In Brief
The old Indianapolis Athletic Club is luxury condos now, but residents say the knocking hasn't stopped: loud, insistent banging on their doors around midnight, and a young man's voice telling them to get out. Two firefighters died here trying to do exactly that.
The Full Story
The Indianapolis Athletic Club, three blocks north of Monument Circle, is luxury condominiums now. Residents say the trouble starts around midnight: loud, insistent pounding on the apartment doors, the way a trained firefighter knocks when he's trying to wake sleeping people before the fire reaches them. Some say they've heard a young man's voice telling them to get out.
This isn't really a ghost story. It's a firefighter story.
The nine-story clubhouse opened in 1924 at 350 North Meridian Street, built to promote "clean sports, amusement, and sociability." At its peak it had more than 2,000 members, names like Eli Lilly and a future Indiana governor, and 160 sleeping rooms upstairs. People stayed overnight.
People were staying overnight on February 5, 1992. At 12:06 a.m. someone called 911 to report an odor of smoke in the lobby. The fire had started in the third-floor bar, an electrical fault near a refrigerator, and the first crews on scene reported almost nothing showing. What they couldn't see was the worst of it: a renovation had left a hidden cavity above the barroom's suspended ceiling, and a second fire was raging up there, unseen, building heat behind the plaster. Then the ceiling erupted and the whole room flashed over.
Two Indianapolis firefighters were caught in it. Cpl. Ellwood "Woody" Gelenius was 47. Pvt. John Lorenzano was 29. An elderly overnight guest died too, overtaken by smoke as he tried to make it down a stairway. The whole country was half-watching the building that night, because the sequestered jury from Mike Tyson's rape trial was housed inside.
The fire changed how the city's fire department worked, bringing a tighter command structure, better protective gear, and new breathing equipment. The club itself closed in 2004 for financial reasons, and a developer turned the nine floors into more than 80 condominiums, keeping most of the original detail. The knocking, residents say, came with the building.
Most accounts give the voice a name. They say it's Pvt. Lorenzano, warning people out the way he was when he died, though that specific attribution is local interpretation more than record. What's documented is gentler and stranger than a name. Every year, during the city's St. Patrick's Day parade, a battalion of Indianapolis firemen stops in front of the building, turns in formation, and salutes the two men who didn't come out.
The living salute them from the street once a year. Residents say one of them never stopped working the building at all, pounding on doors at midnight, trying to get everybody out.
