Logan Mansion

An 1897 Victorian in Shreveport where a paranormal team caught an EVP of a child's voice saying you can't go up there. A girl fell from the third-story attic, though the traditional identification, Theodora Hunt, is probably wrong. Owner Vicki LeBrun has logged dozens of incidents including a music box that wound itself up and played at 5:30 in the morning.

A wind-up music box sitting in the foyer of the Logan Mansion started playing at 5:30 in the morning. Nobody was in the foyer. Nobody had wound it. Vicki LeBrun, who owns the mansion with her husband Billy, recorded the incident with the rest of the decade's worth of material she and Billy have collected since they moved into the house. "It is kind of hard to believe sometimes," she told a local reporter, "and we were disbelieving when we moved in, but too many things have happened over the years."

The house is at 725 Austin Place in Shreveport, a seventeen-room Victorian built in 1897 for Lafayette Robert Logan, who made his money selling ice and beer. Architect Nathaniel Sykes Allen designed it, and the mansion is one of the most architecturally intact late-Victorian houses in Shreveport. Over more than a century the building has served as a single-family home, a boarding house, a church, a community center, and at one point the studios of radio station KCOZ FM. Every use has layered onto the one before it.

The central ghost story involves a young girl who fell from the third-story attic to her death. The traditional version names her as Theodora Hunt, an eleven-year-old who lived across the street and often played at the mansion. Some accounts place her fall in 1904, others around 1930. But research by local historians has complicated that identification: Theodora was a sickly child who actually died in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where she had traveled seeking medical treatment. She never fell from the Logan Mansion at all. A competing theory holds that when a later owner named Hampton lost money gambling and started renting the oversized attic to local schoolteachers as residence space, it was a teacher's child who fell. Whichever child it was, the house seems to have kept her.

A member of the Shreveport tourism bureau reported seeing her face in the third-story attic window around 2012. Dozens of photographs taken in the attic over the years have picked up orbs, which is low-tier evidence on its own, but the Louisiana Spirits paranormal investigation team ran a formal overnight session in the house and recorded something harder to wave off: a clear EVP of a girl's voice in the front hall saying "you can't go up there."

The child isn't the only presence. A man and a woman have been seen downstairs, and a ghostly dog has been reported in the library, which contains some of the original Logan-era books. Temperatures drop suddenly in specific rooms, even in July. Guests talk about being watched from directly behind them and turning to find nothing there.

The LeBruns run candlelight tours during October, and they rent rooms through Airbnb year-round. If you want to spend a night somewhere where the ghost is probably an eleven-year-old girl who may or may not be named Theodora, you can actually book it. That's unusual for a haunted Louisiana mansion, most of which are either museums with fixed hours or private residences with no public access.

What stays with most visitors isn't the orbs or the EVP or the music box. It's that sentence in the child's voice. You can't go up there. Nobody tells a child not to go somewhere without a reason.