Most secret societies guard their rituals, their membership or their purpose. SICSIC, the masked spirit crew of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, guards only the faces of its six members and the meaning of its name. Everything else about it is published by the university, which lists it among the oldest active student groups on campus.
What happened
The group was created by Frank J. Prout, the university’s third president, who served from 1939 to 1951. In the autumn of 1946, with the campus filling up with returning servicemen, Prout decided the place needed a lift. On the night of October 5 he picked six students and had them come to University Hall in the small hours; the university’s seventy-fifth anniversary account puts the founding meeting at 2:35 in the morning. The six agreed to form an anonymous booster organization whose mission, in the words still used on the university’s website, is to promote school spirit and goodwill among students and faculty.
The structure Prout set up has barely changed. There are always six members, two from each of the sophomore, junior and senior classes. New members are chosen by the existing group at the end of their first year and serve for three years. One member who joined in 1957 later recalled receiving a letter from the president’s office telling him to report to a particular place at a particular time for instructions. Prout and his wife Alice used to host the six for dinner at their home, a tradition that the group’s faculty advisor has continued, and university presidents and advisors are honorary members.
The traditions
In public the members wear overalls and full-head masks. Each mask must be new to the group when a member joins and is kept for the whole three years, so a given character, whether a cartoon ogre or a film villain, identifies one anonymous person across their time in the crew. The old post on this site listed the masks in use in 2009; the cast changes every year. Members tend to arrive late to sporting events and leave early, hand out candy, pose for photographs, speak in disguised high-pitched voices and paper the campus overnight with black-and-red signs headed “SICSIC SEZ.”
The group has had a dip and a revival. In the 1990s advisor Gregg DeCrane rebuilt it and oversaw the admission of women, which the university credits with improving the crew’s culture. Students have occasionally tried to chase members down and pull off their masks. The sanctioned unmasking comes once a year: the two graduating seniors are revealed in front of the student body, traditionally at a home game. In February 2025 the two seniors were unmasked at a hockey game against St. Thomas at the Slater Family Ice Arena.
The explanations
There is no mystery about whether SICSIC exists or what it does. The one genuinely unanswered question is the name. The university’s own pages do not explain it, and no founding document that does so has been made public. Guesses range from an acronym to a nonsense word chosen because it looked good on a sign, and the group has shown no interest in settling the matter.
Older write-ups, including the version of this post copied from Wikipedia, gave the time of the founding meeting as 12:45 a.m. and said Prout chose the first six from the pages of the yearbook. Neither detail appears in the university’s published history, which gives 2:35 a.m. and simply says Prout hand-picked the students. Both claims are plausible and neither is verified, so they are left out here.
Where it stands
SICSIC marked its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2021 and continues to operate. It belongs on a site about the unexplained only in the loosest sense: it is a working example of how a small, controlled secret, maintained in plain sight, can outlive its founder by decades. The verdict is simply that the story is true.