Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896
April 20, 2024

Krieger construction unearths mass student grave

By ILLINOIS JONES | March 30, 2017

APRIL FOOL'S: This article was published as part of  The News-Letter's annual April Fool's edition, an attempt at adding some humor to a newspaper that is normally very serious about its reporting.

Last Tuesday, the construction crew working on waterproofing the foundations of Krieger Hall and the Breezeway unearthed a mass grave of student bodies.

Following this discovery, the University’s Archaeology Department set up an excavation site, cutting off access to the area until spring 2020, which was when the construction was probably going to end anyway.

Archaeology graduate student Jackie Cousteau spoke about the new discoveries at the site.

“This is really interesting. So on the first layer, you can see all the bodies of the #ReCoverHopkins Coalition members that formed in spring 2016 to fight the University’s decision to remove covered grades,” Cousteau said. “Now you can see why there has been no activism on that front.”

Cousteau explained how as they dug deeper, it was more difficult to determine the exact causes of death of students.

“So on this new layer, we found this group of skeletons with a lot of bad transcripts,” she said. “Our current theory is that these are all of the students who were planning on dropping out but the University ‘got rid of them’ to preserve the school’s retention rates.”

One surprising discovery was a pile of skeletons with the word ‘Bloomberg’ carved on each skull. The archaeology department declined to comment to The News-Letter, saying that they could not disclose any information about ongoing police investigations. However, one worker agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity.

“Michael Bloomberg was totally a serial killer while a student at Hopkins,” the source said. “It was the ‘60s; Things were pretty wild. Unfortunately, he had this compulsion to put his name on absolutely everything, and I guess that’s his downfall.”

Bloomberg could not be reached for comment as of press time.

Robert Landon is a senior in the history department whose research is the University’s history of research in public health.

“So we know that Hopkins was involved in some syphilis experiment in Guatemala in the 1940s. We found out from this excavation that the University actually gave syphilis to local Baltimoreans as late as the ‘80s for their research,” he said. “You can see their bodies there. Who hasn’t the University given syphilis to?”

Landon also explained how they found “underground fraternities” while excavating.

“So today we have ‘underground fraternities’ that just operate in sketchy row houses. Back then, when some fraternities got banned, they actually went underground. Some of their underground structures must have collapsed burying them” he said. “You can easily tell where they are because of all the Natty Boh cans.”

Other sections that had been marked off by the archaeologists include premeds who did not get into medical school, alumni buried by student debt and all the suspects from the emails that campus security sends out when an “incident occurs.”


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