My uncle was a Sigma Chi pledge in 1940..
..The original house was somewhere in the vicinity of McComas, but has long-since been torn down. He told me the story several times about smuggling beer into the house.
It seems the newly formed fraternity had been busted a couple of times the previous year and their house was being watched closely by a neighbor across the street who didn't like the boys for whatever reason. As a solution, the engineering students in the '40 pledge class vowed to get in the good graces of the chapter by digging a tunnel to the house next door.
He said in one night they broke through the basement wall with hammers and chisels, then over the course of two weeks they dug a tunnel you could belly crawl through to the house next door. They removed the dirt from the basement every night in old suitcases and shored up the tunnel using construction debris from a job on campus.
Soon after they finished it they got scared of a cave in due to a week of rain and decided not to crawl through the tunnel anymore so they devised a rope and pulley system. He said for nearly 2 years they'd bring in cases of beer disguised as something else into the house next door, take them to the basement and tie each bottle individually to the rope and pull them through.
One time, during the onset of alzheimers, he was recounting the story to me like I'd never heard it and I told him how clever they were. He stopped me cold.... and told me if they were REALLY clever they'd have made the tunnel big enough to smuggle girls into the house.
