A campus ghost story about Yale's most elite secret society stealing Geronimo's skull stopped being a rumor the day a researcher pulled a 1918 letter out of Yale's own library — and the legend acquired the weight of a federal lawsuit. For generations the tale circulated as exactly the kind of thing privileged young men whisper to make themselves feel sinister: that members of Skull and Bones had robbed the grave of the Apache leader Geronimo and enshrined his skull in their windowless clubhouse, the 'Tomb,' on the Yale campus. It was unverifiable, and so it stayed a story. Then came the paper.

Here is the chain of fact. In 2005, historian and author Marc Wortman was working in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library when he found a letter dated June 7, 1918, written by one Skull and Bones member, Winter Mead, to another, F. Trubee Davison. The letter's language is jaunty and chilling: 'The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club and the Knight Haffner is now safe inside the Tomb, together with his well-worn femurs, bit and saddle horn.' That is not a rumor reported secondhand. It is one society member telling another, in writing, that the deed was done — and it sat for nearly ninety years inside Yale's own archive.

The context makes the letter credible. During the First World War, a contingent of Bonesmen served in an Army artillery unit stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma — the very post where Geronimo had been held as a prisoner of war and where he was buried in 1909. According to the persistent lore, members of that group, said by some accounts to include Prescott Bush, grandfather of one president and father of another, dug into the grave and carried trophies back to New Haven. The 1918 letter does not name Prescott Bush, and it should not be read as if it does. But it does place the act 'by your club,' at Fort Sill, with the spoils delivered to the Tomb — which is precisely the claim the legend makes.

The proof that this moved from anecdote to legal record is the lawsuit itself. In February 2009, twenty descendants of Geronimo, represented by Ramsey Clark — a former U.S. Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson — filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. They sued Skull and Bones, Yale University, and senior federal officials, seeking the return of Geronimo's remains 'from New Haven, Fort Sill, and wherever else they may be found.' Because Geronimo's grave at Fort Sill is on federal land, the United States government itself was a named defendant. A campus ghost story had become a filing on a federal docket.

Now the rigorous, skeptical part, because this case rewards precision and punishes wishful thinking. The lawsuit did not win, and it did not lose on the merits of whether the skull was stolen. In July 2010, U.S. District Judge Richard W. Roberts dismissed the case on legal grounds: the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the statute the plaintiffs leaned on, applies only to grave disturbances that occurred after its 1990 enactment, and the federal government had not waived its sovereign immunity to be sued this way. The court never ruled on whether Skull and Bones actually holds Geronimo's skull. Yale, for its part, has stated flatly that it does not possess Geronimo's remains, does not own the Skull and Bones building, and has no access to it.

There is also a genuine reason for doubt about the skull specifically, and honesty demands it be stated. Some historians, including those who have studied Skull and Bones, have argued that the 1918 raiders may have dug in the wrong place or taken the skull of someone else entirely, since Geronimo's actual gravesite was not clearly marked at the time and the prisoner cemetery at Fort Sill held many graves. A 2009 internal account and subsequent analysis raised the real possibility that whatever sits in the Tomb — if anything does — may not be Geronimo at all. The letter proves intent and a claimed act; it does not prove correct identification.

So what is actually settled is narrow and unsettling at once: a documented 1918 letter, in Yale's own collection, records a Skull and Bones member boasting that the club exhumed Geronimo's skull and brought it to the Tomb, and that document was credible enough to anchor a federal lawsuit led by a former Attorney General. What remains unresolved is everything that matters most — whether the skull in that letter is genuinely Geronimo's, whether it still rests behind the Tomb's locked doors, and whether the descendants of a man who died a prisoner of the United States will ever be allowed to find out. The society that prizes secrecy has, on this one point, kept it.