ever since getting cut off from my bennington college email / library resources i have been doing some thinking. a few people have requested that i write something about my unique (short but sweet) stint at bennington college. my time at this school is hard to put into words, but i'm going to try and paint a picture of what it was like to be there in the best way i can.
it's mildly interesting, at the very least for people who have gone to this school, so i'll dig in.
i don't know anyone (so far) who has graduated from this school (without a medical leave of absence for mental health) who isn't crazy. i mean, to be fair, i don't know everyone who has graduated from this school. but my research shows that there are at least a lot of conditions and social/cultural norms on campus that would shape anyone into a bonafide freak after being there for four entire years of their young adulthood.
there are a lot of undeniable reasons as to why i would still be thinking about this place after leaving about two years ago. i'm friends on facebook with a good bit of alumni and/or people who also eventually dropped out and it seems like everyone is still hung up on this place.
first things first, there were approximately 800 students in total when i was there. my freshmen class was the largest they had ever introduced in the college's history, which is probably a big reason why i was accepted there in the first place. they're really trying to expand the school, which is odd considering the general selling points are the really tailored individual attention and small professor to student ratios.
now, let's get a little backstory on my personal experience applying and eventually, moving to vermont to attend this school. i applied to three or four schools in total - and surprisingly got into all of them. bennington was not my first choice school at all but the universe works in strange ways and i ended up there somehow. in high school, i knew a couple of people who were either attending bennington or had recently graduated — these people seemed deeply affected and generally deranged when talking about the school, both to me directly and publicly. this was definitely a red flag. nevertheless i drunkenly submitted a powerpoint about myself stating that i had written for 'rookie mag' as my application. i only applied to fancy art girl colleges because i never took the SAT lol. i went into the test and forgot my calculator. naturally i backed out because i knew my scores most likely would have been subpar for the math portion to begin with. i am so silly, but this is just how it played out. thankfully there were fancy art girl colleges to fall back on, as they did not require standardized test scores. this was a big win for gays everywhere.
obviously they loved the powerpoint about me and offered me a lot of money in scholarships, grants, and loans. financially this school made the most sense compared to moving to berlin, for example. (haha)
imagine every alt teenager in a wealthy or famous family in nyc and la. drop them off in rural vermont, and tell them to be artists. imagine them all wearing carhartt and blundstones with an ego. now imagine being a normal person living amongst that. i'm not making this post in order to talk pejoratively about bennington students, that's redundant and boring at this point. i met people at this institution that honestly changed my life in a lot of ways and will probably be friends with until the end of time. it's the general culture and intensity of the school itself that sped up such a strong bonding process with these people though, and that's what i'd like to write about. you're absolutely not the same person after going to and eventually leaving this school. i don't say this lightly, it really is a cult in a lot of ways. (i highly recommend reading the secret history by donna tartt if you haven't already, it's based on bennington.)
i'd like to divide this post up in a few different sections:
- environment
- students and culture
- supernatural occurrences
1. environment
bennington was started up in 1932. it was originally a women's college but eventually became co-ed in 1969. and in 2010 they stopped allowing students to smoke inside of the large colonial houses we all shared. the school is still mostly women, and students still smoke inside of the houses quite often. as a freshmen you are placed into one of these large colonial houses based on your personality - yes, kind of like the sorting hat in harry potter. it is no surprise that i was placed into one of the most chaotic households available to live in on campus. the house was called "stokes" - it was originally called the stokes-sanford house, named by the socialist lesbian pioneer power couple (helen phelps stokes and mary sanford) who built the house in 1935. there's no 'real' evidence to support that they were in love but look at this photo of them:
“Helen Stokes and Mary Sanford probably met sometime around 1905 and became lifetime companions, sharing homes, travel, and a strong commitment to socialist politics and improved pay and working conditions for women. They organized support for women on picket lines, and Stokes became known for going to court with women strikers who were arrested and paying their fines for them … A Stokes relative … [said] that the two women ‘went everywhere together,’ and that Sanford showed up at all the Stokes family gatherings ‘whether she was invited or not.’ ”
isn't that so cute?
stokes house was not as cute more recently. i actually loved my housemates but the slogan that is still to this day associated with this house (and coined by this house) is just "a good place to sh*t and f*ck." the house has caught on fire multiple times from people trying to light cigarettes off of the stove. it's really hard for me to remember one person that didn't accumulate multiple bills due to destruction of the property each term too. there were a lot of dudes who chain smoked that lived there, and by proxy a lot of holes in the wall. these were not your typical 'pent up anger' types, these were emotionally liberated men who still didn't know how to channel their feelings in a healthy way. they sure did know how to justify punching holes in the wall and manipulate everyone into thinking it was radical expression/catharsis though.
the house has had a reputation for being filled with crazy asses for a long time now. i think this alum who used to live there put it best, "i know nothing about the house anymore but have a feeling people aren’t literally ripping toilets out of walls and throwing them into hallways once a week. "
the environment is generally charming as far as architecture and history are concerned. actually living in it and breathing it in every day is a bit different though. the isolation of troy, new york being the nearest sign of cosmopolitan civilization off-campus was kind of grueling for most people, and as a result everyone was depressed. i did enjoy driving with friends to go buy poppers in troy, new york though. road trips were essential and thankfully my best friend at the time was the proud owner of a toyota rav-4, and a devout lesbian separatist who loved to drive.
honestly, driving around with friends in upstate new york is what saved me from this institution. i am very thankful that i was able to sing carly rae jepsen and fiona apple at the top of my lungs in the mountains.
so yeah, deep isolation, depression, and driving 4 hours to go to a waffle house. escapism... <3
capiche?
all of the classes were either held in this big red barn, a haunted mansion, or a three million dollar marble cube with japanese soaking tubs. the three million dollar marble cube is where the radio station was so i liked it there. the haunted mansion scared the sh*t out of me so i only went in there one time. and the big red barn caught on fire after i left the school. i think it's okay now though.
at the time i thought i wanted to continue doing journalism, something i didn't feel immense attachment to, but had experience in. i think this paralleled with my relationship to men too.
& because of the whole journalism thing (despite not having any majors, just a big paper you write at the end of your time there about your niche) i never had a single class in the arts building, but if i had to describe it in a similar way to the other buildings on campus i would say it's a big glass house. the best word i could use to describe the campus on a whole would be "panopticon" actually.
all of the big colonial houses faced each other down the entire street. you could see into every house from yours. & all of the windows of each individual house point inwards towards each other. every day you could look outside of your window and see someone kicking around in their blundstones or danskos. and because there were only 800 people on campus more likely than not you'd had sex with them before.
this brings us to the next chapter of this blog post.
2. students and culture
thankfully i never f*cked anyone while i was at bennington. (queen of long distance relationships.)
i can only imagine what that must've been like to deal with on top of everything else. i do have a lot of commentary on the general 'hook-up' culture at bennington though as an outsider looking in. (panopticon... i had to grind for this view.)
when i was initially looking into the school there were two things i knew about it:
1. it was ranked number 4 on a listicle of colleges with "pills everywhere."
2. there were historically a lot of sex parties and mysterious orgies from what i gathered in my research.
these two things turned out to be true to some extent. i'd have to say that the school could've been ranked #1 for "pills everywhere" if we were including SSRIs. other than that there was really only one or two drug dealers on campus. the one i knew better was named "nathan" and i think he was a townie who got things delivered from the dark web to sell to the elite drug crazed millennial transplants of southwestern vermont. when you're in the middle of nowhere it's easy to say yes to any drug. it was very clear that most of the first year students were already really into drugs and interested in trying anything too. one of my first nights there i ended up babysitting a guy from western massachusetts who did an eight ball of speed and got locked out of his room. we scrolled through etsy for a really long time, chain smoked, and debated politics despite it being 6am or something. i really didn't like that guy very much but as i got to know him better he turned out to actually just be an alcoholic who needed some help. regardless, his politics were whack...
as i was saying though - nathan definitely had some drugs. i think i smoked a strain of weed called "blackberry train wreck" from him. this was back when my tolerance was incredibly low and i could make a gram last a month. i would roll a tiny amount of weed with mugwort and lavender before bed which would help with my nightmares, which i liked. nathan had more nefarious wares though, which thankfully i never got into. one of my closest friends bought what was supposed to be molly from him and ended up coming out of a khole in the middle of doing a poetry reading like a week after taking it. i can only imagine...
my point is that everyone was doing drugs. a lot of them. it's vermont... live a little.
everyone was sad, everyone was partying. and the school itself acknowledged this fact and embraced it. we had school sanctioned house parties every friday where a copious amount of breadsticks and water bottles were provided by administration for us to have - along with a huge sound system. this was called "the party pack."
now, onto the next emotion. everyone was having sex with each other. to the point where it was borderline incestuous. it seemed like everyone just wanted to feel something, as goofy as that sounds. just the underlying sadness behind the party culture at this school really was something to behold, and hard not to absorb to some extent when you're there. and obviously as a result of that there was a lot of non-consensual and generally alarming sex happening. it was almost as if people were just taking out all of their pain on others, sexually. someone literally bit off someone else's tongue. that's not a story i can make up, ya know?
so pair this behavior with the cancel culture etiquette and identity politics of 2017 at a school recognized for it's progressive views internationally (this is a period piece) - what you get is relentless obstruction. of every aspect of student life. everyone was kind of just stumbling around trying to learn what was right and wrong, and as a result were just getting hurt and traumatized by each other left and right. i think this was hard to watch for me personally because i've been involved in my city's diy music scene since i was in 7th grade and have witnessed many-a-cancellation. the difference between dealing with sexual assault at bennington (and what ultimately left me constantly feeling defeated about the climate surrounding it) vs. the diy scene was the environment. it's so f*cking isolated. there are only two classrooms in the three million dollar marble cube building - you're going to see your rapist on the way to class. you're going to see your friend's rapist on the way to class too. if that doesn't make you feel terrible every day then i don't know what would. in atlanta, you can at least avoid people. in addition to the campus being small and in the middle of nowhere bennington was undergoing renovations when i was going there. as a result, there was only one place to eat on campus so everyone was having to see their rapist as if it was government sanctioned trauma time. naturally, title ix violations were being called out and protested over. the administration was really touchy about the subject and wouldn't do very much to help because they wanted to keep appearances up for the potential incoming students. imagine a gaggle of lanky 17 year olds constantly touring campus amidst this chaos, starry eyed, thinking about becoming the next bret easton ellis.
i'm not even going to attempt to unpack the mental health crisis at bennington college in this post, i'm sure you can imagine it's severity to some extent.
i really think anyone who is able to stay at this school and make it work for them is extremely powerful. like i really do admire everyone's dedication to the hustle. at the heart of it i don't think it's a bad place. academically it was hot, the resources were incredible. i think the classes i had there were really interesting and special. i do wish i had taken advantage of the resources there when i was on campus though, there was so much creative equipment you could just rent and keep in your dorm for personal use. like a library but with musical equipment. there were both longstanding professors and visiting ones from better colleges. the professors were good overall, but i was not there for long, so i didn't get to know too many professors very well. but i did have a hot visiting professor from barnard. she taught a class called "kafka and beckett." that's all we read in this class. it was great, we put on an 'avant garde' production of 'waiting for godot.' & the professor loved my creative suggestion of having everyone recite their lines while playing twister. then she recorded it on her iphone and couldn't stop smiling about how great she thought the production came together. sadly she has still not accepted my facebook friend request. this does not sound like a real college class, i'm fully aware of this.
also all of the professors lived on campus inside of the big colonial houses with the students so this was a really strange dynamic. the visiting professors from better colleges would stay in the big three million dollar marble cube with japanese soaking tubs. strange hierarchy. my house was too insane for any professor to want to live in. ("a bad place to sh*t and f*ck.") and as a result i ended up living in one of the huge professor 'apartments' built into the big colonials. there was a fireplace and so much natural light. it was really a beautiful room. every dorm at bennington was pretty ideal i think. each dorm came equipped with a perfect white wall and beautiful sunlight cascading down an angel olsen (or something similar) poster on that wall, really pretty. my issue with the dorms were that they were haunted.
3. supernatural occurrences
ok, here's the fun part!
before i get into my personal experiences regarding the supernatural during my time at bennington it's important to get the rundown on the area, the campus, and the lore that existed long before my time.
first things first: the bennington triangle
scoot over bermuda triangle...
this triangle of land is centered around glastenbury mountain - a mountain indigenous people literally would not go to. after many hours of research on this subject in the crossett library late at night i can conclude that the people who lived in the area back then were all in agreement that the boulders on glastenbury mountain ate people - on god. apparently they used to just like dump bodies there too? did they think the rocks would just take care of the dirty work? i'm not really sure.
so glastenbury mountain is known to be freaky, historically speaking.
& the main towns surrounding glastenbury mountain that are considered to be within the bennington triangle are...
- bennington (duh)
- woodford
- shaftbury
- somerset
i put them in a bulletined list because these town names are so 'new england old money' and regal sounding.
anyway, so within this triangle in southwestern vermont people just... vanished. between 1920 and 1950. here's a
really funny article outlining what went down. it's a really funny article because of the website it was published to, and because whoever wrote it was writing about these cases in such a way that is just... funny to me. i can't explain it. it's almost like a narrator on a haunted trolley tour or something.
apparently the bennington triangle is also a hotbed for ufo and big foot sightings? i never really got into any of that and can't really give my opinion. what i'll say is this though.
the energy of this location... is heavy yet ethereal. and stepping foot on campus was like having a grand piano dropped on my body from the top floor of a building, like in a cartoon. this is the best way i can describe it at the moment. allegedly the three points/'winds' of this triangle meet somewhere near this hill on bennington's campus, directly next to my house there. this hill is called "the end of the world" - i did not make that up, that's just what it's called and referred to as by the school.
here is one of my favorite photos of this spot:
it's so pretty even though it's not in color.
"the end of the world" is named appropriately i think. most of the high level spiritual / supernatural occurrences that i know from my time there have been linked to this hill in some way.
before i get into the more serious things i experienced as a result of being here i'd like to give a quick play by play of some of my favorite, more lighthearted ghost moments while i was at bennington.
my favorite ghost on campus was definitely whatever was in emily's dorm room. she had a good rapport with this entity for the most part but it really was like... such a sneaky poltergeist. she had a funny name for it but i really can't remember what it was, i'll have to ask her and update this post.
this ghost straight up used to just throw dishes and knick knacks off of her shelves into the middle of the floor while she was just sitting in there. emily's response was just "stop..." like it was so normal and casual. another good story involving this particular ghost was when emily and i were both in her room vibing. i left the room for a minute to go down the hall and when i returned the door was locked. but not
just locked, like jammed shut. emily had not gotten up since i left the room and could not open the door from inside. we basically had to kick down the door just to get her out. we tried to debunk it, but just couldn't. the houses are old obviously but the doors were sturdy and generally free of hardware related issues.
my main reason for speaking so nonchalantly about how haunted this school happens to be is to make the point that this was really kind of just part of the experience and you got used to it by being there everyday. i don't think most people can say that they had to actively keep the perimeter of their room salted and sealed in order to write a paper in peace without paranormal interference. i only ever had a few packages delivered to the school, a large shipment of sage, a stick of selenite, black celtic sea salt, and a
vibrator.
so let's get into it.
my dorm in particular...
i mentioned before that it was a very beautiful room, and i still stand by that statement. it was incredibly picturesque and spacious, two things most people would not say about a dorm room. it was supposed to be a room for three people to live in together but it was just me and vale :) who i love.
the room had its own private entrance and mudroom area. one time some sort of repair guy came in through the door while vale and i were in bed in our damn pajamas and that was jarring but not supernatural.
while living in this room i had some of the worst nightmares, i can't even really begin to describe them. but i always woke up out of these hellish eyelid movies at 5am on the dot no matter what. to preface all of this i'd like to say that despite appearances i don't have any mental health issues and am a generally happy person. never had any issues with nightmares or even sleep paralysis really. i sleep like a little baby most nights, so this happening was really odd for me. & if i slept in anyone else's room i did not have these problems.
i'm going to copy & paste someone else's account of what they experienced in my dorm room when they lived there just to get you into the general headspace of where i'm about to go with this story.
"so yeah, beyond the broader fuckedupness of the school, i consistently had a feeling of some kind of malevolent being, that would sort of try to come to me in a countdown if that makes any sense? like i'd be lying in bed or walking across campus and i would start to get the impression of a countdown in my head "5...4...3...2..." and if i didn't like set up a pretty forceful block by the time i got to 1, i had the feeling it would be BAD. this sounds like mental illness / ocd certainly, and while i definitely have anxiety/depression stuff, it never manifested like that, and i have never experienced anything like it since, even though i often go into very sacred/"haunted"/thin places. the experiences i had there felt very different. it was a very certain thing, and i have an image in my head of what this entity looked like, though i never saw it. one time i had to run to my door, close my eyes and scream "GO AWAY" down the hall. it tended to happen most when i was closest to the end of the world. so when i lived in stokes, or was walking along the wall at night, or near that little bench near noyes. have you ever seen the film "picnic at hanging rock"? if not, i really suggest it. it really is the closest media i've ever seen that represents the feeling i had at bennington, specifically past the end of the world. i had a few encounters like where there was just this intangible
pressure, like if the sound of cicadas was a feeling."
i had a lot of similar things happen to me, the counting down in the head specifically - i don't get angry very easily but as the counting down was happening i could feel myself getting... mad. at nothing! this was awful and not on brand. so keep this in mind while i tell you this story:
in september of 2017 (this was before i really knew what the f*ck was going on at this place as i had just moved there.) i booked my friend's band from atlanta to play at stokes while they were touring, generally it was a good time but one strange thing did happen that i took note of. after playing the show and spending the night in stokes we all took a walk to the end of the world to take pictures the next morning because it was so pretty, and one of the band members seemed kind of off in how she was acting. she was normally quite bubbly but in this moment she seemed quiet and introspective, not really present in the moment. without saying anything she darted over the hill at the end of the world and just ...
ran up that hill. ran so far that we couldn't see her anymore. we were all confused/slightly concerned with what was happening. after some time she came back with a bunch of wildflowers in her hand and the same glazed over expression she had earlier, prior to her swift departure over a hill called "the end of the world." she seemed generally 'okay' so we just carried on and didn't think much of it.
little did i know that one day i would feel 'guided' to run up the damn hill in a very similar manner.
in october of 2017 i went bonkers, y'all!
what happens next will shock you!
pov: you're me in my dorm vibing with a very anxious dog named "bones" who you're dog sitting. it's definitely dark out, probably around 8:30 or 9pm. you're literally wearing like... slip on house shoes. there's no time like the present to just go out into the night without a jacket (i swear to god i think i was wearing my taz sweatshirt) and walk this dog? a calm dog that was in no need of a walk. i was having a little countdown moment and felt like i was supposed to just go over the hill, and over the hill i went. no flashlight, nothing. no offense to the nature of vermont but i was scared to be alone in it, it's really something that overtakes you. so i'm walking through the mud in my house shoes, picking flowers, talking to this dog like it's a person. i was not in the right headspace to receive any information other than whatever the malevolent forces of this psychic hellscape wanted me to. i met some old man who lived over the hill and his two identical dogs that had fur the same color as my hair. he was like "why are you out this late without a flashlight?" and i was like "i don't really know." this man, who sounds like a hallucination based off of how i described him was actually the reality check i needed to go the f*ck home. on my walk back i remember feeling really light and giddy for some reason, like almost skipping back home holding my flowers - eager to put them in a little vase.
that night i got a lot of reading done and felt pretty good.
no one really locked their doors because it was vermont and there were thirty of us to a house, but after getting ready to go to bed and turning off the lights and everything i felt this really strong intuitive knowing at around 2am that i needed to lock all of the doors that night. and thank god some angel whispered that idea into my ear because 5am struck and all hell broke loose in that dorm room.
this nightmare that i woke up from in a cold sweat involved me hearing incredibly aggressive knocking and banging on my doors and windows simultaneously. i felt really scared in the dream, petrified even. guess what the f*ck i woke up to at 5? absolutely relentless knocking and banging on every window in the room, every door. at once! the knocks were in threes which is apparently like, a demonic thing. very scary! the door handles were being jiggled as if someone was trying to get in at any cost. i saw the handles move with my own two eyes. vale was an incredibly heavy sleeper who didn't believe in ghosts. they didn't wake up until around 6:30 or so, kind of dismissed what was going on and then went back to bed because they were so tired. i have no idea how they were able to do this but i wish i could've been able to lol. (the knocking went on for at least three hours.) i looked out the windows to see if this was like... a prank or something? not a soul in sight! i mean it sounded like the FBI was trying to knock down the damn door. this was loud! about thirty minutes into this cacophony of noise the knocking is not only coming from the door that went directly outside but was now coming from inside of my mudroom. this is when i finally forced myself to move and
attempt to call campus security. that's right —
attempt. as soon as i got a hold of my phone it completely fried and would not even turn on. so i'm like okay, f*ck. let's email campus security on my laptop? got my laptop and opened it up. screen went completely black and just started making this god awful beeping / alarm noise that i had never heard it make before. by 8am i had tried to convince myself that i was actually just going insane / if vale was able to sleep through it then i should've been able to as well. i was so tired from being scared that i was able to sleep out of pure exhaustion. i woke up around 9am and the knocking had stopped (thank god) - my phone and laptop were still both out of commission but vale was able to contact campus security. and do you know what the f*ck they said to me when i told them what happened? "must've been the ghosts. this dorm has had issues in the past with them." like ...??? alright. thanks for letting me know kings <3
and then what? then i went to go and take a shower and i was covered in bruises!!!!!!!!!!!! bruises! my inner thighs were covered in bruises!
that day i posted something to the effect of "my dorm room is haunted" on facebook, which prompted the girl who had originally run up that hill / made a deal with god to reach out and tell me what she felt up there. everything tracked and was very similar, but i did not expect to receive photos of bruises on her inner thighs that looked nearly identical to mine.
this is always something that will freak me out.
i'm grateful for this happening because while i generally understood some concepts of 'otherworldly' occurrences i had never experienced anything so forward like that. it was scary as sh*t, don't get me wrong. especially because all of this happened soon after our house had a themed party that was blatantly satanic (we had 'hail satan' written on this huge antique mirror in our common room and i was dressed as a nun shooting liquor into people's mouths via ketchup and mustard squirt bottles.) i remember someone being like, "hey can we erase the big 'hail satan' in the common room i feel weird about it... the energy is off." but as soon as it was erased it got even worse and i think that's incredibly scary.
there are a lot of things i can't explain, and a lot of things i don't know! the unknown is freaky but this is my personal experience with it.
as you can tell this school is what really cemented my nicotine addiction
this is by far the most feral and insane blog post i've written to date so i'm sure there are some plot holes. wrote this at an ungodly hour.
so, if you have any questions i am happy to answer them in the comments section. xx :) peace n love
p.s
if anyone is craving more ghost stories here are some of lizzy's experiences, outlined in a google doc entitled
"spectral ethnographies — a psycho-geographic handbook for the bennington eldritch" i don't think she ever finished it but there are some good stories in there.
