Bancroft Hall has 4.8 miles of corridors. It’s the largest dormitory in the world, with all sorts of secrets, quirks, and hidden locations. There’s a rifle range (Clancy’s Patriot Games got the location wrong), squash courts, King Hall, Smoke Hall (where you serve restriction and start fires¹), the Rotunda (the center of the picture above), and Memorial Hall (directly through the main entrance in the picture, then up some stairs).

The Top of Bancroft

Everything beyond this point is dumb. If you happen to have access to this location, don’t do what we did. Duh.

Our room was on 2-4, the 4th floor of the 2nd Wing. This meant we had not just recessed dormers (a.k.a. a private deck) but also easy access to the giant, Versailles-inspired copper gutters. These were an excellent way to move between rooms and explore the Bancroft roofline. An early reconnaissance mission was interrupted when we discovered a hatch above Memorial Hall. We’d seen The Goonies, so in we went.

It turned out to be a secondary machinery room for an elevator, with open access to the shaft. What really caught our attention was the ladder bolted to the inside of the shaft, reachable only when the elevator car was gone. Now fully in Die Hard mode, we had to see what was at the top.

An unlocked hatch. Because who would find this room and ladder, let alone climb it?

We did. A lot. The rooftop became our spot—not as famous as the Chapel dome, but it was ours. The discovery also gave us another prize: access to the elevator itself. It ran down the northeast corner of Memorial, Smoke, and King Halls. It was super old-school, rickety, and absolutely off-limits to Midshipmen. So, of course, we used it all the time, particularly for restriction musters. That plan inevitably backfired when the elevator got stuck, and a fire crew had to rescue us, resulting in even more restriction.

We passed our knowledge on to our Plebes. I wonder if 6th Company still knows about it or if one of the many Bancroft renovations “fixed” it.