Frat Houses Are Death Traps

After centuries of American idiots drinking beer and doing stupid things, someone is finally taking a stand. Insurance companies! But also, The Atlantic's Caitlin Flanagan, in a new investigative piece, "The Dark Power of Fraternities." The occult forces seem to lie in dumb kids getting shit-faced falling to their deaths.

You'll have to scroll to the end of Flanagan's freakout to read anything meaningful about sexual assault, creepy lawyers, or other collegiate ills. The bulk of the piece is anecdotes of plummeting coeds, a sort of John Landis version of 2666's "The Part About the Crimes," starting with this tale from Marshall University's Alpha Tau Omega house:


If this isn't enough to keep you away from the Greek system, Flanagan has lots more where that came from:

Amanda rolled onto her shoulder toward the exterior wall, and suddenly, quickly, and unexpectedly dropped off Cook's mattress into the open exterior window, falling from the third-floor 'sleeping porch' to the cement approximately 25 feet below.

A 20-year-old man named Shane Meyer had fallen from the third-floor window of the Delta Tau Delta house just 12 days before Andaverde's fall from SAE

I discovered that two months after Andaverde's fall, a 20-year-old student at Washington State—"quite intoxicated," in the laconic assessment of a local cop—pitched forward and fell from a third-floor window of Alpha Kappa Lambda, escaping serious injury when his fall was broken by an SUV parked below



In April, a University of Idaho student named Krysta Huft filed a suit against the Delta Chi fraternity, seeking damages for a broken pelvis resulting from a 2011 fall, which she claims was from the house's third-story sleeping porch onto a basketball court beneath it.







Jesus Christ, these frats are slippery. And what—oh, there's more:




The current school year began, and still the falls continued.

Fuck! Watch out!


It's raining men. Yes, this is all really bad. Dying is bad, and dying after slipping in a puddle of Keystone Light and breaking your skull in a frat shrub is a particularly bad death. Greek-letter houses, according to Flanagan's research, seem to occupy some sort of gravitational vortex compared to other structures with floors and windows:


This leads Flanagan to ask us, "Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations?" It's a good question, and one I wish I'd been asked before I indemnified my own college fraternity against any wrongdoing, short of me being stabbed in my sleep after a house-wide conspiracy. Our house was insured by some incredibly shady Caribbean firm—the only place stupid enough to insure frat houses—and policy payments were the only dues that ever came in on time.

I was apparently plain lucky to have never fallen off a roof, but others are not. This can't stand—in the war between white kids in khaki shorts and physics, it's not even close. They're being massacred. But if we connect Flanagan's dots and abolish the American Greek system, we would only release these drunk and clumsy men into other perilous areas, impaling themselves on jungle gyms, slipping into sewers, and trying to scale hydroelectric dams. Rather than do away with the Greek system, let's just childproof it: it's the houses that are killing our children, with their open windows and ledges. If fraternities were confined to tents, bouncy castles, basements, or any other structure without floors or windows, there'd be nothing to fall out of or onto. Pledging a fraternity once again becomes safe and wholesome—just some guys hanging out and adhering to American values, laughing it up, and sometimes kissing.