen seem to be a reasonably multicultural crew whose main aim is getting wasted and dancing their pants off.
Nicolas Thorne.
Haruko Castro and Noah P. Hood.
Noah P. Hood.
Victor I. Cazares.
Haruko Castro.
Easha Anand and Mark Ro Beyersdorf.
Easha Anand and Mark Ro Beyersdorf.
Lindsay Ullman and Haruko Castro.
Andrew Law, Lauren A. Taylor, Mark Ro Beyersdorf, Victor I. Cazares, Easha Anand, and Sarah Kabay.
Sarah Kabay.
Haruko Castro and Noah P. Hood.
Victor I. Cazares.
Haruko Castro and Andrew Law.
Haruko Castro and Andrew Law.
Haruko Castro and Noah P. Hood.
An unidentified girl and Saad Rizvi.
Easha Anand.
A boy in a hood and Easha Anand.
Crystal Paul-Laughinghouse, someone named Maura, and Victor I. Cazares.
Lindsay Ullman and someone named Maura.
Easha Anand, an unidentified female, Victor I. Cazares, and Mark Ro Beyersdorf.
Lindsay Ullman, Noah P. Hood, Haruko Castro.
Noah P. Hood and Andrew Law.
Nicolas Thorne.
The love of John Mittermeier's life and John Mittermeier.