In Brief
The Slippery Noodle Inn in Indianapolis is the oldest bar in Indiana, open since 1850. People keep seeing a shadowy, cowboy-cut figure on the upper floors, tied to a knife fight that closed the brothel here in 1953.
The Full Story
At the Slippery Noodle Inn in Indianapolis, people keep seeing a man on the upper floors who isn't dressed for now. The figure reads as a cowboy, cut from an older century, and it turns up throughout the building. The story most people attach to him goes back to the brothel that ran upstairs here until 1953, when two customers fought over one of the working girls and one stabbed the other to death. The way it's told, the bloody knife was left on the bar. No newspaper or court record was ever found to mark that death, so it stays bar lore, passed mouth to mouth for decades. The people who tell it can't even agree on the cowboy: some say he's the man who lost the fight, others the man who swung the knife.
The Noodle opened in 1850 as the Tremont House, a roadhouse at the corner of South and Meridian. It is the oldest continuously operating bar in Indiana, in its original building on its original site, and very little of those 175 years was quiet. It ran through six names and as many lives: a German-American club, a saloon, a tavern brewing beer in the basement straight through Prohibition.
The basement has its own resident. Staff call him George, a former handyman in coveralls who turns up to startle beer-delivery crews and keg workers, sometimes heard before he's seen. The building was a way station on the Underground Railroad during the Civil War years, and visitors say the hidden room down there holds the sharpest cold and an uneasy pressure the rest of the basement doesn't carry. One psychic who toured the place said he watched a hand rise out of the basement floor. During the same visit, the story goes, a second-floor presence spoke through a woman in his group and named herself the madam of the old brothel.
Upstairs, in those brothel rooms now used mostly for storage, the reports are doors that open and close on their own, whispers, cold spots, the feeling of being watched. Wine bottles have been found uncorked in the basement with no one to account for them.
The Yeagy family bought the place in 1963 and gave it the name it carries now. A manager who grew up in the building eventually opened the haunting up to ticketed tours of the basement and the closed-off upstairs. None of the dark is documented the way the building is, though. The slugs Dillinger's and Brady's gangs fired into the basement wall for target practice are still embedded there, countable. The man on the stairs is only a story people keep telling, and keep seeing.
