A&M's Secret Societies: The True Mysteries of Aggieland

There are cryptic metal plaques bolted around the Texas A&M campus, and nobody knows who put them there. No records. Nothing online. And this spring, six of the original eight just... vanished.

Vanished as in someone pried them off?

Removed. By whom, unknown. A student group called the Plaque Hunters has been tracking them, and Rebecca Strub, class of twenty twenty-three, noticed the removals back in April.

Okay, what do the plaques actually say?

Two styles. The old ones carry the original A and M C logo, no numbers. The newer ones are sleek black with a number on them. The hunters have seen numbers up to ten.

Ten of how many?

They think twelve. Because of the twelfth man tradition. That's a guess, not a fact.

And nobody's confessed? On a campus with a student newspaper going back to eighteen ninety-three?

One of the hunters, Aaron Hickerson, says he read every Battalion article since twenty nineteen and every Aggieland yearbook. Nothing. His line was, either it's new, or it was meant to stay hidden.

That's deeply annoying in the best way.

So the Texas A&M Foundation went digging for exactly this kind of thing. Cushing Library archives, TexAgs forums, even the Aggies subreddit. Confirmed versus questionable.

Give me one that turned out to be true.

From the late fifties through the seventies, the areas under the Academic Building, Sbisa Dining Hall, the Doherty Building and the Animal Science Building were converted into bomb shelters. Barrels of water, survival gear, boxes of non-perishable food.

And now?

One of them is a food court. The Sbisa Underground Market. Students are eating Chick-fil-A and Smoothie King inside a nuclear fallout shelter.

That's a very American sentence.

The provisions are long gone and none of them are designated shelters anymore. But the rooms are real.

Alright, now the one that's nonsense.

The Coke Building. Built in nineteen fifty-one, white brick, and then over a few years it started shifting toward a salmon color that looked suspiciously close to burnt orange.

Burnt orange. As in Longhorn orange.

Exactly the rumor. A sneaky Texas fan sold A&M bricks that would betray them. But David Chapman, class of sixty-seven, the retired director of Cushing Library and the university archivist, says the brick was always meant to go reddish-pink. A nod to the old cherry-red campus buildings.

So the prank was just... chemistry.

Same building has one he can't settle, though. There's a conference table in the third-floor dean's suite that people say belonged to General James Earl Rudder, class of thirty-two.

Can't he just check?

He's said he can't prove or disprove it. What's documented is that administrative offices moved into the Coke Building in nineteen fifty-one, so Rudder's office and desk were in there at some point.

I like that he just says "I don't know." Rare.

There's also the Albritton Bell Tower clock. The four is written as four I's instead of I V. Aggies say it's because I V looks like t.u.

They changed a clock face to avoid the rival's initials?

No. That four-I's style is all over old European clocks, and this clock came from Annecy-le-Vieux, in France.

Okay, but what about an actual secret society? That's the title.

Two threads, and I want to be careful with both. In March of two thousand five, Finnie Coleman, an assistant English professor at A&M, gave a talk and claimed two racially motivated secret societies existed on campus at that time, called the True Texans and the Stikas.

Claimed. Meaning not established.

That's his claim, in his presentation. I've got no documentation beyond that, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

And the other thread?

Much lighter. The Building Climber's Club, mid-nineteen seventies. They climbed onto campus roofs and explored the steam tunnels. One TexAgs poster says it wasn't really secret, just never publicized.

The steam tunnels are real, then.

Real, and people have been caught in them. One poster describes going in through a grate near Evans around nineteen ninety-two, five hours underground, then tripping an alarm. Campus police swarmed the exits and arrested them. He got criminal trespassing, probation, community service.

Five hours. What were they even looking for?

Whether the tunnels really ran all the way out to the McDonald's on Southwest Parkway.

And did they?

He never says. One more, and this one's documented. November fourteenth, nineteen fifty-nine. Roy Simms, a meat locker foreman in the Animal Industries building, was cutting a slab of bacon when his knife slipped and severed the femoral artery in his groin.

Oh god.

His coworker Zellie Newton had stepped out to his car to catch the weather report. He came back, found Simms bleeding, called an ambulance. Simms was dead before it got there. The Battalion reported it that year.

And the haunting grew out of that.

Screams in the hallways, the freight elevator moving with nobody in it. Faculty and custodians who won't stay past five. The meat lab moved out years ago. The basement where he died is a men's restroom now.

That's the part that gets me. Not the ghost. The restroom.

And the plaques are still out there. Or six of them aren't.

Somebody on that campus knows. They're just enjoying this too much to say.