Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center

Huey Long kept a fifth-floor suite at the Heidelberg Hotel from 1929 until his 1935 assassination, including a secret tunnel to his mistress's hotel across the street. Now the Hilton, the tenth floor is where housekeepers keep smelling cigar smoke in a building that's been smoke-free since 2006.

The Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center has been smoke-free since its 2006 reopening. The housekeepers on the tenth floor keep catching whiffs of cigar smoke anyway, drifting through rooms that were freshly cleaned an hour earlier and confirmed empty. The smell is the recurring part of the story. The man seen walking those same hallways, long coat, bucket hat, cigar clamped in his teeth, is the part that makes it a ghost story. Staff say he doesn't acknowledge anyone. If you speak to him, he vanishes.

The hotel opened in 1927 as the Heidelberg, sketched out on a napkin by architect Edward Nield and built by Roy Heidelberg. It had 216 rooms, a dining room, a coffee shop, and a rooftop garden. This was the poshest place in Baton Rouge, which was a meaningful distinction in a capital city that had just outgrown its plantation-town bones. By 1929, the hotel's most important guest had moved in. Huey P. Long, the populist governor who was busy tearing up Louisiana's political machine, kept a permanent fifth-floor suite at the Heidelberg and used the building as an off-site command post. He conducted state business from the dining room. He met his mistress upstairs. He ran the governorship through the hotel bar when the formal capitol building bored him.

In 1931, Long had a subterranean tunnel built connecting the Heidelberg to the King Hotel across the street. The tunnel let him slip between buildings without being ambushed by political enemies, and it let him visit the mistress without anyone on the sidewalk getting a clear look. The corridor was nicknamed Peacock Alley for its peacock-blue and green tiled floor. It's still there. The Hilton reopened the space as an events venue called The Tunnel in 2022, with live music on Thursdays and guided walks through the original tiled stretch.

That same year, 1931, Long won a seat in the U.S. Senate but refused to resign the governorship, triggering a constitutional standoff with Lieutenant Governor Paul Cyr. For a short stretch of weeks, the Heidelberg itself effectively served as the Louisiana State Capitol while the two men argued over who held the office. Long eventually let go, moved to Washington, and kept running Louisiana by telephone.

He ran it that way until September 8, 1935, when he was shot in a corridor of the new State Capitol, four blocks from the hotel. The assassin was identified as Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of one of Long's political enemies, though the question of whether Weiss actually fired the fatal bullet or whether Long's own bodyguards hit him in the crossfire has never been fully settled. Long died two days later. He was forty-two. His reported last words: "I wonder why he shot me."

The Heidelberg stayed open for another fifty years, then closed in 1985 and sat empty for two decades. During the pre-construction inspection for the Hilton renovation, workers logged one of the stranger incidents in the building's recent history. The swimming pool, which had been caked in mold and grime from twenty years of abandonment, appeared sparkling clean the next morning. The room had been locked. No contractors had been inside. The work foreman couldn't explain it, and neither could anyone else on the crew.

The $70 million renovation finished in 2006. The Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center added the building to the National Register of Historic Places that same decade. The original listing actually dates to 1982. Historic Hotels of America has named it one of the twenty-five most haunted hotels in the country. The Huey Long sightings skew to the tenth floor, which is part of a 1957 addition, not the original structure. Why his ghost would prefer the top of an add-on to his own fifth-floor suite is one of the questions the hotel staff can't answer.

The cigar smoke, though, moves through the whole building. Housekeepers say it shows up most often after a room has been turned over. Fresh linens, vacuumed carpet, and a lingering smell of something the hotel hasn't officially allowed in two decades.

Peacock Alley is open for dinner reservations now. Long would have loved it.