Guaranty Income Life & Broadcasting Building - Baton Rouge, LA

929 Government St.

 Baton Rouge, La 70801

30.443595,-91.180937

            Constructed in the 1920’s, this building was initially the Baton Rouge General Hospital and served as the gold standard for the local medical community. For its time, the hospital was considered to be extremely technologically advanced. The hospital operated in its entirety until the 1950’s, when it shut down and then became the Guaranty Income Life and Broadcasting building. This location is now home to five broadcasting stations and an insurance firm.

            For years, this old hospital has been reported to be haunted. A majority of the activity reported seems to originate from the basement area, which was the morgue when the hospital was still in operation. The basement now serves as several offices and an area to store, no pun intended, dead files!

            Reports of unexplainable cold spots and disembodied voices have been commonly reported here. Staff and security guards alike are hesitant to go in some areas of the building alone. There are various hypothesis regarding who or what haunts this old hospital. Some have seen the apparition of an older woman in an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform standing motionless and silent with a tumultuous look on her face. Others feel the paranormal activity is due to a former doctor who, even once the hospital was shut down, continued operating a small clinic here. Additionally, there is always the safe assumption that spirits of some of the deceased patients continue to wander the hallways.

            Regardless of the source, staff and visitors are adamant that the Guaranty Life building continues to breathe life from its interesting past. Hospitals have always been intriguing in the eyes of a paranormal investigator. Perhaps it's simply from watching too many horror movies of deranged doctor's performing gruesome experiments on unwilling patients. Personally, I cannot comprehend how a patient who died a slow death holds any sort of emotional attachment to a hospital. It would be easier to envision deceased staff members as being the source for these hauntings, as these individuals spend much of their life caring and devoting their undivided attention to patients they would often become attached to. Whether these hauntings are due to intelligent entities, interacting with the current occupants, or simply residual imprints etched in time due to years of monotony, there are still plenty of strange happenings to keep this old building an interesting place to work for years to come!