On the 10th of October, 1873, a blindfolded man was lead out to the gorges near Cornell
University.
It was part of a prank – an initiation ritual to a college society that the man had applied
to join.
Before the night was over, though, this man would be dead – just one of many people
throughout history who lost their life during the ritual process of hazing.
Fraternities and sororities have existed on college campuses in America since the 1700s.
They provide community, networking opportunities, social events, and academic support for their
members.
Often they own a dedicated house or dorm on campus where active members live and study
together.
New students who wish to become part of a fraternity or sorority express interest at
the start of term.
A “rush” follows: a period during which applicants are invited to social events to
get to know existing members… and allow those members to determine if they’ll be
a good fit.
Applicants who find favour with existing members are offered a “bid” – a provisional
offer of membership – and are thereafter known as “pledges”.
Pledges are usually required to undergo a trial period before they become full members.
This may be as simple as a brief orientation or a week or two of doing chores for existing
members, but it can also take the form of a violent or humiliating hazing.
Hazing activities vary enormously.
In most cases existing members put pledges through a series of unpleasant experiences:
encouraging them to drink to excess, take part in games, eat unpleasant foods and drink
unpleasant drinks, or perform humiliating or painful rituals or dares.
The ostensible purpose of hazing is to help the members of the fraternity of sorority
to bond.
All established members have survived the hardship of a hazing, and are bound by their
experience of mutual suffering.
Hazings do, however, often go wrong.
In fact there’s a history of hazing deaths which stretches back hundreds of years.
Here are just a few of the earliest cases.
Mortimer M Leggett was, by all accounts, a quiet and hard-working young man.
He began his studies at Cornell University in September of 1873, and was soon invited
to join Kappa Alpha Society.
Kappa Alpha, founded in 1825, was one of the very first fraternities ever to form in the
United States.
The Cornell chapter had been around for less than ten years at this point, and was generally
thought of as a worthwhile and beneficial society.
Mortimer had enjoyed his time at Cornell, and had even written home to remark on how
friendly and welcoming his classmates were.
In this letter he noted that the college did not entertain hazing rituals.
This was not entirely true.
On the night of the 10th of October, Mortimer was invited to take part in some preliminaries
before his induction into Kappa Alpha.
These preliminaries would, it turn out, take the form of a long and tiring blindfolded
night-time walk through town.
The walk ended in a field beside one of Cornell’s famous gorges.
By the time he got there, Mortimer was visibly exhausted.
He’d been walking arm in arm with an established fraternity member all this time.
But, seeing that he was tired, another came to assist him.
The two members guided Mortimer to a tree, against which they rested to recover their
strength.
In the moonlight, none of the three noticed that the tree stood on the very edge of a
gorge.
As they relaxed against it, they slipped around the trunk and tumbled over the edge of a sheer
drop.
They landed on hard-packed earth, head-first in Mortimer’s case.
There were several fraternity members in the field when the fall took place – some of
them guiding other blindfolded pledges.
They immediately sent word to town, and started searching for a safe route down into the gorge.
All three of the young men were injured, but Mortimer’s injuries were the most severe.
While the other two survived the accident, Mortimer would die later that night at the
house of a local physician.
The death shocked the community, and lead to an internal investigation by the university.
It was ultimately concluded that Mortimer was in the field of his own free will, and
that he had not been coerced.
As such, the fraternity members who had taken him on his blindfolded walk were not blamed
for his death.
Despite this, the university paper called for a formal ban on hazing activities – a
ban that would indeed come into effect two years later.
As a reporter for the Ithaca Journal wrote: “If societies themselves are beneficial;
if they are conducive of fraternity and good fellowship among the students, or of anything
valuable and credible, retain them.
But on the contrary, the practice of these rude and unfeeling ceremonies are always reprehensible
and frequently attended with deplorable accidents.”
Another accident in 1905 took place in Gambier, Ohio, at Kenyon College.
New student Stuart L Pierson – the son of a wealthy timber merchant – was applying
to join the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity.
As part of an initiation ritual he was sent out alone to an isolated railway bridge, and
told to take with him a length of rope, a razor, some fig cakes, and a bottle of chloroform.
This was common for fraternity initiations.
Pledges were often tied up, blindfolded and left in remote locations.
In this case the chloroform was, according to fraternity members, a bluff – an item
that Stuart was told to take with him in order to create a sense of fear and uncertainty
about what was to happen during the initiation.
Joining Delta Kappa Epsilon was a big deal for Stuart, and his father had decided to
come out to Gambier to be present for the initiation.
His train had been delayed, however, and Stuart had stayed up all night waiting for him to
arrive.
Thus, when Stuart got to the railway bridge, he was extremely tired.
What happened next is not categorically known… but at 9:41pm, Stuart was hit by a passing
train on the railway bridge, and instantly killed.
In the aftermath of this shocking accident, speculation was rife.
Fraternity members suggested that Stuart had fallen asleep next to the train tracks and,
startled awake by the sound of the approaching train, had stumbled into its path.
Stuart’s father, distraught, accepted this explanation, and arranged for his son’s
body to be transported home to Cincinnati as soon as possible.
Stuart’s remains were removed so quickly that the coroner had to follow them to the
city in order to carry out an examination.
During this process he noted that Stuart’s wrists bore marks as though they had been
tied with cords, and that his shoulder and wrist were dislocated as though he had struggled
to free himself from those cords.
It was posited that fraternity members had, in fact, tied Stuart to the tracks in order
to scare him... having first checked the train schedule to ensure that no trains were due.
The train that hit and killed Stuart had been an unscheduled one.
Although an inquest took place, a Grand Jury refused to charge anyone in Stuart’s death,
and it was left uncertain whether he had fallen asleep and been startled into the path of
the train, or tied to the tracks as part of a poorly-planned hazing ritual.
The death remains, to this day, an unfortunate chapter in the history of the college.
On the evening of the 20th of February, 1894, Cornell University held its annual freshman
banquet to welcome new students to the school.
Hazing, despite the earlier ban, was now common at the establishment – and extended beyond
the fraternities and sororities.
Each year second-year (or sophomore) students would target first year (or freshman) students
for brutal hazings.
In previous years freshmen had been kidnapped, shaved bald, and abandoned in the countryside.
For this year’s freshmen banquet something altogether more elaborate was planned.
Sophomores had infiltrated the building where the banquet was due to take place and drilled
holes through the ceiling of an empty office which they calculated to be directly below
the banquet hall.
On the night of the banquet, sophomores barricaded the doors of the banquet hall, ran rubber
tubing through the pre-drilled holes, and attached jars of homemade chlorine gas.
It was hoped that the choking effects of the chlorine would cause a panic amongst the freshmen,
ruining their welcome banquet and serving as a thorough hazing.
Unfortunately, the sophomores involved made two mistakes.
Firstly, they failed to understand how dangerous chlorine gas could be.
And secondly, they had not drilled into the banquet hall, but instead into the kitchen,
where a group of caterers was at work.
These caterers instantly began to suffer pain and shortness of breath.
Believing a faulty stove to be the cause, they shut the doors between the kitchen and
the main banqueting space, and proceeded to extinguish and remove the stove.
This did nothing to help, and after several minutes of violent choking, they evacuated
the kitchen.
Henrietta Jackson – a cook – barely made it outside with the help of her colleagues.
Her breathing was laboured, and she was struggling to walk.
Her co-workers carried her to the nearby house of a doctor… but by the time she arrived
it was already too late.
She died before the doctor could provide any medical help.
Because the caterers had shut the doors between the kitchen and the hall, the freshman banquet
was unaffected.
Despite long and convoluted court proceedings in the aftermath of Henrietta’s death, the
sophomores responsible for the poisoning were never positively identified.
Though there were several suspects, there simply wasn’t enough evidence to pin the
crime on any of them.
Though, undoubtedly, several people knew who the guilty parties were, they refused to divulge
this information.
Henrietta was buried in Ithaca City Cemetery, with Cornell class officers raising funds
for her grave marker.
Her funeral was attended by many students of the university.
She had been an innocent victim…
but hers would not, by any means, be the last death that could be attributed to a poorly-planned,
misplaced hazing ritual.