The Gaslight Inn: Haunted (for Real!)

The Gaslight Inn, 2280 S. Meridian Street, is a little boutique bar masquerading as a neighborhood watering hole.  The truth is that only a few of its patrons come from the surrounding neighborhood, which is kind of sketchy.  Most of the folks that go there are businessmen and working stiffs who stop in on the way home from their jobs downtown, or friends of the owners, high-school buddies Art and Joe.  There's nothing fancy about the place, just a clean comfortable bar in an ancient building that supposedly used to house a mortuary-- it's right next to a Catholic cemetery and a Jewish cemetery.  Perhaps that's why the place is supposedly haunted, with customers and employees reportedly having witnessed unexplained phenomena whenever it's really quiet. We saw the door to the basement close all by itself, t'other day, and it wasn't due to gravity or wind currents, not that I could tell, anyway. (See below for some more ghost stories.) Regular beer prices are good, and the pub grub is GREAT!  Steve the cook knows his stuff, and they often have good beer and food specials-- the all you can eat catfish on Fridays is the BOMB!  $4 glasses of decent wine are the norm, as I write this.  As a practicing drunk (I'll get it right one of these days), I'm not a big fan of the rather weak mixed drinks here (though I order 'em all the danged time, anyway!), but they do often have good drink specials as well as specials on buckets o' beer.  As I said, the neighborhood is just a little bit sketchy, so lock your car and take your keys just to be safe.

UPDATE, 04/14/2012:  Steve the chef is no longer at the Gaslight, but the new cook, Scott, is apparently really talented, foodwise anyway (dunno if he can play the piano, sing, or dance).  We recently had a $5.99 lunch shredded-pork burrito and the Famous Reuben Sandwich that were DEEELICIOUS, so I think Scott knows his stuff, too.

UPDATE 06/11/2012:  They've repainted the interior a bright blue with deep blue trim, which makes the place look bigger, for some reason. ...Turns out Scott used to be the restaurant and catering manager for the American Legion post in Greenwood, IN, which is a pretty big operation.  The story I heard is that he was fired from there for conflict of interest after some family members asked him for part-time help with their restaurant.  I dunno if that's true, but the Greenwood post's loss is certainly the Gaslight's gain!  I had some New-Potato Salad catered from his kitchen there at a recent function, and it was incredibly scrumptious, depending how you like your potato salads:  It even had bacon and little slices of Spanish olives in it,as well as some delicious seasoning I couldn't decipher.  Wow!

UPDATE 02/11/13:  Some recent Gaslight ghost stories:  

1) Tom, a 6'6" regular patron, was sitting at the rather isolated far end of the bar Friday 02/07/13, and had been expounding upon how the stories about the Gaslight being haunted were a lot of horse sh*t, and John (the name they've given the ghost, who is supposedly a former owner of the building) was just a figment of everyone's imagination.  A few minutes later  Tom suddenly said "Ow!" and hopped off the bar stool. He said something had just bit or slapped him on the back of the neck.  When they looked at his neck there were three strip-like welts there like he had been scratched with fingernails.  My Little Woman came in the bar just after this happened and she witnessed the welts.  I later talked to Tom personally he said the story is true-- he said the pain happened all at once, like a from a whip rather than a scratch.  Tom said he still doesn't believe in ghosts, but he admitted he could find no explanation for what happened, as there was no one sitting anywhere close to him.

2)  Tim, brother of one of the owners, said he was the first customer in the place at 11:00 a.m.on a recent Saturday and went in the restroom prior to sitting at the bar.  He went over to the urinal and while he was um, in the middle of his business, the automatic towel dispenser rolled out a paper towel.  The dispenser has a motion sensor on the bottom at which you have wave your hand to get it to activate, and Tim was alone some 12 feet away from it. Before Tim finished up, the dispenser activated two more times!  No one's seen the dispenser do that before or since....   

3)  Joe, one of the owners, came in to open up the bar on Monday 02/11/13 and went upstairs to get something from storage.  The rest of the upstairs has seating but is used for special occasions; so it has speakers connected to the juke box, but they are almost always turned off and Joe hadn't yet turned on the juke box, anyway (see where this is going?)  Suddenly the upstairs speakers started blaring some sort of punk rock song (I didn't know that genre still existed!)  Joe went downstairs to turn off the juke box and saw the "now playing" screen indicated that it was a song from the band named "Gaslight Anthem"!  Cue the TWILIGHT ZONE theme song, boys!