Indiana Repertory Theatre

IRT artistic director Tom Haas died in a 1991 jogging accident. Staff still hear his phantom footsteps on the mezzanine on rainy nights.

Tom Haas went out jogging in thick fog on January 28, 1991, and never came back. The Indiana Repertory Theatre's artistic director usually ran indoors, circling the mezzanine when Indianapolis weather turned bad. That morning he made an exception. A van hit him as he rounded a corner near his home. He survived the collision but died of a pulmonary embolism three weeks later, on February 21. He was 53.

Staff at the IRT say he's been running the mezzanine ever since.

The phantom footsteps start on cold days and rainy nights, the exact conditions that used to drive Haas inside. Employees working late hear floorboards creak overhead on a regular loop, as if someone is pacing out laps on the mezzanine floor. A few people claim they've seen a full figure in the lobby, jogging the route he took in life before the figure vanishes. Lights flicker in the mezzanine and upper levels. If you worked with Haas, you'd recognize the rhythm.

He's a strange ghost for a building this grand. The IRT lives inside the old Indiana Theatre, a 1927 Spanish Baroque movie palace with a glazed terra cotta facade sculpted by Alexander Sangernebo and an auditorium that originally seated 3,200. Rubush and Hunter designed it in the Churrigueresque style for the Circle Theatre Company at a cost of $995,000. It was one of the first air-conditioned buildings in Indianapolis, with bowling alleys, billiard rooms, a soda fountain, and a sixth-floor ballroom modeled after a Spanish village plaza, ceiling painted deep blue and studded with electric stars. Plenty of places for a 1927 ghost to walk. Instead, the building got a 1991 theater director who liked to jog.

Haas came to Indianapolis in 1980 after co-founding the Weathervane Theatre in New Hampshire and the PlayMakers Repertory Theatre in Chapel Hill. Before that, he ran the acting programs at Yale School of Drama, where his students included Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and Michael Gross. The IRT had just moved into the converted movie palace, and Haas built out the company's identity over the next decade. He created the Upperstage for experimental work and the Cabaret Stage for musical revues. He wrote his own musical, Operetta, My Dear Watson. The mezzanine laps were his ritual, the thing he did to keep moving when he couldn't get outside.

The haunting fits the man. Not a tragic Victorian lady, not a stagehand who fell into the flies. A working artistic director who died in his fifties and kept the routine going. The activity intensifies during weather he used to hate. Make of that what you will. Ghost tour companies like US Ghost Adventures and Ghost City Tours now put the IRT on their Indianapolis routes, but the stories come from the people who actually work the building. They're the ones who know what they're hearing when the floor creaks above them at 11 p.m. on a rainy Tuesday.

The Indiana Roof Ballroom upstairs gets its own mentions, unaccounted-for sounds and residual energy from the ballroom's big-band heyday in the 1940s and '50s. That one has the classic movie-palace pedigree. But the ghost most people at the IRT will tell you about is the one who used to run the mezzanine on cold days when he couldn't get outside.