23 Yale Myths
War, aliens, dead bodies, steam tunnels, squirrels, shantytowns, and mannequins
I was once told that a myth isn’t necessarily a falsehood, it’s just a story we use to explain the things we don’t understand. So Mount Olympus is a myth, yeah, but so is Congress. So is meteorology and the stock market and the mafia. Myths aren’t always true, but they’re attempts to explain situations that are true. A myth is how a human being with limited information makes sense of changing seasons and childbirth and the global supply chain. A myth is a fuzzy suggestion for a link between the world we see and feel, and the forces that produced that world.
So here’s 23 Yale myths—stories that might be true, or might be false—but all explain my lived experience. There’s notes about which ones are factual at the bottom.
The women’s bathroom on the bottom floor of commons (the one closest to the bow wow) is infinite. You can keep walking forever. One of my friends claims that if you walk far enough, you eventually come to a door that opens up into Terminal D in La Guardia.
While that’s only legend, I can confirm that there’s a portal to Grand Central in Commons. You have to go to Rooted and ask for the charred cardamom lentils with extra golden raisins.
That rectangular monument in front of Commons is a cenotaph—a memorial to those buried elsewhere—for Yalies who died during WWI. Considering that Commons is built on the exact same proportions as the monument, and those words on the top of Commons aren’t wines or Swiss ski resorts, they’re WWI battles—so there’s evidence that you can read Commons as a war memorial. A war memorial to dead twenty year olds, where a hundred years later college students are just wondering whether to get chicken or pork dumplings.
The residential college basements were dug during WWII as bunkers. (So why do all the post war colleges still have them…?)
All the residential college basements connect to each other, if you open the right doors.
Actually, the steam tunnels connect most of the colleges and also most buildings that were built back when steam was used to heat the buildings. They’re sweaty concrete corridors full of more or less rusty pipes, and look like a place people were never meant to see. Welcome to the underworld.
Whenever a president visits Yale, the secret service has to tour the steam tunnels to make sure they’re safe. I like to imagine the secret service agents in their suits and sunglasses following some chunky neon-vested Yale security guard on a scamper through these tight, dusty corridors.
If you don’t know your way around, you could get lost in the steam tunnels. I’d say you could wander for days before you find your way out—but the dehydration would get you within hours.
To help with navigation, there’s lines of poems and novels spray-painted on the wall. You know you’re going in the right direction because you’re following the right words. In the industry, we call this practice Breadcrumming. The best trails are the first Harry Potter book, the Aeneid, and the lyrics to TikTok.
I could be convinced that “Peter Salovey” is a constructed personality for a retired voice actor from New Jersey. But, assuming that he is a legitimate figure, that means that between 2017 and 2022, both the dean and president of Yale University were psychologists. (What makes you think that we weren’t living in a psych experiment?)
Speaking of psych experiments: the Milgram shock experiment happened in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall. The room is always locked, but you can’t lock away the truth that 65% of subjects would obey authority, even when it conflicted with their conscience. (Although, as Dar Williams’ Buzzer suggests: it’s more complicated than that.)
Relatedly, I once participated in a psychology experiment that involved receiving electric shocks in a Yale basement but it was fun.
Payne Whitney is so big. But if you added up all the space I’ve used within the building, it wouldn’t be much larger than the average YMCA. My theory is that there’s an entirely separate business run out of Payne Whitney. I told my Dad this and he said, “so it’s a front?” But no. Not necessarily. A front implies that there’s something intentionally criminal going on, and I don’t think that’s the case. Payne Whitney isn’t the lynchpin in New England’s drug trade or anything—it’s probably, like, a computer repair shop. Or a paper products distributor. Something almost disappointingly innocent. (Also, Yale University has no knowledge that their building is being used like this.)
I could be convinced that the same is true of HQ, but I steam tunneled into it while it was under construction and it seems like there’s nothing interesting going on, it’s just a jenky building.
Neville Wisdom is not real. There are no people inside, just mannequins. No one works there.
“Yale replaces people,” an older friend once told me. He was a senior, I was a sophomore, we were standing in Branford Courtyard waiting for someone else. “I see people I thought graduated years ago. And then eventually I realize it isn’t them—it’s just someone who looks exactly like them. Somehow Yale knows the characters it wants, and it just keeps casting them.” “So I’ll see you again?” I ask. “Yeah,” he says. The scary part is, he’s right. Years later, there’s a first year who looks just like him.
The squirrels in Branford Courtyard are selected through a holistic admissions process, and only the healthiest, most active, most normal looking squirrels are allowed in. Branford Courtyard is Yale’s favorite self-representation, it’s on every postcard— they wouldn’t let anything imperfect happen here.
Students once built a shantytown in Beinecke plaza to demonstrate against apartheid.
The Lipstick statue in Morse was originally in Beinecke Plaza, and the lipstick tube was inflatable—which is some sort of comment about masculinity, the Vietnam war, and Yale as a newly coeducational institution? It was designed by Claes Oldenburg, who is apparently really famous but I viscerally hate his work (especially the Floor Burger). Students commissioned Oldenburg to design something with a political message that would make the Yale administration crawl out of their skin—but because it was done by such a famous artist, the Yale administration wouldn’t be able to destroy it. Basically, students knew the only thing that might crack Yale’s political suppression was Yale’s elitism. The solution was for Yale to fossilize Lipstick Ascending as the rigid, unusable structure we have today and then tuck it away in Morse, Eero Saarinen’s postwar granola bar—as if to say that injustice was a problem we resolved in the 60s and nobody has anything to rally for anymore.
Written in 2003: “One way to make sense of the university’s financial standing is to consider where Yale would fit in the corporate economy were it not classified as non-profit. The surprising truth is that, by almost any measure, Yale’s wealth places it among the largest corporations in the country. Depending on which measure is used, Yale would rank between 250 and 300 in the Fortune 500 listing. Ranked by total assets, the most conservative measure in 1995 placed Yale squarely among the corporate giants, ahead of such well-established firms as Turner Broadcasting, General Dynamics and Nike.”
Everyone knows the legend about how Sterling Memorial Library was designed as a cathedral, but someone told the architect, “we said we wanted a library, not a church,” so he just crossed out “cathedral” and instead wrote “library” and used the same plan. But James Gamble Rogers, the architect, originally intended to juxtapose Sterling Memorial Library with a chapel of equal proportions—symbolizing Yale University’s focus on both faith and knowledge, equally pursuing light and truth. After the university discontinued compulsory chapel in 1926, however, it was hard to justify building a cathedral while Battell Chapel was already empty. So there was always supposed to be a chapel on the other side of College Street.
Harkness Tower is a honing beacon for aliens. It’s been glowing blue this week.
Somewhere on Science Hill there’s an unlabeled room full of radioactive waste.
Autopsies were illegal in the United States until the late 1800s. But the Yale Medical School originally operated out of SSS, right across the street from the Grove Street Cemetery. Legend has it that professors would rob fresh graves and give midnight lectures on what was really inside the human body.
I worked at the anthropology lab for a semester. I repress a lot of stories about what I did there, which is ideal for HIPPA regulations—but I can say that Yale is in possession of a shocking amount of human remains. Most of them are just skeletal, but my PI once took me into the lab on the other side of the building, unlocked a totally normal-looking cabinet, and rolled out an entire corpse. He then showed me the fridge where they kept monkey semen. It was a weird day.
There’s a room full of brains in jars at the med school.
True: 3, 6, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23
Possibly true or kinda true: 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21
Stuff I just made up: 1, 2, 4, 14, 19
A few sources:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/599848