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Initiation
Benjamin Green
As I sit down to pen these words, I can hear the storm outside raging. It’s like the night Pledge Peterson disappeared, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I know the end is near. The Grim Reaper is leering over my shoulder, and I want to unburden myself before he comes for it. The others are gone, and I am the last keeper of our black little secret. I should have carried it to my grave, but on a night like this, the burden is too great.
It all began in October of 1954. I was a senior at Cromwell Academy, a second-tier Ivy League school with pretensions. I was also a frat brother at Chi-Alpha-Omega. That was the fraternity to belong to. We saw ourselves as being the equals of Yale’s Skull and Bones.
It’s easy to laugh at us now. A bunch of bourgeois boys acting like cultural snobs. What you children of the Sixties don’t realize is what a schizophrenic time it was. The Fifties was pregnant with the radical egalitarianism of the Sixties, but the old class colors still flew with pride.
All of us were WASPs that came from upper-middle class New England families. Most of us had gotten too many gentlemen’s C’s to get into Harvard. So places like Cromwell Academy welcomed us with open arms. But I’m starting to digress.
We the brothers of Chi-Alpha-Omega saw ourselves as the New England blue-bloods, even if our family money was less than a generation old. Our fraternity was meant to keep the riff-raff out.
Cromwell Academy might accept the hoi polloi in the name of academic excellence, but the fraternity was about keeping the class distinctions alive.
By 1954, a new wind was blowing across the land. The Supreme Court had handed down its Brown v. Board of Education decision. While it was Kansas, a chill wind blew over us. We spent months after that arguing what we were going to do about that.
Everyone lived in mortal fear that a Negro would apply to our fraternity. There were a few tokens on the campus, to show how open-minded we were. Nobody doubted for a second the Burger court would overturn our free association rights in the name of making a political statement.
After much debate, we decided to let Anthony Peterson pledge. Though his family had renounced Judaism three or four generations ago, he might as well have had KOSHER tattooed on his forehead. As we used to say, Not out kind, dear.
As distasteful as the idea was, we saw it as better than having to accept a Negro. Plus, there was no promise he would make it through the initiation. That was the genesis of an idea that would haunt us for the rest of our lives.
There was a street in that college town called Gaylord. Today, I suppose it would be called a slum. Then, we said the neighborhood was down at the heels.
Anyway, Gaylord turns into a dirt track up to a rambling Victorian mansion generations of undergraduates have dubbed Haunted Hill. The house was razed in the early Seventies as an eyesore, but all plans to build something on the land have fallen through.
The man who built it was a reputed robber baron, and a notorious recluse. He created the college just before the turn of the century, with one caveat: it was not to bear his name.
When he died in the teens, the Gilded Age was still alive, but on life support. After the Great War, the climate became forbidding to such palaces to vanity. The mansion stayed unoccupied, and a legend began growing up around it that it was haunted.
With this in mind, we decided that in the spirit of the season, Pledge Peterson would have to spend the night in the old mansion. And because we didn’t believe in ghosts, frat brothers Hyde and Pratt would do the honors.
After all, we didn’t believe, but that wasn’t going to stop us from exploiting the legend. If we were going to have to break bread with a Jew, he was going to have to earn the right.
Are you shocked by this, dear reader? This was how we thought back then. We were looking forward to watching him run screaming out the front door.
The evening’s festivities began with a Judas meal. Pledge Peterson was told about what he must do for his initiation. Then we started telling him stories about the haunted mansion. Since most of it was vague on details, we embellished it to suit our purposes without shame.
Frank Hyde and Jeremy Pratt left, claiming disgust that we would fill the kid’s head with nonsense. All of us at the table had trouble maintaining straight faces while we were doing this.
Anthony soaked all of this up like a sponge. His eyes got wider and wider behind his horn-rimmed frames. I kept hoping he would back out, but only because I didn’t want to go out on a wild night like that one. Pledge Peterson wouldn’t though, so we all loaded into my 1936 Plymouth.
As the cliché goes, it was a dark and stormy night. The wind howled and shrieked through the skeletal trees, and the lightning opened the heavens with a strobing effect. Rain poured out of the sky, so the windshield wipers didn’t have a chance of keeping up.
I had to keep the speed down, to avoid driving off the road. The drive out there was a nerve-wracking experience. Part of it was an extended period of repressing laughter.
Once we left Gaylord proper, there was the threat of mud. By all rights, that track should have become a quagmire, stopping us before we did what we did. Somehow though, whoever was watching over us saw that we got through.
I don’t think it was God. Any divine being that would allow us to continue on would be a cruel, capricious monster.
Mind you, it wasn’t easy. There were several kidney-jolting potholes, and heart-in-the-throat moments where the back wheels spun. Somehow, the old Plymouth managed to claw its way to the top of the hill. Once it reached the gates, it spluttered, and died.
I looked at Pledge Peterson, and said, “There is no way off this hill tonight, unless you want to brave the elements. Your other option is to brave the haunted mansion.”
Anthony was white as a sheet, and trembling. It was clear that was the last thing he wanted. He had no choice at this point, though. I had bullied my car up here, and now I was feeling mean. If he backed out on us now, he would be hounded off the campus. It was as simple as that.
Everyone piled out of the car. The wind resisted our attempts to open the doors, and the rain slashed at us like liquid knives. We should have recognized them as the omens they were. However, in the arrogance of youth, we figured it would add credence to our haunted house tale.
We followed him part way up to the porch, and called out to him that we would be waiting outside for him. Then Percy Wainright said, “Don’t be more than an hour, or two! We might get bored otherwise!” There was no repressing our mirth.
Then we beat a hasty retreat. By the time we climbed back inside my car, all of us were soaked to the bone. Percy opened the glove box, and peeled off the cellophane wrapper of a pack of Lucky Strikes. He produced a book of matches, and we all lit up.
“Do you think this old heap will ever run again,” somebody asked.
“Of course it will. The old girl will still be running when you are all dead and gone.” Little did I realize how prophetic those words would be.
As we continued smoking and waiting, the talk turned to how long it would take Hyde and Pratt to scare the socks off Pledge Peterson. A betting pool was established as to how long he would hold out. Because we were poor college students, it did not rise above the level of penny-ante.
As our cigarettes began burning down, and most of us lost our bets, the first doubts began setting in. We had a second round of cigarettes, then a third.
Somewhere along the way, the windows were cracked, to keep the air breathable. By the time we’d smoked our Luckies as far as we could, we began getting concerned.
Not so much for Peterson as Hyde and Pratt. Neither of them appeared, to boast of their exploits. We might have felt different if we’d heard that Pledge Peterson had a heart attack. After all, the aim was to scare him, not kill him.
A check of my watch showed that it was almost two o’clock. If they hadn’t succeeded in chasing away that little Jew-boy by now, we’d be stuck with him.
The question now became, what happened to Hyde and Pratt? They should have given up long ago, but given a status report on how they had done.
Percy volunteered to hunt everyone down, and put an end to all this foolishness. The rest of us tried passing the time with conversation, but by now, we were all aware that something was seriously wrong. None of us had any clue how wrong, though.
After half an hour, Percy also failed to return. I was nervous, and out of sorts, so I said I would go next. After scrounging up a flashlight, I set off.
The storm had abated to a steady rainfall, but the air was charged with electricity, as if the storm was set to resume at its full fury at a moment’s notice.
The house could be best described as Medieval Ugly meets Victorian Decadence. Plus, it was pained in dark shades of gray and blue, which further added to its forbidding exterior.
This may sound strange to you, dear reader, but the house seemed to radiate an aura of menace beyond that. It was almost as if it was laughing at me, challenging me to unwrap the enigma of what it had done.
My heart quailed before it. Then I thought of Frank, Jeremy, and Percy, and I forced myself into action.
I almost turned back as my flashlight fell on the bronze gargoyles. They leered at me with evil intent. Then the door swung open. Knowing I had no choice, I went in. The doors slammed shut behind me.
I half-expected to be greeted by a zombie English butler in the lobby. If the house had one, it chose not to put him on display. I began tearing throughout the house, calling out for my friends.
In some of the rooms, I found dirty red velvet rugs, and furniture covered with white sheets. Dust and cobwebs were everywhere. Pictures of stern men in costumes that were at least a hundred years out of date stared down at me with cold, fishy eyes. I also had the sense of a dark malicious creature hiding in the shadows, enjoying my torment.
I called out for my friends. Nobody returned my hailing. I heard inaudible whispers, and a few times there was a dirty chuckle. However, there were no signs of anybody. On the second floor were bedrooms, and the third floor was dedicated to storage, but there were no signs of anyone human being up there for decades.
I was just about to give up, when I heard a pounding sound in the attic. Aware that the house could be setting me up for one of its tricks, I went up into the attic.
There was nobody there either, but there was a doorway to the roof. I found Percy sitting on the point of the roof. His hair had gone snow white, and he was giggling, and pounding the roof with a hammer.
The next couple of days were a blur. There was a minor sensation in town. Because we all hung together, and kept our mouths closed, the investigation ground to a halt for lack of evidence.
The entire affair ended as a tempest in a teapot, but it spelled the end of Chi-Alpha-Omega. After we swore a blood oath never to reveal what we knew, the integrity of our fraternity was compromised.
There were a couple attempts to revive it, but the Sixties killed it, and Cromwell Academy. It closed in the Seventies, and is now a private school. Percy died in an insane asylum three years later, never uttering another coherent word.
The first chance I got, I tried getting rid of that 1936 Plymouth. Despite my best efforts, it keeps coming back, like that proverbial bad penny.
Now my grandson owns it, and is turning it into a hot rod. Every time I see the damned thing, it brings back a flood of bad memories. So do thunderstorms. Whenever the weather is like this, I think of Anthony, Frank, and Jeremy.
They vanished off the face of the earth, and they are waiting for me on the other side. And they are very angry.
