Passage to Sphynx from AD
Informant Name: Anonymous
Date Collected: May 16th, 2016
Place Collected: Dartmouth Green
Genre of Folklore: Myth
Informant Data: The informant is a freshman in the class of Dartmouth and he chose to stay anonymous. His major is undecided yet.
Contextual Data: The informant’s school had had many AD’s and the informant had heard legends about the house from both friends at work and his high-school.
Item: “From speaking with a few of the people that I knew attended Dartmouth, they would talk about a secret society, sort of an underground frat that would throw parties. There would be a lot of nebulous facts about where exactly they would have the space to throw parties and how many people knew about it. No one really knows how people get selected for the society, but since AD seems to be one of the most infamous and old frats on Dartmouth campus, it seemed logical when a rumour started going around that the Sphynx (the secret frat) had a door that was in AD’s basement. Since no one had ever been inside of AD and the frat had a reputation of partying hard and being crazy, many freshman I know thought that the Sphynx was accessible through AD and that that was how people got chosen.
Interpretation: I found this slightly questionable as many myths I suppose as I am also a freshman and had heard that that was not true because then it would be too easy for people to sneak in. Since the door would be in the basement, it might also be not as secretive as AD is open to everyone. Additionally, when the house got closed down that would have posed a real problem to the “secret frat.” Overall, this seems just to be a loose myth going around an uninformed class that doesn’t have much first-hand experience with AD.
 
Collected by:

Seb Lim
Dartmouth College
HB 2773
Hanover, NH 03755
Professors Victoria Somoff & Mikhail Gronas
Russian 13: Vampires, Witches, and Firebirds; 16S