Est. 1927 · National Register of Historic Places · Spanish Baroque Architecture · Indianapolis Cultural History · Regional Theater
The Indiana Theatre at 140 West Washington Street opened in 1927 as a Paramount Pictures Publix movie palace and was, at the time, the largest theater in Indianapolis. Its architecture combines Spanish Baroque with decorative motifs drawn from Indian and Egyptian visual traditions — an eclectic pastiche typical of the era's picture palaces. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
The Indiana Repertory Theatre was founded in 1972 by Ben Mordecai, Greg Poggi, and Ed Stern, initially operating out of The Athenaeum. In 1980, IRT moved into the Indiana Theatre and undertook a major renovation that subdivided the former single-screen palace into three performance spaces: the OneAmerica Stage, the Upperstage, and the Cabaret.
Tom Haas, age 42, succeeded Ed Stern as IRT's artistic director in 1980 and held the position for eleven years. Before Indianapolis, Haas had founded the PlayMakers Repertory Theater at the University of North Carolina, co-founded the Weathervane Theater in Whitefield, New Hampshire, headed the acting and directing department at Yale School of Drama from 1969 to 1974, and served as associate director of Yale Repertory Theater. His acting and directing students included Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Michael Gross, and Henry Winkler. At IRT he directed 35 mainstage productions and established both the Upperstage (for experimental work) and the Cabaret Stage.
On January 28, 1991, Haas was struck by a van while jogging in heavy fog near his Indianapolis home. He survived the initial impact but died three weeks later, on February 21, of a pulmonary embolism related to his injuries. He was 53. The identity of the driver is not named in published obituaries or the Indianapolis Encyclopedia biography; accounts attributing the collision to a family member appear only in later folk retellings and should be read as unverified tradition.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Repertory_Theatre
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Theatre_(Indianapolis)
- https://indyencyclopedia.org/indiana-repertory-theatre-irt/
- https://www.irtlive.com/about/our-history/
Phantom footstepsResidual haunting
The paranormal reputation of the Indiana Repertory Theatre centers on a single, specific phenomenon: on rainy or foggy days, staff and building workers report hearing the upper mezzanine floorboards creak in a pattern consistent with someone running.
The origin story is attached to Tom Haas. According to accounts carried in Indianapolis ghost-lore and the local paranormal tradition, Haas kept up a regular jogging routine, and on days when weather drove him inside he would run the mezzanine circuit. On the foggy morning of January 28, 1991, he ran outside instead. The van that hit him was driving under poor-visibility conditions; the identity of the driver is not named in Haas's published obituary. He died three weeks later of a pulmonary embolism.
The specificity of the reported haunting — not a cold spot or an undefined presence, but creaking that matches the rhythm of running footsteps, triggered specifically by rain — is what has made the account persist. Whether the sound has a mundane cause (old wood expanding in humid conditions, structural settling characteristic of a 1927 building) is a question the accounts don't attempt to settle.
IRT has not marketed the story or organized paranormal programming around it. The tradition circulates in regional ghost-writing and the occasional Indianapolis walking-tour narrative but remains understated — in character with a working regional theater that has its own reasons for remembering its longest-tenured artistic director.
