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[Kylee Evancho]

Among Princeton's "secret" gardens is Wyman Garden, near Procter Hall at the Graduate College. It was designed in the early 1900s by Beatrix Jones Farrand, the University's first consulting landscape architect and a powerful force in shaping the look of the campus. European hornbeam covers an arbor along one side of the garden.

late July. In one corner there is a 40-foot Southern magnolia tree. The garden was created in the 1920s for the enjoyment of the infirmary's patients and staff. The center flower bed blooms in spring and summer with black-eyed susans, catmint, dahlias, daylilies and rudbeckia.

The Class of 1936 Garden (at left), between Maclean House and Stanhope Hall, provides a shady spot for sitting. The Class of 1946 Garden (at right), along the side of Maclean House, is planted with heavenly bamboo, hellebors and lavender hostas.

Just in time for the 250th anniversary of its construction,Maclean House has been the focus of some sprucing up. Crews have renovated thelandscape and gardens around the house over the past few months, removing someof the overgrown plants that have been there for 50 years and creating newvistas and spaces.

The winter season brings a subdued beauty to Princeton's campus. As the fall foliage fades, Princeton's evergreens take on a more prominent role in coloring the landscape and adding vitality to the grounds. According to Jim Consolloy, who retired Feb. 1 after nearly 21 years as grounds manager, some of the University's most well-traveled spaces are spectacular in winter as well as summer.

Visitors to Princeton University's Prospect Gardens may be familiar with the cheerful orange marigolds, pops of pink petunias and bunches of begonias blooming around the lush grounds. What they may not know is that most flowers planted there and in other campus gardens get their start just down the road in the University's greenhouses.

The Princeton Writes Staff Essay Contest inspired stories from across campus. The contest was cosponsored by Princeton Writes, a program in the Office of Human Resources dedicated to strengthening the practical communication skills at the University, along with the Office of Alumni Affairs and the Council of the Humanities.

For the first time in its 40-year history, The Grinnell Magazine has been honored by the CASE Circle of Excellence Award program. The magazine won a silver award in the "Best Articles of the Year" category for "Campus Mystery: My Search for the Duclod Man," by freelance writer Sarah Aswell '04. Like a number of Grinnell students and alumni over the last 15 years, she received a disturbing anonymous letter from the "duclod man." Read the fascinating story of Aswell's search for the letter-writer through some of the darkest, most shadowy corners of the Internet.

As early as 1992, students at Grinnell College began receiving strange, anonymous letters in the mail. The letters contained homemade greeting cards with crudely drawn pictures -- men crawling, toilets and trash cans, twin closet doors -- and jokes that didn't make sense. Q: What would a duclod like about the land of the giants? A: Standing in two closets without touching either knob.

In one mysterious letter, the sender defined the made-up word duclod as the fusion of two words, dual and closeted, a person who hides his or her sexuality from both gay and straight people. Another letter described duclod as "bisexual, homophobic, heterophobic, confused."

The letters were sent in groups, four to seven cards reported at a time. They were postmarked from different, seemingly random parts of the country, and always sent during school breaks. Mostly, the letters targeted gay and bisexual seniors.

I receive my duclod letter during spring break of my senior year. There's no return address, but it's postmarked Hartford, Conn. My address is scribbled in big, rough block letters. Inside the envelope is a piece of paper folded like a greeting card. Inside the greeting card are sheets of paper with photocopied text running crooked off the page. On one side, a strange message: "if you like shaving cats, try shaving crayons." On the facing side: "it takes two hands to handle a duclod."

The next morning I walk to the student affairs office. An administrator shakes her head and shows me the letters they have on file, from the crisp white letters of recent vintage to the aging, creased pages from the early '90s.

She fills me in on everything they know. Campus security has been investigating the case with no luck. The Grinnell police have been informed. She tries to take my letter for the file, but I hold on to it. It was sent to me; it's mine.

I call an old friend, Fred, who received a letter a few years ago (even though he's straight). He wrote an article about it for the school newspaper in February 2001. He tells me the letters were often sent from Boston and Worcester, Mass., and Memphis, Tenn. For years there has been duclod graffiti in the men's bathrooms on campus. "Duclods die twice," was scrawled on a wall in the library basement. Fred said everyone had pet theories. He had to be a student -- how else could he know who the bisexual students were? He had to be a Grinnell staff member -- he had been sending letters for more than a decade. "He" had to be a group of students, a sort of sick club, passing down the tradition as members graduated.

"Chamo Howards" isn't his real name, of course. Neither is "Red Kuller," "Professor Xlhoip," or "D. Trapper." I track him through dozens of fake names and websites. Each new page reveals something darker about the man I am looking for. He is obsessed with bodily functions; his favorite drawing is a crude toilet seat with beans balanced on top.

I begin to recognize patterns -- the way he constructs sentences, his diction, the types of sites he visits, his calling cards. A picture of a jack-o'-lantern. Puns that don't quite work. Posts at 4 or 5 in the morning.

When I click on the link, and my mail client automatically opens and tries to send a mass e-mail from my personal account. The heading reads, "The bad machine doesn't know it's a bad machine." I close the message without sending it, and a website pops up: Welcome to Desolation.

The website is full of conspiracy theories and ramblings. But in between the creepy gibberish, I find my first real insights into the person who sent my letter. He likes the Red Sox, linking him to Massachusetts. There's also a link to Camp Arrowhead, a small summer camp in Massachusetts. It's a tiny glimpse of normalcy. Did he work there?

Each discovery of a new fake word or new fake name leads to more pages, jokes, fake words, and names. I've learned to navigate the Internet's maze, the forgotten pages in ancient HTML, the boarded-up houses of the World Wide Web. I've trolled joke sites no one has visited since 1996. I've lurked in guest books no longer connected to home pages. But none of it links to a real person.

I've formed him completely in my mind. He's male, middle-aged, awkward-looking. He's single, outwardly quiet and polite. He grew up in Massachusetts and has family in Memphis. Too many letters came from these two places for it to be otherwise. He is, I decided, bisexual. He is a duclod.

A duclod joke is found scrawled in a bathroom at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Fred forwards me an e-mail from a student at the University of Kansas who received a letter and had no idea what it was about. Chamo is widening his field.

I begin to collect the dozens of e-mail addresses Chamo leaves in his wake. I write to them from a fake address I've created, calling myself "Maggie Pie" or "Maggpie." "What is your real name?" "Answer me." My e-mails don't bounce back, but he never responds.

My next break comes in February. It's 3 a.m. and I'm on one of Chamo's many webpages. As with the Red Kuller site, my e-mail client opens, and Chamo attempts to e-mail people from my account. I scroll through the addresses that automatically appear, as I have a hundred times before. This time I notice one address that is always, always on the list. I nervously type the address into Google, and a single page pops up. Her name is Melanie Owings, and she lives in western Massachusetts. I have the real name of a real person.

I Google her full name, and what I find scares me. Melanie is mentioned in many of Chamo's strange forum postings. He writes hidden messages about her, matching the color of the font to the color of the background -- when I highlight the pages, the messages pop out. "My name is Melanie," he writes, and I know he's lying.

She writes that she doesn't know anyone connected to Grinnell College. I write back, stupidly, "Are you sure?" She doesn't answer. I wish I had asked her about Memphis, about Camp Arrowhead, about any shy, awkward middle-aged men she might know.

I find him on a Friday. Chamo's newest character, "Pilldown Man," leads me to the home page of "Chillee UmGum." I highlight the page and find a secret message. It's a link that says, "This is my maker." I hold my breath and click.

His name is Richard. He likes to farm, and his real-life webpage is about organic farming. The image at the top of the home page is the jack-o'-lantern I've seen so many times. I click on the "rsum" link, and his life pops up before me.

His picture: an awkward-looking, overweight, middle-aged man with glasses. He lives in Memphis. He went to college in western Massachusetts. He grew up in Lawrence, Kan. His father had taught at the University of Kansas, where the latest duclod letter had been sent. He links to Camp Arrowhead. I look at the web address and see the term "shavescats." I remember well the strange message in my own letter.

I call Grinnell College and talk to the administrator again. She's intrigued, but points to an obvious flaw -- I can't connect Richard to Grinnell College. He doesn't mention it on his home page, and he isn't an alumnus or a former employee.

I e-mail him. I use my alias because I'm still scared and because Chamo has taught me how to act like him. More and more I want to conceal and confuse; I want to find out about him without him finding anything out about me. I write him three times: "Are you Chamo?" "Why do you do this?"

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