In Brief
The Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center has been smoke-free since 2006. Even so, housekeepers on the tenth floor keep catching cigar smoke in rooms they finished an hour ago. The man they see in the hall is dressed the way Huey Long was in the 1920s.
The Full Story
The Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center has been smoke-free since it reopened in 2006. The housekeepers on the tenth floor keep smelling cigar smoke anyway. Fresh linens, vacuumed carpet, a room turned over and confirmed empty an hour ago, and then the whiff of something not allowed in the building for two decades.
The smell is the part that recurs. The man is the part that makes it a ghost story. Staff describe him walking the tenth-floor hall in a long coat and a bucket hat, a cigar clamped in his teeth, dressed the way Huey P. Long dressed when he ran Louisiana. He doesn't acknowledge anyone. The way Visit Baton Rouge tells it, he keeps walking the tenth floor puffing a cigar and disappears the moment he's acknowledged. Speak to him and he's gone.
The hotel opened in 1927 as the Heidelberg, sketched onto a napkin by an architect named Edward Neild. It had 216 rooms, a coffee shop, and a roof garden, and over the years it hosted Will Rogers, Hubert Humphrey, and John F. Kennedy. But the man who left his mark on it was Long. He moved into a fifth-floor suite in 1929 and ran the state from it like a command post, ducking the press through a tunnel under Lafayette Street that locals called Peacock Alley for its blue-and-green tiled floor. He's said to have used it to slip out and visit his mistress. The tiles are gone now. The corridor is still there, reopened in 2022 as an events space with an absinthe fountain and Long's portrait on the wall.
The tenth floor where they see him isn't even his floor. It came later, part of a 1957 addition that added the ballroom and renamed the place Capitol House. His suite was five floors down.
Long never died here, either. He was shot four blocks away, in a corridor of the State Capitol he built, on September 8, 1935, by the son-in-law of a judge he'd been moving to ruin. He died two days later, eleven days after he turned 42. Whether the fatal bullet was the assassin's or his own bodyguards' crossfire has never been fully settled; an exhumation decades later found the shooter had taken two dozen bullets from every angle, the way a panicked detail sprays a room.
The hotel closed in 1985 and sat derelict for over twenty years. The story staff tell about that stretch is the pool: caked in two decades of mold on one pre-construction walkthrough, found sparkling clean the next day, with no one having had access to the area in between.
