In Brief
The Indiana Repertory Theatre in Indianapolis has a ghost who jogs. Staff say the footsteps belong to Tom Haas, the artistic director who died in 1991, and they come on the cold, wet days that once kept him running laps indoors.
The Full Story
The Indiana Repertory Theatre in Indianapolis is a 1927 movie palace with every ingredient for a classic ghost, and the one it got is a theater director who liked to jog. The story goes that on cold and rainy days, you can hear floorboards creak on the mezzanine, as if someone is running laps up there. Staff say it's Tom Haas.
Haas was the IRT's artistic director, and a man with a serious pedigree. He'd run the acting and directing department at the Yale School of Drama in the early 1970s, where his students included Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and Henry Winkler. He came to Indianapolis in 1980, directed 35 mainstage productions over the next 11 years, and built out the company's experimental Upperstage and a cabaret stage for musical revues. He was, by the time he arrived, exactly the sort of director a regional theater builds itself around.
He was also a runner. On bad-weather days, when Indianapolis wouldn't let him out, he circled the upstairs mezzanine instead, lap after lap on the floor above the lobby, waiting out the gray.
On January 28, 1991, he made an exception. He went out to run in heavy fog, and a van struck him near his Indianapolis home. He died three weeks later, on February 21, of a pulmonary embolism. He was 53. He had spent years avoiding fog exactly like the fog he died running into.
The footsteps, by every telling, started after that. And they come on the gray, wet mornings that used to keep him inside, the same weather he had logged so many indoor miles trying to wait out. To this day, witnesses say, the floorboards creak as the director jogs his old route around the mezzanine.
The building wrapped around that small, modern haunting is a Spanish Baroque palace that seems built for an older ghost, a Victorian lady or a stagehand lost up in the rigging. When it opened, it held roughly 3,200 seats, basement bowling alleys, a soda fountain, and one of the first air-conditioning systems in the city. A sixth-floor ballroom still wears a deep blue domed ceiling set with electric stars. The cinema went dark in 1975, and five years later the IRT moved in and split the old auditorium in two, turning the balcony into a second stage.
Nothing in the record names a witness or pins a date to the first footsteps. There's no recording, no investigation, no photograph. Just a director who ran indoors when the weather turned, still making his laps on the days it does.
