Underneath the floorboards of Double Brick House this winter, the Office of the Physical Plant (OPP) discovered a letter dated 2005 from former Andover students, including Nkem Oghedo ’08. Current Double Brick residents posted a photo of the letter on Instagram on January 12, later finding through the comments section of the post that the letter was written during Oghedo’s Junior year.
“Dear curious stranger, who decided to try to lift the floor boards, like I did in June 2005… Double Brick, the past three years have been some of the wildest years, and we write this to make sure they don’t go forgotten. Just a few minutes ago we were thinking about time. It’s been weird to think about all the stuff that has happened in the same spot you are in right now, in the same room. We were picturing this letter under here and now you are taking it out,” wrote Oghedo in the letter.
Chloe Rhee ’24, a prefect in Double Brick, explained that current residents of the dorm immediately posted the letter online after reading it as a dorm, eager to find the letter’s writer.
“We were super surprised [when we found it]. The letter was rediscovered on the kitchen table after final sign-in, so it was read out to all the people that were in the common room at the time. It was really enjoyable to hear from students from years past about their own experiences, and as soon as we finished reading it the first thing we did was try and find the people who had written it on social media. We also posted a photo of the letter on our dorm’s social media account,” said Rhee.
EV Heck ’25, a resident of Double Brick, voiced her hopes for the letter to become a tradition in the dorm. She and her dormmates plan to write a similar letter for future students to find.
“We are definitely [going to] continue the tradition and will work together to write a letter for future [Double Brick residents]. I personally feel like this is the kinda thing you see in movies and this is definitely helping me romanticize the Andover experience,” said Heck in an email to The Phillipian.
According to María Martínez, House Counselor of Double Brick and Instructor in Spanish, Sonia Appen ’24 reached out to Oghedo, one of the letter’s writers, on various platforms. The residents of the dorm saw outreach as an opportunity to forge a connection between former and current students.
“We have reached out to the writers of the letter, we did so right after finding it, so we were a bit enthusiastic. I believe we reached out to Nkem Oghedo on Linkedin and [sent] three separate Instagram messages. Nkem responded within a day or so, and tagged the other writers in the post on our Instagram. It was really great to be able to reconnect with individuals that had lived in the Double Brick before. I think it made my experience there feel more special and also more legacied. It also made me reconsider these notions of time and place. I hadn’t really comprehended how many people had lived in Double Brick before me, or the numerous memories that had been experienced in the same place I lived,” said Rhee.
