What Is Documented, and What Is Only Alleged

A surprising amount about Skull and Bones is a matter of public record. The society owns a windowless brownstone on High Street in New Haven, known as the Tomb, and an island in the St Lawrence. Its property and finances are held by the Russell Trust Association, a corporation registered in 1856, whose filings are accessible. Membership is fifteen seniors a year, and the names have been published in the Yale yearbook and elsewhere for most of the society's existence. Its alumni include presidents, senators, cabinet officers and intelligence officials, which is neither surprising nor sinister for an institution that recruits the same year at the same university.

Two documented episodes cut against the folklore. The society admitted women at the beginning of the 1990s after a dispute with its own alumni that reached the courts. And in 2009 descendants of Geronimo sued the society over the long-circulating claim that members had taken his remains from a grave at Fort Sill in 1918. The suit was dismissed on procedural grounds without resolving whether the remains were ever there.

What is not documented is the interior: the initiation, the confessional practice members are said to undergo, the objects in the building. Accounts exist but they are unverifiable, and treating them as established is where most writing on the subject goes wrong.