In Brief
At Pleasant Hall on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, the custodians won't work the third floor alone. The reason is room 312, where the story goes a young woman shot herself when the building was a hotel — a story a 30-year staffer tells firsthand.
The Full Story
At Pleasant Hall on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, the people who clean the building won't work the third floor by themselves. The reason they give is a single room: 312.
The person who tells the story isn't a tour guide or a blogger. It's Connie Scott, a custodian who has worked the building for about 30 years and told the LSU student newspaper what happened there. Back when Pleasant Hall was a hotel in the 1970s, she said, a young woman and her boyfriend, who lived on the floor below, got into an argument. The woman shot him, trying to kill him. He survived. She ran upstairs to her own room, 312, and shot herself.
It's the part about the boyfriend that the retellings keep. He wasn't a bystander. He was the one she meant to kill, and he lived, and she's the one who didn't. Some accounts hang a name on her — a few call her Rosemary — but there's no record of any guest or student by that name, so the name is just something the lore added.
Accounts differ on the last part. The custodian's version, repeated by most retellings, has her dying by gunshot in 312. The version in Bud Steed's book *Haunted Baton Rouge* has her opening the window and leaping to her death from the third floor instead. Either way, the third floor is where it ends, and where the reports cluster.
Scott and other workers describe cold spots that drop the temperature hard, noises with no source, doors that open on their own, and a woman's voice that sounds, as she put it, like someone in real pain. Students in the rooms below report footsteps overhead. Steed's account adds the worst of it: a girl seen falling from a third-floor window and gone before she lands, and a blood-covered figure with a neck wound standing at the foot of beds.
Nothing in the LSU archives confirms any of it. There's no police report, no obituary, no dated record that the shooting ever happened. The story survives because the staff keep telling it, the same one, for decades.
The building opened in 1931 as Smith Hall, the campus's first women's dormitory. It's an offices now — Admissions, Financial Aid, Digital and Continuing Education. The hotel closed years ago. The woman on the third floor is the one tenant who never checked out.
