I do think I know someone
who's in a secret society. I have my suspicions, but
I'm going to say officially, I do not. When they go disappearing
at odd hours of the night, during the day sometimes,
then you can tell. There are some underground
things going on. One of the things
that fascinates everyone about secret societies
is the mystery of them. I think that all the
class presidents and vice presidents have some
sort of involvement in a secret society. Perhaps I'm in a secret
society and it's so secret that I don't even know it. Right now I think there are
about 14 secret societies at the University of Virginia. It's hard to tell,
because there are three new ones created every
year and three that go away. I know that there's three
main secret societies here on grounds, or three big ones. The big three, like the Seven
Society, the Zs, the Imps. The Seven Society is
probably the most secret of all societies. You do not find out who is a
Seven until they pass away. The church bell will
ring seven times. There'll be a wreath of black
roses in the shape of a 7 at their grave. In order to communicate
with the Seven Society, the tradition has always
been that you leave a letter at the base of the
Thomas Jefferson statue in the rotunda. So if people want to
ever reach out to them, ask for help with different
initiatives, they can go and they can leave
the letters there. A lot of times they've donated
to different organizations and different events. But once again, it's anonymous,
so you don't know a whole lot about them. The oldest secret society
by its very symbol, the Z, explains who they are
and what they want. The Z in Greek actually
stands for "he lives." So the whole nature
of the group is to preserve the thinking and
ideas of Thomas Jefferson. There are stories of when
students are in libraries, people will talk
about food, and then randomly pizzas will show up. They open it up and just
see a giant Z spelled out in pepperonis. The Imps, they're known as
being the most rambunctious of the secret societies. During finals, you
might see people in morphsuits running through
the libraries with big boom boxes, trying to get
people to get up and dance. They do a lot of things around
grounds for students when there's high times of stress. It's another way to be, I guess,
immersed in the community. I like them because they
give an air of mystery to the university. They really are there to promote
the well-being of the students and to point out the
people around here who are making positive impacts. Small acts of kindness that
generally amount to something a lot greater, because
they really come in when the university needs them most.
