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Brian Alvey threw a big party at the Vollrath Tavern in December of 2007 shortly after he finished the bar's first wave of renovations. The bar was trashed -- and the huge bar-back mirror covered in dust and smoke residue -- but the owner decided he needed food to steel himself for the late-night cleanup. So he closed up the bar, headed out to Peppy's Grill in Fountain Square, ate, and returned to find the mirror had been meticulously -- and mysteriously -- cleaned.
That didn't surprise bartender Debbie Rackemenn.
"The mirror I have seen cleaned on several occasions," she said. "I know it's been cleaned spotless."
Rackemenn tended bar at the Vollrath for two years before Alvey bought the place, and he jokes that she and the antique bar are all he kept after the purchase. The bartender has had her fair share of strange experiences in the building but she stops just short of declaring the place haunted.
"I've always heard there was a ghost in here. Whether or not I've seen him or not might be a case of late-night jitters," she said. "I actually was comin' up through the bar here and I seen this shadow thing go "whoosh" in that back room. I know when I've been downstairs I've heard someone walking on this floor."
On April 5, a newly formed group called Researching Indy's Paranormal was given free reign of the Vollrath to ferret out evidence supporting alleged paranormal activity or determine if it was all a bunch of hokum. We spoke to RIP's Eric Russell to learn what they found.
How did you get involved with the Vollrath?
My brother works for Nuvo and he was critiquing a band at the Vollrath and ran into (Vollrath owner) Brian (Alvey). My brother knew we were into the Paranormal so he gave my number to Brian and (Alvey) invited us down to investigate the Vollrath.
We're still fairly new to the scene of researching the paranormal but once Brian explained some of the experiences he'd had, and when we went into the bar people told us things that they'd experienced. Everybody had a story down at the bar.
What did you guys do during your overnight stay?
We got there at 11 o'clock and they let us set up at midnight. We set up four digital cameras and five voice recorders, we took 283 digital pictures.
We were in the bar from midnight to 4:30 a.m. and have been going through data ever since. We just found out two nights ago that we took 50-some-odd 8-mm 400-speed pictures and none of them came out. The film was just completely blank.
Did you have any personal experiences?
There's a poolroom in there and me and Todd (Sondrini), one of the other investigators, had witnessed shadows on the wall that we couldn't explain. They weren't from cars or anything and we didn't set up recorders in there because no one mentioned the poolroom having any paranormal activity.
On video we have some strange lights that we cannot explain. They're very intense bright white lights that just kind of float about. They don't follow the contour of the ceiling or anything that you'd think is dust or a bug. Then we have a bunch of voice recordings of people talking and you can actually hear the lip smack but there was no one around the voice recorder when it happened.
The strangest one is you hear, "Bugaboo." We looked it up online and it is a mischievous ghost or spirit. It also means mischief. I remember my grandmother saying it.
Were you able to find anything that reinforced the claims of people hearing footsteps or the mirror cleaning itself?
We chalked the mirror when we first got there and we got nothing off the mirror. Although the strange white lights were in the area of the mirror, then they moved to the north corner of the bar and then they came back. It's all on video, we can't explain it.
Did you investigate the basement at all?
We didn't get anything out of the basement but we only did the basement for about 45 minutes. The original owner lived above the bar and we want to investigate [his apartment] also.
Were you able to do any research about the bar and things that might have happened there?
We spent about eight hours researching at the main library. We have all the names of the original tenants to the building, the original owner and then all the owners listed all the way up to 1980. Al Capone supposedly went there but it would take so much research...it was '24 to '26 that he was in there, supposedly.
So do you think the bar is haunted?
I think there's something to it. We pulled seven voices from five audio recorders, the video, when we go back we want to do the basement and the poolroom. There is an eerie feeling in that poolroom. I can't explain it but it's an eerie feeling that you get, especially by the door that goes to the basement from the poolroom.
After sifting through hundreds of photos and hours of video and audio recordings, Researching Indy's Paranormal released evidence of what they believe to be unexplained phenomena.
Haunted or not?
Did the team capture the sounds of a creaky old building or disembodied voices of the dead? Did they record dust particles, insects, or the souls of the dearly departed.
We have our ideas but we'd like to know what you think. Check out the videos below and visit RIP's YouTube page at www.youtube.com/user/RIPIndy08
