Lies my tour guide told me

Long before James Frey or Mike Daisey started complicating the boundaries of nonfiction, the students who lead tours of the Yale campus were already there—telling stories about Yale that, if not made out of whole cloth, had only a thin thread of truth woven into them. The undergraduate admissions office and the visitors center supervise the guides, and we believe them when they say they tell every student to tell the truth. We’ve even heard some completely honest tour guides. But once in front of an audience, some students can’t help giving way to their inner fabulist.

It’s been 14 years since we last wrote about this (“Yale’s Tallest Tales,” March 1998), and another generation of stories has made the rounds since then. We heard each of the following claims on tours this summer. They are, um, not true.

Beinecke Library

View full image

Nineteenth-century US senator and vice president John C. Calhoun, Class of 1804, “may be” buried somewhere around Harkness Tower.

Manuscripts & Archives

View full image

The reason students rub the toe of the statue of former Yale president Theodore Dwight Woolsey, Class of 1820, for good luck (if in fact they do: our readers suggested on Facebook and Twitter that this is a "tradition" made up by tour guides) is that he was an avid fan of Yale crew. Whenever he attended a regatta, he would kick the boat with his left toe to start the race, and Yale would always win.

Christopher De Coro

View full image

When Yale refused to give up its statue of Nathan Hale, Class of 1773 (“America’s first spy”), which the CIA wanted to adorn its headquarters, operatives dug their way into Old Campus under cover of darkness and surreptitiously made a cast of the statue. (It’s true that the CIA has a copy of the statue. But they got permission.)

Ragesoss

View full image

Sterling Memorial Library was the result of architect James Gamble Rogers’s insistence that, as a great architect, he was entitled to design a cathedral. When he pressed Yale to let him build one, they said they needed a library instead. But Rogers got the last laugh.