Slippery Noodle Inn

An 1850s knife fight over a brothel worker left a cowboy-shadow ghost at the Slippery Noodle, Indiana's oldest continuously operating bar.

Two men got into a knife fight over one of the brothel's working girls at the Slippery Noodle sometime in the 1850s. One of them ended up dead, and the bloody knife ended up on the bar. A shadowy figure in a cowboy-cut silhouette shows up throughout the building to this day. Regulars and staff have reported him for decades. Most people assume he's the one who didn't walk out.

The Slippery Noodle Inn at 372 South Meridian has been open since 1850, which is 176 years under one roof and almost none of it quiet. It went up as the Tremont House, a roadhouse for travelers coming into Indianapolis. In the 1860s it became the Concordia House, the city's first German-American club, then the Germania House after anti-German sentiment ran through the country. It served as a stop on the Underground Railroad, with a concealed basement room that sheltered freedom seekers who could then catch a train north out of the Union Station a block away. That room is where visitors today describe the sharpest temperature drops in the building. During Prohibition the place was officially Moore's Restaurant and unofficially a brewery in the basement, and the John Dillinger gang is said to have hung out in the back building. The bullet slugs from their target practice are still embedded in the basement walls. The brothel upstairs ran until 1953.

Harold and Lorean Yeagy bought it in 1963, renamed it the Slippery Noodle, and their son Hal Yeagy Jr. turned it into a blues venue in 1985 after his father died. It's been a working blues bar ever since, two stages, live music, and a place Indiana Landmarks calls the oldest continuously operating bar in the state still sitting in its original building on its original site.

The cowboy figure isn't the only ghost. Sarah is a second-floor presence, most often reported by male visitors in what used to be the brothel. She shows up as a dark-haired woman in a long dress, standing in the doorway of one of the old bedrooms. She looks directly at you and then steps back out of sight. Locals believe she was one of the working girls and that she was killed by a client. People who've been on the second floor report doors opening and closing on their own and the feeling of being watched, which, if you know the building's history, lines up with exactly who used to work on that floor.

George is downstairs. He shows up in overalls to beer-delivery workers in the basement, sometimes whispering next to them while they roll kegs in, sometimes just standing there. Staff say he's a former caretaker, and some delivery people have refused to come back. In the hidden Underground Railroad room the air temperature drops sharply and visitors describe an uneasy pressure that's different from the rest of the basement. A psychic named Gary Spivy visiting the building reported seeing a hand come up out of the basement floor. During the same visit, according to the people who brought him in, a former Madam upstairs communicated with his group and identified herself.

Brian Yeagy started running official haunted tours through the basement and the closed-off upstairs hotel rooms in October 2020. Food Network put the Noodle on its list of the most haunted restaurants in Indiana.

The original Tremont House signage is still painted on the north exterior wall. The building has changed names four times, roles a half dozen more, and through all of it the same basement, the same staircase, and the same second floor keep generating the same reports. Most old buildings carry a ghost or two that got grandfathered in by rumor. The Noodle earned its whole roster by being open continuously for most of what the city has been through.