In Brief
Guests on the upper floors of the Omni William Penn in Pittsburgh keep hearing two men arguing in the hallway at odd hours. Staff say they're the dishwashers from 1976 — friends for years, until one pulled a gun and shot the other dead.
The Full Story
On the upper floors of the Omni William Penn in Pittsburgh, guests keep hearing two men in the hallway, carrying on a loud, cheerful, drunken-sounding argument at odd hours. When security goes to look, the corridor is empty. The story the hotel's ghost tours tell is that the two men never finished the argument they started in 1976.
Samuel Bankhead was 65. Nelson Cooper was 70. They had washed dishes side by side at the William Penn for years, friends as much as coworkers, and the way it's told, the fight that night was a joke. A needling argument in the 18th-floor locker room over which of them could take home the prettier girl. The joke got loud. Then it stopped being a joke at all. Cooper pulled a gun and shot Bankhead dead. No newspaper or court record for it has surfaced, so the killing survives only as the hotel's own story, passed hand to hand on the tours, which is its own kind of strange for two men whose voices people swear they still hear.
They aren't the only voices in the building. Henry Clay Frick opened the place in March 1916 as the last thing he ever built, and three decades on, in 1947, the writer Ruth Harkness died here at 46. She was the woman who'd carried the first live giant panda cub out of China in 1936, a story she put in a book called *The Lady and the Panda*. Since her death, staff and guests say they hear a panda bleating somewhere on a high floor of a downtown hotel.
The high floors are where most of it gathers. Because the building hides six service levels down at its base, the top two floors carry the old numbers 22 and 23, and they're closed off now, given over to storage and maintenance. Some elevators still rise to them, but the doors won't open. Two guests who took the stairs up to the 22nd said the interior was untouched since the 1970s, stuck in time. Another, a few floors down on the 16th, reported "the coldest chill I've ever felt in my life." One woke in the night to find the fold-out reading lamp on the headboard unfolded and switched on.
The hotel has collected its share of stories that turned out to be invented, too. For decades it claimed Bob Hope had proposed to his wife here in 1934, until a manager finally asked Dolores Hope whether it was true. "No. I didn't meet him until I arrived in New York," she said. "But it's a good story. Go ahead and use it."
