I do think I know someone who's in a secret society.
I have my suspicions, but I'm going to say officially,
I do not.
When they go disappearing at odd hours of the night,
during the day sometimes, then you can tell.
There are some underground things going on.
One of the things that fascinates
everyone about secret societies is the mystery of them.
I think that all the class presidents and vice
presidents have some sort of involvement
in a secret society.
Perhaps I'm in a secret society and it's so secret
that I don't even know it.
Right now I think there are about 14 secret societies
at the University of Virginia.
It's hard to tell, because there are
three new ones created every year and three that go away.
I know that there's three main secret societies here
on grounds, or three big ones.
The big three, like the Seven Society, the Zs, the Imps.
The Seven Society is probably the most secret
of all societies.
You do not find out who is a Seven until they pass away.
The church bell will ring seven times.
There'll be a wreath of black roses in the shape of a 7
at their grave.
In order to communicate with the Seven Society,
the tradition has always been that you leave a letter
at the base of the Thomas Jefferson
statue in the rotunda.
So if people want to ever reach out to them,
ask for help with different initiatives, they can go
and they can leave the letters there.
A lot of times they've donated to different organizations
and different events.
But once again, it's anonymous, so you don't know a whole lot
about them.
The oldest secret society by its very symbol, the Z,
explains who they are and what they want.
The Z in Greek actually stands for "he lives."
So the whole nature of the group is
to preserve the thinking and ideas of Thomas Jefferson.
There are stories of when students are in libraries,
people will talk about food, and then
randomly pizzas will show up.
They open it up and just see a giant Z spelled out
in pepperonis.
The Imps, they're known as being the most rambunctious
of the secret societies.
During finals, you might see people
in morphsuits running through the libraries with big boom
boxes, trying to get people to get up and dance.
They do a lot of things around grounds for students when
there's high times of stress.
It's another way to be, I guess, immersed in the community.
I like them because they give an air of mystery
to the university.
They really are there to promote the well-being of the students
and to point out the people around here who
are making positive impacts.
Small acts of kindness that generally amount to something
a lot greater, because they really come in when
the university needs them most.