About This Location
A fraternity house at Dartmouth College in Hanover, site of one of New Hampshire's most tragic paranormal legends.
The Ghost Story
Nine fraternity brothers suffocated in their sleep on February 25, 1934, when their furnace chimney blew out and filled the house with carbon monoxide. Their ghosts still gather in the basement, dressed for a party that never ended. The Alpha Theta chapter of Theta Chi occupied a house on North Main Street in Hanover, across from the Dartmouth campus. That Saturday night, someone banked the coal furnace for the evening but failed to leave a glowing center in the fire. A slight explosion broke the metal flue pipe, and poisonous gas seeped through the basement and up through every floor of the wooden structure.
The nine who died were William S. Fullerton, Edward F. Moldenke, William M. Smith Jr., Edward N. Wentworth Jr., Americo S. DeMasi, Wilmot H. Schooley, Harold B. Watson, John J. Griffin, and Alfred H. Moldenke -- Edward's brother. A white collie dog, curled at the foot of one of the beds, also perished. No one discovered the bodies until 4:30 the following afternoon, when the janitor, Merton D. Little, arrived to make the beds and found the house silent and still. The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine reported the tragedy in its March 1934 issue under the headline "Furnace Gas Kills Nine at Theta Chi House."
The surviving brothers were devastated. Membership plummeted, and by the late 1930s the chapter decided the only way forward was to demolish the house entirely and build anew. The current Alpha Theta building was constructed in 1940 on the same site. But the demolition crew left one section of the original structure intact: a portion of the basement containing the laundry room, known within the house as Appalachia. It is this unreconstructed remnant -- the same stone walls, the same floor where the deadly gas first pooled -- that the dead reportedly refuse to leave.
Students doing laundry late at night in the basement describe finding themselves face to face with a room that should not exist and a gathering of young men in tuxedos accompanied by women in ball gowns, laughing and talking as though at a formal party. Those who have examined the faces closely report that they match the photographs of the nine who died in 1934. The apparitions are always dressed for celebration, always gathered together, always in the basement where the gas first accumulated. Other students report rooms appearing and disappearing arbitrarily in the basement -- doorways that open onto spaces that are not part of the building's floor plan, then vanish when the observer looks away.
In 2007, a ghost hunter attempted to gain access to the original basement section to investigate. The fraternity's current members maintain the tradition that the nine brothers still walk the oldest part of their house, trapped in a Saturday night that never became Sunday morning. Alpha Theta is now a gender-inclusive organization, and the house has evolved considerably since 1934. But the basement remembers.