Omni William Penn Hotel

Two dishwashers still argue on the 18th floor after a 1976 murder. Frick's clipped 'This is my hotel' on EVP. Panda bleats where Ruth Harkness died.

In 1976, two dishwashers at the Omni William Penn were arguing in the 18th-floor locker room over which of them could take home the better-looking girl. Samuel Bankhead was 65. Nelson Cooper was 70. They had worked together at the hotel for years. Coworkers described them as friends. The argument was a joke that got loud. Then Cooper pulled a gun and killed Bankhead on the spot.

Guests on the upper floors still hear them. Two men, cheerful and loud, carrying on a drunken conversation in the hallway at odd hours. Security gets called. When security gets there, the hallway is empty.

The William Penn opened on March 11, 1916, as Henry Clay Frick's answer to the Waldorf: a $6 million hotel with 1,000 rooms that Pittsburgh called the grandest in the nation. A 1929 annex pushed the room count to 1,600, briefly making it the second-largest hotel in the world. Joseph Urban designed the Art Deco ballroom. Lawrence Welk debuted his orchestra here on New Year's Eve 1938, and William Penn staff actually built his first bubble machine. JFK stayed at the hotel. Bob Hope proposed to his wife here in 1934. Count Basie played the Chatterbox lounge.

And a 1922 Prohibition-era salesman shot himself in a top-floor room after receiving death threats over whiskey he'd been selling under the counter. He is one of several deaths on file.

The hotel had six unused service levels at its base, which means the 16th and 17th floors are technically the 22nd and 23rd in Pittsburgh's old elevator numbering. Staff call them 22 and 23. They've been closed off for decades. Guests who've talked their way onto these floors describe interiors frozen around 1970: vintage carpet, furniture nobody's moved, a stillness that reads wrong for a working hotel. One guest, writing later, called it "the coldest chill I've ever felt." Ghost tours in Pittsburgh still refer to 22 and 23 as the hotel's most reliably active real estate.

Paranormal investigators running EVP sessions on the upper floors have captured a male voice with a formal, clipped cadence saying "This is my hotel." Guides attribute the voice to Frick himself. Frick was famously particular about his properties. If he kept any of his attention here after 1919, this is the level of remark he'd make.

Author Ruth Harkness died at the William Penn in 1947. Harkness had become internationally famous a decade earlier for bringing the first live giant panda out of China, a cub named Su-Lin that she raised in her Manhattan apartment and wrote about in her 1938 book The Lady and the Panda. Guests on her old floor sometimes report the small, goat-like bleat of a panda cub in the hallway. It doesn't last long, and there's never anything visible to explain it.

You won't find any of this on the Omni's official site. The hotel runs as a luxury property, hosting weddings in the Urban Room and business travelers in refurbished suites. But the 18th-floor corridor, the closed-off top floors, and the occasional panda bleat on a high floor have given Pittsburgh one of its most persistent city ghost stories. For a 1916 hotel built by a steel baron who never really let go of anything he owned, the roster fits.