Cathedral sleepover a night of discovery

Somebody was riding the elevators all night long, but it wasn’t me.

That knowledge was… Somebody was riding the elevators all night long, but it wasn’t me.

That knowledge was strange because as far as I knew, I was only one of two people inhabiting the upper floors of the Cathedral of Learning on Feb. 9, 2008, the night my roommate and I spent the night in the Cathedral.

Abigail and I, for the most part, remained in the lounge where we were planning to sleep. Armed with a portable DVD player, episodes of “Alias” and drinks from the vending machine, we also knew we weren’t alone.

But we had exploring to do. Leaving our belongings in the locked lounge I happened to have the door code for, we began in the basement on the lookout for homeless people in the unlocked theater.

We didn’t find any.

We did however, find three drunken freshmen who described to us in great detail the rumors they’d heard about the ghosts of the Early American room.

They were stopping by the Cathedral to use the bathroom on their way home but had no idea from which way they’d come.

A couple in the second floor bathroom was about as incoherent as the freshmen on the ground floor, but the guy told us he was doing “a very important thing of putting on his belt.”

The two were reluctant to answer any more of our questions until Abigail extended her hand to help the girl from her seat on the floor. As the girl pulled the guy out the door, she hissed coyly to Abigail that she and the boy had just had sex.

Abigail and I moved upward on our search for unusual happenings, although we didn’t expect anything to top that.

We explored the mysterious mural on the fourth floor that had a fan set on it overnight. A little further down the hall, we found an open door that led only to a run-down room overlooking the tops of the Cathedral Common Room arches.

There was no one around.

We rode the elevator to the 36th floor and proceeded down from there, poking our heads out on every floor searching for signs of life or intrigue.

Abigail, with waning interest in the project, ran ahead of me at each flight, ramming into the walls at the base of the stairways to stop herself.

We stopped on the 15th-and-a-half of course, but no one was there, and it was too cold to stay.

We returned to our temporary home, spent two of the most uncomfortable hours of sleep I’ve ever experienced on two tiny couches and returned home at around 5 a.m. when she convinced me we’d served our purpose of spending the night in the Cathedral.