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.