MAY 25--While we're on the subject of drunken, vomiting sorority girls, here's a letter detailing the debauchery at a recent formal held at a Cincinnati museum commemorating the Underground Railroad, the hidden network once used by escaped slaves.

The March 26 affair at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center was organized by the Alpha Xi Delta sorority chapter at Miami University in Ohio. In an internal memo drafted three days after the booze-soaked event, a fuming Freedom Center official described how inebriated sorority sisters and their guests attempted to 'urinate on our artifacts,' defaced restrooms, and vomited 'throughout our building.' Describing the museum as a 'place of education and inspiration for visitors,' Rhonda Miller noted that, a day after the formal, staffers were 'still finding hidden bottles of alcohol and new places where students had vomited from having too much to drink.'

Miller, the museum's private event coordinator, wrote that she even had to stop one young man as he was preparing to relieve himself on the side of a 'priceless and sanctified' slave pen. The pen, pictured at left, was moved from a Kentucky farm and reassembled in the museum's second-floor atrium (slaves were imprisoned in the two-story log house prior to their auction).

Two weeks after the Alpha Xi Delta formal, another Miami University sorority was involved in a similar drunken escapade. That event, described here by the owner of the lodge where the party was held, resulted in the suspension of the school's Pi Beta Phi sorority chapter. (3 pages)