Slippery Noodle Inn

The Slippery Noodle Inn on South Meridian Street was built in 1850 as the Tremont House, a roadhouse and inn serving travellers who arrived at the city’s original wooden Union Station; the name is still painted on the building’s north side. It claims to be the oldest continuously operating bar in Indiana in its original building, and it is described as Indianapolis’s oldest commercial building. In the 1860s it became the Concordia House, the city’s first German-American club, and it later went by Germania House, Beck’s Saloon during the First World War and Moore’s Beer Tavern. During Prohibition it posed as a restaurant while beer was still brewed in the basement.

The building’s long history is colourful. Its upstairs rooms served as a brothel until 1953, when the business closed after a fatal knifing, and the bar was a hangout of the John Dillinger and Al Brady gangs, with bullet marks still visible in the backroom, according to the inn. Local tradition also says the cellar sheltered freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, though that is mostly repeated as lore rather than documented. Harold and Lorean Yeagy bought it in 1963 and gave it its current name; their son Hal Yeagy Jr. turned it into a blues venue in 1985 and ran it until his death in 2020. The building is a contributing property in the Indianapolis Union Station–Wholesale Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1982.

The ghost stories are told by the family and staff. In a 2018 television interview, Hal Yeagy recalled that an earlier owner died by his own hand in 1873, and he linked that to a small downstairs room with a brick ceiling and dirt floor that he said he avoids. Patrons and employees have described cowboys, enslaved people and prostitutes, as well as a caretaker in coveralls in the basement, unseen touches, footsteps, voices, objects that shift and locks that open by themselves.

In October 2020 the bar began its first official, ticketed haunted tours, led by manager Brian Yeagy, who said the tour would pass on accounts from past employees, delivery drivers and band members, and would visit the basement and upstairs rooms normally closed to patrons. Tickets cost from $45 to $75. The stories are anecdotal, and the identities of the “ghosts” fit the building’s known uses a little too neatly, which may say as much about its storytelling as about its history.

A man in coveralls in the basement, apparitions of cowboys and women from the brothel days, footsteps and voices, unseen touches, objects that move and locks that unlock. Reports come from family, staff, band members and delivery drivers and are anecdotal.

The dirt-floored basement, the upstairs former hotel rooms and the backroom bar; tours visit areas usually closed to customers.

The inn is a landmark of the Indianapolis blues scene and appears in local ‘most haunted’ lists and the city’s Halloween events.