Nationality Rooms: Tours of Terror

The Cathedral’s Gothic architecture can make it a spooky place, but its resident ghost makes it even spookier.

Quo Vadis, which is Latin for “Where are you going?” is the name of the tour guide club for the Cathedral’s Nationality Rooms. The Quo Vadis guides said there’s reason to believe that the Cathedral has a ghost.

Martha Jane Poe — the said ghost and relative of the Gothic poet Edgar Allan Poe — haunts the Early American room, the last stop on Quo Vadis’ annual tour. Every year for the past three years, Quo Vadis has organized a Halloween Tour as a fundraiser for the club.

E. Maxine Bruhns, 91, has directed the Nationality Rooms for the past 50 years, and is also the granddaughter of Martha Jane Poe, the supposed ghost of the hidden bedroom. During her time at Pitt, Bruhns has added 11 Nationality Rooms to the Cathedral. Bruhns holds an annual ghost watch in the hidden upper bedroom of the Early American room in an attempt to connect with the spirit of her late grandmother. She will hold this year’s tour on Halloween.

Bruhns said she believes her grandmother haunts the room because of the close relationship the two shared during Bruhns’ childhood.

“Grandma had come to live with us, and she took my bed and slept there for about a year,” Bruhns said. “But then she had a stroke and died in my bed. And we were just such good friends.”

The Early American room, on the third floor of the Cathedral, remains closed to the public and the curious eyes of wandering students. Only on official tours can participants experience the room. The scent of hewn wood saturates the space, accented by a tinge of stuffiness that confirms the doors are usually locked tight.

Four lanterns cast deep shadows and a small amount of light across the wooden table, the long benches and the old-fashioned, unused fireplace. Situated next to the fireplace, a wood-paneled door with a small latch remains obscured in the near darkness. On a tour, a guide will unlatch the outer door and reveal a closet with a thick inner door at the back.

The wall then swings back to reveal a narrow, wooden, spiral staircase, the only entrance to the hidden bedroom upstairs, where the ghost of Martha Jane Poe supposedly spends her afterlife.

Bruhns claims responsibility for bringing Martha Jane Poe to the Early American room. In the late 1980s, when Bruhns placed her grandmother’s wedding quilt from 1850 in the hidden bedroom, she said her grandmother’s spirit came with it.

Three days after she placed the quilt in the hidden bedroom, Bruhns said one of the custodians, John Carter, told her that after cleaning the room, he straightened the quilt on the bed and turned to leave. On his way out, the custodian said he heard a “whoosh” noise, and he turned back around to see that something had fussed with the quilt and there was a dent in one of the pillows.

“[Carter said], ‘Max, I’m not telling anyone. They’ll think I’m crazy.’ And I said, ‘Maybe it’s Grandma,’” Bruhns said.

Another time, Bruhns put several ears of corn in the Early American room for decoration, only to get another call from Carter a few days later.

“John called me about five days later, and I came down there [to the Early American room], and the ears were all on the floor, and there were kernels on the floor,” Bruhns said. “And I said, ‘How could an animal get in here?’ John said, ‘That wasn’t no animal.’”

Rachel Rosenberg, a senior majoring in linguistics and one of the tour guides in Quo Vadis, said she has also encountered Martha Jane Poe’s ghost.

During the 2014 Halloween Tour, Rosenberg sat in the hidden bedroom and spooked tour groups with the history of the room. When one tour group filed out, they left Rosenberg alone. As she waited for the next group to come through, Rosenberg fiddled with the objects in the hidden bedroom.

“I was moving Martha’s stuff around while I was up there, not being as respectful of her space as I could’ve been,” Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg said she then went down to the lower part of the Early American room and continued to wait at the long table, still by herself. It was late at night, between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., she said, and the Cathedral was nearly empty. Suddenly, Rosenberg heard a ‘Psst!’ sound coming from behind her. When she turned to see who made the noise, there was nobody else in the room.

“I checked in the hallway, and there was nobody around,” Rosenberg said. “I sat back down at the table … and I heard it again, from right behind me, ‘Psst!’ And I was like, ‘Okay, Martha, I get the memo!’”

Nervous and afraid, Rosenberg fled to a bench in the hallway, where she continued to wait until the other tour guide came back. Now, when she goes back in the room for tours, she knows she shares it with Martha Jane Poe.

“Now whenever I leave I say, ‘Goodbye, Martha.’ I try not to move her stuff around, and I’m much more respectful of her space,” Rosenberg said.

Since taking up this resolution, Rosenberg has not had any more interactions with the ghost.

Tour guides Alecia Caballero and Mariah Flanagan, both juniors, have heard urban legends from the older guides.

Caballero and Flanagan said one guide unlocked the door to the hidden stairwell in the Early American room and left it open while conducting a training session in the hidden bedroom. When the guide and the trainees went back down the stairwell afterwards, the door had inexplicably closed.

“[The guide] was kind of starting to freak out a bit. The [other] guides thought she was kidding,” Caballero said.

The group was locked in the stairwell until they managed to position a Pitt ID between the door and the frame to unlatch the locked door.

The year before she started training, Rosenberg said a guide and a trainee got locked into the lower part of the Early American room, though this time with no way to finagle the door open.

“When they tried to leave the room, the door wouldn’t unlock,” Rosenberg said, “I think Martha got a little lonely, wanted friends. They had to call down to the gift shop to have someone come and unlock the door.”

Despite the spooky stories, Caballero, Flanagan and Rosenberg consider Martha Jane Poe’s ghost more friendly than fierce, which explains why Bruhns tries to connect with her every Halloween.

“Martha got lonely. And she doesn’t like when you mess with her stuff. She’s a grandmother. What do you expect?” Rosenberg said.