For those of you that may not know much about the University of Virginia, the only thing you need to know as background information for this story is that UVA has secret societies. Some are super super secret with their members only being revealed after death, like the 7 Society, while others are semi-secret where members are not required to hide their identities, like the P.U.M.P.K.I.N Society.
I personally am extremely interested in secret societies. I always wanted to be a member of one but sadly that never happened.
I promise that this actually happened and that we were all of sound mind.
It all happened one night during my second year in college. Two of my roommates, Samantha and Abby, and I were hungry so we decided to go get some food at this place called “The Castle” (before it was redone into the new, weird version it is now). We get to The Castle and I’m about to get in line when I notice that Abby isn’t with Samantha. I ask her where Abby is and she says something like “I don’t know, she went that way”, but there was only one way in to the food place so I was like “What do you mean? How could she go any other way?” and Samantha said “A bunch of people in black robes walked by so she ran after them” and I BOOKED it out of there with my secret society radar on and ran off to find these people wearing black robes.
Luckily I ran into my roommate just around the corner as she was following the group which had about 7 people in it. The robes had hoods but no one was wearing them which I thought was strange. They were walking in step at a very fast pace while one of the secret society members was holding some type of big picture in a frame. Abby and I followed them for a loooooooonnnnnggggggggg time but the group was just going in circles around some of the old dorms. While we were following the secret society, two other seemingly normal guys joined us and were all enthusiastic about the fact that we were in pursuit of a secret society. They said that they would keep following them and that we should catch the group head on by going the opposite way. Abby and I were naive and thought this was a great idea so we started running the opposite way, turned the corner to go down a side street between the back of one of the dorms and a cemetery, and the secret society was gone. Like they completely vanished. Only those two dude were standing in the road.
We asked the guys where the robed people went and they responded with “I don’t know… they just disappeared…” then walked off. Well, Abby and I obviously knew something was up and were wondering how seven people could just disappear like that when Abby goes “Kassie, look up there”, points up the hill to the cemetery, and there they were. All 7 of them were standing in a semi-circle, hoods now on, the big picture thing was in the middle of the semi-circle, and they were quietly chanting something. I completely flipped out when I saw this because I get scared SUPER easily and ran almost all of the way down the side street. Abby was much braver.
So Abby comes walking to me, making fun of me for high-tailing it out of there, and then says that she wants to get a closer look. So she then proceeds to climb up the hill, gets on the ground, and starts army crawling through all of the cemetery foliage in the middle of the night. I stayed right where I was on the street because there is absolutely no way I would ever find myself crawling through a historic cemetery at night to spy on a weird group of chanting robed people. That’s a big nope from me.
At this point Samantha is asking where we were because we left her at the food place for quite awhile and I tell her to come where I am so she can she the secret society people. She finally gets to me, I tell her all of the events, point to the cemetery where the secret society was, and then point to the bushes on the ground and tell her that that is where Abby was. Samantha for some reason decides that she wants to army crawl through cemetery foliage to spy on creepy chanting people too and joins Abby up the hill.
This is where it gets weird…
While Abby and Samantha were in the cemetery, I decided to stay standing on the side of the side street to keep watch in case the secret society left. After a few minutes of not much going on, a car turns down this side street and I see that the driver of the car is wearing a neon green plague doctor mask. I whip out my phone as fast as I could but all of the next events happened so fast. The car with the plague doctor dude drives by and stops right in front of the area where the robed people were chanting. All of the sudden the door opens and some realllllllllly creepy organ music (think Haunted Mansion ride at Disney mixed with Phantom of the Opera) is playing pretty loudly from inside the car. Two girls wearing onesie pajamas proceed to jump out and run up the hill right to the secret society. The car then peels away and parks itself at the end of the street, turns its lights off, and proceeds to sit there. Not sure what plague doctor dude was doing but he was probably watching me. I was trying to rapid fire text Samantha and Abby about what was going on but it all happened at once and I know the messages didn’t make sense.
Samantha came down from the cemetery to figure out what was going on but it was too late… the girls wearing the onesies were gone. We stood there for a little bit as I tried to coherently relay what I just saw but then we decided to go back to the food place because we were hungry and Samantha reported that the secret society people weren’t doing anything besides standing there in semi-circle formation.
We got food and started eating when Abby came back to the food place pretty exasperated and said “You will NEVER believe what just happened! I was up there and these two girls -“, I interrupted asking if they were wearing onesies, and Abby was extremely confused as to how I knew that. I asked if she stopped and questioned them, she said no, I was like “HOW COULD YOU LET THEM GO?!”, and it turns out Abby wasn’t getting any of my text messages so she had no idea that these onesie wearing girls were connected to the secret society (although she probably should have figured it out).
She said that she saw the onesie girls walking around in the cemetery and told them that she was spying on a secret society. The girls apparently said “A secret society? Oh that’s cool… we are just doing a project for our astronomy class” and then they ran off deeper into the cemetery. After that the secret society people went down the hill and started briskly walking away so Abby left the cemetery bushes and came to us.
Still to this day we can’t believe that she let them walk without questioning them… but it definitely adds to the strangeness of the story.
Things to remember:
- Don’t trust seemingly normal dudes that seem interested in helping you catch the secret society.
- If you drive the get away car for secret society people, drive a car that does not have an easy to remember license plate because people like me will memorize it and we will slowly collect information on you over the next few years.
- If you run into girls wearing onesies walking around an old cemetery in the middle of the night, they probably aren’t there for a supposed astronomy assignment.
What a time.
Photo 1: https://66.media.tumblr.com/e963e63c7515b1da8868da03fae56290/tumblr_n15hbjCJpv1rv6w5bo1_500.jpg ; Photo 2: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_r7efe1Ftm4/maxresdefault.jpg ; Photo 3: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/19/81/94/19819410316325e527f9678e397bd628.jpg ; Photo 4: http://mypartyshirt.com/media/catalog/product/a/d/adult-footed-onesie-pajamas-plaid.png
Thoughts About Nothing 
