The man who died from a ghost story at Harvard

New England Folklore recounts the tale of an 18th-century Harvard student who supposedly went into convulsions and died when a classmate played a prank on him and came into his room one night covered in a sheet - after the student had earlier decried the existence of ghosts during a late-night ghost-story session.

The tale was first told to an author of a book about fake ghosts by Washington Allston, a Harvard student and artists for whom the neighborhood is named.

Ed. note: The account mentions the victim swallowing his tongue. Turns out that's impossible and the last thing you should do to somebody in convulsions is to try to put something in their mouth to block their tongue.