Haunted Baton Rouge

INTRODUCTION

IS BATON ROUGE HAUNTED?

Baton Rouge is an eclectic mixture of both modern and historic perched alongside the Mississippi River about eighty miles north of New Orleans. While much has been written about the paranormal aspects of New Orleans, I found it strange that Baton Rouge has very little in writing about ghosts and hauntings, especially given the age of the city and its history. My younger brother, Walt Steed, a twenty-plus-year resident of the Baton Rouge area, first brought it to my attention when I was discussing upcoming book projects with him one night. You should write a book about Baton Rouge, he said. There are a lot of haunted places here, but no one writes about them. A little bit of research revealed that stories were plentiful, although they were told mainly by word of mouth, passed down through families and friends. That revealed to me that while there might be a shortage of ghostly accounts in writing, there certainly is no shortage of them being told among the residents of the city. Wherever I went while researching this book, I was met with dozens and dozens of friendly people who were quite eager to share their stories of ghosts and hauntings, willingly answering my inquiries with enthusiasm and pride in their city and heritage. It’s no secret to the people of the Baton Rouge area that they live in a truly haunted place, and they are no different than their counterparts all across the country—they all love to tell and listen to a good ghost story about their hometown.

Armed with that knowledge, I set out to research and document some of the stories that were told to me, looking, as usual, for the historical connection. (Anyone who has read my previous books, Haunted Natchez Trace and Haunted Mississippi Gulf Coast, knows how much emphasis I place on the history surrounding the hauntings.) To my way of thinking, each ghost story and legend had its start somewhere, usually in a factual occurrence that either grew with each telling or from which the actual ghost story stemmed. Some of the stories I discovered were nothing more than urban legends and could not be confirmed as stemming from an actual event. Others, however, were easily matched to actual happenings, and while in some cases nothing more than the event itself could be verified, in others, names and dates were easy to match to the story. Those are the ones that quickly catch my attention, both as a paranormal investigator/researcher and as a writer, as those are the stories from which you naturally gravitate from writer to investigator, delving into the story armed with the names and facts to try and document some hard evidence to substantiate the story. I wasn’t able to investigate each place or story, as neither family obligations nor finances would allow that much time away from home, but I was able to look into a few that I found to be fascinating in both a historical and a paranormal aspect.

I also decided to cast a wide loop, so to speak, around the Baton Rouge area and look into stories and places out to a distance of fifteen miles from the Baton Rouge city limits. Since the metropolitan area covers such a wide amount of space, I thought that it would be beneficial to include some of the stories from the outlying areas. Even though these towns have names and identities of their own, they are still referenced by many as simply being a part of BR or the Rouge.

So is Baton Rouge a haunted city? Do ghosts and specters walk the streets and the hallways of its buildings? In my opinion, the answer to those questions is most definitely yes! My answer is based both on the amount of stories there are as well as the history of the area.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE RED STICK

Baton Rouge, which literally means Red Stick, was reportedly given its name by Pierre Le Moyne, the Sieur d’Iberville. Le Moyne, who was instrumental in establishing colonies for the French all along the Gulf Coast area, was exploring the Mississippi River when he came across a reddish cypress pole upon which hung the carcasses of bloody animals and fish. This pole marked the boundary between the Houma tribe and the Bayou Goula tribe and was actually situated on Istrouma Bluff, the first bluff that one would come to going upriver that was high enough to ensure that the marker wouldn’t be washed away by flooding.

A cannon monument overlooking the river. Photo by Hope Steed Kennedy.

It is now thought from the excavation of mounds left by the indigenous peoples and from further research of surrounding areas that the land that now comprises Baton Rouge has been inhabited since nearly 8000 BCE. The three remaining mounds within the city are believed to have been built by more advanced peoples around 5000–3500 BCE, and while not believed to have been used as burial mounds, many researchers believe that they were used for religious and social purposes. That means that the area around Baton Rouge has been lived on for at least ten thousand years or so. But the real documented history from which a lot of the ghost stories and legends stem from began around 1719 with the establishment of a fort at the location. Baton Rouge would grow quickly to become one of the more prominent French settlements in the area.

In 1755, in what would become known as the Great Expulsion, British soldiers deported around eleven thousand French Acadians from Acadia, which is now Nova Scotia, sending them back to France, where many were later relocated to La Louisiane. A good number would settle in the area near Baton Rouge, an area that would come to be known as Acadiana. The people eventually became known as Cajuns. By maintaining their diverse culture of food, music and devotion to the Catholic religion, they have evolved into their own subculture and have been instrumental in making the area famous.

The Treaty of Paris, signed on February 10, 1763, saw all of the French holdings in America pass into British hands. The settlement slowly developed as a town under the British due to its significance as the southwestern-most outpost of the British Americas. Unfortunately for Britain, its control of the area was to be short-lived. When the American Revolution broke out, Baton Rouge stayed loyal to the crown, but in 1778, France declared war on Britain, as did Spain in 1779. That same year, the Spanish governor of New Orleans, Don Bernardo de Galvez, led a force of around 1,400 troops and a few rebellious British subjects and captured the newly constructed Fort New Richmond in the Battle of Baton Rouge after just three hours of artillery shelling. This had the distinction of being the only Revolutionary War battle to be fought outside the boundaries of the original thirteen colonies. Galvez would later capture both Mobile and Pensacola, ending the British presence along the gulf. In 1810, the land would pass on to American hands after rebels overcame the Spanish garrison at Baton Rouge, establishing the Republic of West Florida, which existed for a mere ninety days before being annexed into the United States. On April 30, 1812, Louisiana was admitted to the Union as the eighteenth state.

Because of Baton Rouge’s strategic location along the Mississippi River, the U.S. Army built a series of buildings between 1819 and 1822 that, due to their pentagonal layout, became known as the Pentagon Barracks. The barracks were large enough to house approximately one thousand troops, and with the building of the Baton Rouge Arsenal and Ordnance Depot, Baton Rouge became a major outpost on the Mississippi River. It was so important, in fact, that when the Civil War broke out, the state of Louisiana, after secession from the union, seized the barracks and arsenal and turned them over to the Confederacy. The Confederates would evacuate Baton Rouge in April 1862 after the Battle of New Orleans, and Union troops would move in and occupy the city in May 1862, holding onto it throughout the war, even through one attempt by the Confederates, the Battle of Baton Rouge (August 1862), to retake it. The town was severely damaged during the battle, although not to the extent of other cities that were major conflict areas during the war. Baton Rouge did supply nearly one third of its male population to the Southern cause with the formation of several volunteer companies such as the Pelican Rifles, the Creole Guards, the Baton Rouge Fencibles and the Delta Rifles.

Aerial view of the Pentagon Barracks. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS LA, 17-BATRO, 8-1.

Battle of Baton Rouge, August 4, 1862, from a Currier and Ives print. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-60328.

After the war, the period of Reconstruction brought many changes to the city, which saw many freedmen moving from the rural areas all over the South to the cities as they sought to escape white control and find better jobs and educational opportunities. By 1880, the population of the city was 60 percent black, and it would take until 1920 before the white population would exceed even 50 percent. The city would grow despite racial segregation and Jim Crow laws, which bred conflict and racial hatred among those in both races. And in the early part of the twentieth century, new business and development, along with the arrival of the Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railway, saw much new opportunity for the city. With the railroad and its strategic location along the river, the city became a large industrialized area. Standard Oil began building processing facilities, with many other petroleum and chemical companies following suit. Safety standards weren’t always the highest back then, and many deaths occurred during the early years in both the plants and the refineries. Stories are still told about some of the unfortunate souls who go to work at the plants each day, many years after they met their untimely demise on the job.

Baton Rouge weathered the Great Depression with a large public works project. The building of the new Louisiana State Capitol building was directed by Governor Huey P. Long in 1932 and was considered to be a symbol of modernization and growth. Also built around the same time were the Louisiana