Scripps Women's College

Scripps Women's College is the decisive defensive site in the Battle of the Five Colleges, a place where ordinary students convert an existing campus into a fortified refuge and resist an overwhelming undead force. Its importance lies not in advanced military technology but in organized improvisation: gardens, wells, walls, landscaping tools, and ROTC practice rifles turn an educational institution into a functioning wartime community.

Setting and Transformation

Scripps Women's College stands among the five colleges just outside Greater Los Angeles: Pomona, Pitzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont McKenna. At the start of the Great Panic, while much of the surrounding population fled toward the hills and nearby suburbs descended into violence, three hundred students chose to remain and defend the campus. They obtained supplies from the other colleges and made the Women’s College at Scripps resemble a medieval city, using the campus’s existing wall as the basis for a defensive perimeter.

The students’ preparations joined survival infrastructure to military defense. They planted gardens to secure food, dug wells to secure water, and reinforced walls and towers against attack. Their weapons were a deliberately improvised mixture of landscaping tools and ROTC practice rifles rather than a fully equipped professional arsenal. The campus therefore functioned simultaneously as fortress, supply base, and settlement, showing how civilian spaces could be reorganized when conventional authority and public safety collapsed.

The Siege

The three hundred defenders held off ten thousand zombies over the course of four months. The scale of the defense is central to the site’s meaning: the students did not merely survive a brief incursion but maintained a sustained resistance while fires burned in the mountains and surrounding communities fell into disorder. Their defense lasted until the Inland Empire could finally be pacified, linking the college’s local endurance to the broader restoration of regional security.

The siege culminated in a final major assault. On the night before the last and worst attack, a fresh horde was visible on the eastern horizon. Students sharpened weapons, reinforced defenses, and stood guard on the walls and towers while music played continuously from a loudspeaker to sustain morale. The contrast between ordinary campus life and impending mass violence became part of the battle’s remembered power: a student singing across the grounds provided an atmosphere of beauty and composure while the defenders prepared for annihilation.

Witnessing and Representation

Roy Elliot reached the campus with his oldest son after deciding that the spreading Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome required an immediate response. Because most mass media had been knocked out or federalized, and because obtaining formal journalist status could have taken months while roughly a hundred people were dying each day, Elliot took a digital video camera, spare batteries, and a solar-powered charger. The pair traveled for a week on mountain bikes, searching for stories near Los Angeles.

They arrived at Scripps Women's College near the end of the siege, in time to record the final undead falling and students linking up with soldiers beneath an oversized homemade American flag flying from the Pomona bell tower. Elliot gathered ninety-six hours of raw footage, then returned home to edit it. His wife supplied the narration, and the family made fourteen copies in different formats, screening them that Saturday night at camps and shelters throughout Los Angeles. The resulting film, Victory at Avalon: The Battle of the Five Colleges, made the college’s defense into an immediately circulating account of courage and collective action rather than a forgotten local engagement.

Memory and Significance

The name Avalon came from stock footage shot by one of the students during the siege. It referred to the night before the final assault, when the campus was being prepared for battle and a Scripps student’s singing carried across the grounds. Elliot placed the song over a montage of students sharpening weapons, strengthening defenses, and guarding the walls, making the campus’s emotional atmosphere part of the film’s historical record.

Scripps Women's College also stands as a corrective to the failures associated with earlier military responses. At the Battle of Yonkers, troops were placed on the ground behind sandbags and in fighting holes, despite the presence of roofs, garages, apartment buildings, and other elevated positions that could have provided superior observation and protection. The account of Scripps instead emphasizes a community that used what was already available, adapted civilian materials, and organized itself around endurance. Its defenders anticipated the later logic of resource-conscious warfare: practical tools, sustainable supplies, and disciplined cooperation mattered more than the prestige of specialized equipment.

The college’s story therefore survives as both a military episode and a memory-making event. It records a shift from panic and flight to deliberate resistance, from a campus designed for education to a fortified community, and from isolated survival to a public narrative capable of restoring morale. In the wider history of the Zombie War, Scripps Women's College is remembered because its students demonstrated that defensive strength could arise from local knowledge, shared labor, and the refusal to abandon a place simply because the surrounding world had collapsed.