Pentagon Barracks

A Union sentry still paces the second-floor balcony of the 1819 Pentagon Barracks in Baton Rouge, watched by legislators and staff who now occupy the former army post. Disembodied voices, opening doors, and ghost soldiers from both Civil War armies are reported across the four brick pentagon buildings that Zachary Taylor and Robert E. Lee once called home.

A soldier paces the second-floor balcony of the Pentagon Barracks at night. Legislators and staff who work in the buildings during the day have seen him from the lawn. He does not react when people wave or call out. He walks the same stretch of gallery, turns, walks it again, and eventually fades. The Pentagon Barracks are now state office space for Louisiana lawmakers, but the sentry does not seem to have gotten the memo that the army left in 1879.

The complex was built between 1819 and 1825 on the bluff above the Mississippi in Baton Rouge. Captain James Gadsden laid out four identical brick buildings in a pentagon shape, with a fifth commissary and warehouse completing the geometry that gave the post its name. Zachary Taylor was stationed here before he became president. So was Robert E. Lee. The barracks were seized by Louisiana forces in a bloodless takeover in January 1861 and handed to the Confederacy. Union troops recaptured the site in 1862. The army left for good after 1879, and LSU used the buildings as a campus from 1886 to 1925. The state took them over in 1951 and converted them into offices and apartments for legislators.

Ghost soldiers from both armies are the most common report. A former maintenance worker told the Visit Baton Rouge tourism office that the buildings are "haunted and quite spooky, especially at night," and described exactly the encounters that staff pass around: doors opening on their own, voices speaking in empty rooms, the pacing sentry on the balcony. The author Bud Steed documented some of these accounts in Haunted Baton Rouge, which treats the barracks as one of the core haunted sites in the city.

The building housed a lot of dying young men, which is the usual ingredient. Yellow fever killed soldiers here in waves. The Battle of Baton Rouge in August 1862 left casualties scattered across the grounds, with the Union and Confederate lines running within shouting distance of each other. Cholera and typhoid took their share too. When the army listed the men buried on the post in the 1870s, the total ran into the hundreds.

Disembodied voices are the second-most reported phenomenon. Staff working late have heard conversations in rooms they just locked, usually too muffled to make out the words but clearly two or three voices trading remarks. Some have described the cadence as military, which is either pattern recognition or a clue. Doors that had been shut are found open. Doors that had been open are found shut and sometimes latched from the inside.

The pacing sentry is the one people name first. He is usually described as wearing a Union uniform, which is historically plausible for this period of occupation, and he always walks the same section of balcony on one of the outer buildings. A 2022 Visit Baton Rouge feature quoted staff who still catch him on night walks across the capitol grounds.

None of this is marketed. The barracks are offices, not a tourist attraction, and the state does not run ghost tours here. The stories leak out anyway, from people who unlock the buildings in the morning and from legislators who have apartments in the complex and have gotten used to hearing footsteps in corridors nobody else uses. The barracks are the oldest standing military structures in the Louisiana Purchase, and the interiors remain closed to the public. The sentry probably prefers it that way.