Pleasant Hall

Room 312 on the third floor of LSU's Pleasant Hall is where a young woman is said to have shot herself after a failed attempt on her boyfriend's life, and custodians will not work that floor alone. Temperature drops, crying voices, and a 1940s-era apparition passing through a closed door have been reported for decades at the former 1931 women's dormitory.

Custodians at LSU's Pleasant Hall will not work the third floor alone, and the reason is room 312. LSU legend says a young woman shot herself in that room after a failed attempt on her boyfriend's life with a shotgun downstairs. She ran upstairs, locked the door, and finished what she had started. The story is repeated by staff and students across decades, and the third floor is where nearly every reported phenomenon at Pleasant Hall happens.

The details the custodians report line up across years. The temperature drops hard at the landing between the second and third floors. Doors at the end of the hallway open and close without anyone touching them. A woman's voice is heard crying somewhere in the corridor, clear enough that staff have followed the sound and found nothing. One custodian interviewed by WGNO New Orleans, Connie Scott, said she heard a voice that sounded like someone in pain, and she was certain the pain was real.

The building was constructed in 1931 as Smith Hall, a women's residential dormitory, and later renamed Pleasant Hall after Governor Ruffin G. Pleasant. LSU converted it into a campus hotel and conference center, which is its current function. The third floor is mostly guest rooms now. Staff report that room 312 in particular runs cold year-round, even in August when Baton Rouge sits at ninety-five percent humidity and the rest of the building runs warm.

Bud Steed's Haunted Baton Rouge documents a ghost on the third floor that staff and long-term residents have called Rosemary, a young woman sometimes seen walking the corridor and passing through a closed door. Steed's account gives the ghost a name without giving her a confirmed backstory, which is an honest hedge. The LSU archives have no record matching the shotgun story, and sources that repeat it never pin it to a specific date.

The original shotgun incident is a red flag if you want the story to be sourced rigorously. The basic frame repeats without names: jealous fight, failed murder attempt, suicide upstairs. It's possible the story is folklore built around the actual experiences people have on the third floor, rather than the cause of them. It's also possible the original records were simply not kept.

The building does not market itself as haunted and the university's campus tours skip it, but students know about room 312. Students in the rooms below occasionally hear footsteps overhead, tracing the same corridor Rosemary is said to walk.