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FILE 096 · VOL XVII · Not on Any Map

Harvard's Forbidden Tunnels Are Full of Carved Names. Some Haven't Enrolled Yet.

Every school keeps a list of who it keeps. Some of them are written underground.

Based on: The Harvard Steam Tunnels

Intake record

Recovered file

Under Harvard University there are about three miles of tunnels. [1]

They were built in 1927 to carry the steam pipes that heat the campus. They run between the old brick buildings like veins, dark and narrow, lit by dim bulbs in wire cages. In places the ceiling drops so low that a grown man has to crouch. The pipes hiss. The air is hot and wet and smells like rust. [1]

The tunnels are strictly off-limits. Not just to tourists. To students too. [1]

Students go anyway. They always have. In 2004, Harvard Magazine described six freshmen who spent months planning a run through the tunnels at two in the morning. They popped a sidewalk grate, tripped a silent alarm, and ended up cornered underground by campus police. [2]

And when people do get down there, they find something strange. Carved into the wooden shafts and scratched into the old pipes are initials. Signatures. Names. [1] Generations of them, left by people who were never supposed to be there.

Nobody keeps a list of who wrote them.

That is what everyone believes.

Owen Achterberg was the first person in his family to go to college, and he spent his first month at Harvard feeling like a mistake that nobody had caught yet.

Everyone else seemed to know things. Which professors mattered. Which clubs you were supposed to want. How to talk at dinner without sounding like you were trying. They had parents who had gone here, and grandparents, and names on buildings.

Owen had a scholarship and a part-time job shelving books.

His roommate, Graham, had all of it. Graham's grandfather had been Class of 1961. When the old man died that fall, Graham came back from the funeral with a cardboard box of his things and dumped it on Owen's desk because his own was full.

"You can have whatever," Graham said. "It's all just papers."

At the bottom of the box was a 1958 freshman register, the kind with every student's photo in it. Folded inside the back cover was a sheet of drafting paper, soft as cloth from being opened and closed for sixty years.

It was a map.

It was beautifully drawn. Thin, careful lines in black ink, the way an engineer draws. The outlines of the campus buildings were faint, almost ghostly. Under them, in heavier ink, ran the tunnels. Every turn. Every junction. Every place where the ceiling dropped.

Some of the junctions had small circles drawn on them. Beside each circle was a set of initials and a class year.

R.W.L. 1931. H.C. 1944. T.M.A. 1958.

T.M.A. was Graham's grandfather.

The list went on. Dozens of initials, each with a year. The years went in order, from the 1920s down through the 1990s and into the 2000s.

Then Owen noticed something that made him put the map down and look at it from across the room, as if distance would fix it.

The years did not stop at the present.

2027. 2029. 2034.

Three sets of initials, in the same careful black ink, the ink faded the same as all the rest. Written sixty years ago. For people who had not graduated yet.

At the very bottom of the map, in the same hand, was one line.

Never carve your name below the oldest one.

Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.