Where Her Teeth Went to Hollar | A Louisiana Ghost Story from 1916alt
In 1916alt Baton Rouge, a ghost with no name still moans through the winter cold. Some say it’s grief. Others say it’s abscessed teeth.
Ghosts & Legends
Bayou Elsewhere, 1916
It started, as most hauntings do, with a sound no one could explain.
A soft moan—just under breath and just out of reach. First heard by a janitor in the courthouse annex. Then by a schoolteacher walking home down North Street. Then by a deputy who said it followed him all the way to Laurel Street and never once touched the ground.
The first reports came in the winter of 1916, exactly one year after a woman no one really knew had died of sepsis from an abscessed tooth during the Christmas holidays. Her husband, the station agent at Angola, had tried to get her to Baton Rouge in time, but by the time she arrived, it was too late. She was gone before the new year.
No obituary. No record of burial. Just a sad little note in The True Democrat newspaper: "Death from abscessed teeth."
No one even remembers her name now.
But someone remembers her voice.
They say the moaning still comes in cold snaps. Never angry, never loud. Just... persistent. Like she’s still trying to breathe through swelling gums and clenched jaws.
A few claim they’ve heard the rattle of a tin cup—banging, scraping, tapping against nothing. Others say they’ve smelled saltwater and something sour, like infection. One woman—an old archivist who kept a sleeping cot behind the reference desk—swore the ghost only appeared near train tracks and dental offices. She called her "the Hollow Mouth."
Children say if you press your ear to the railroad siding on a January night, you can still hear her: a broken moan, the creak of an empty water glass, and something trying to suck air through pain.
Some Baton Rouge locals say she wasn’t from here at all. That she never had a name, or maybe had too many. That the earth forgot her because the papers did.
And maybe that’s all a ghost really is: a person the paperwork left behind.
Footnote: This story is loosely based on a real newspaper clipping from The True Democrat [volume], January 02, 1915, Image 2, documenting the death of a woman in Baton Rouge from abscessed teeth. Clipping archived via the Library of Congress at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov.
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