KENT PLANTATION HOUSE House — Alexandria, Louisiana Status: Operating · Access: Open to public Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/kent-plantation-house-alexandria-louisiana/ The 1796 house—the oldest in central Louisiana. Kent Plantation House is a house in Alexandria, Louisiana. The 1796 house—the oldest in central Louisiana. Its accounts name only a collective — the kent dead. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 1 legend, 1 documented fact and 1 named or described presence — documented record and retelling kept side by side. The site is open to visitors. The oldest standing structure in central Louisiana was built by a man who never spoke English in a colony that wasn't yet American. Pierre Baillio II raised his house on a Spanish land grant in a bend of the Red River between 1796 and 1800 — three years before the Louisiana Purchase — on cypress timbers pegged together and filled with bousillage, the colonial mixture of mud, moss, and deer hair that insulated the houses of French Louisiana. The construction was the technology of a vanished world: the house stands on brick piers above the floodplain, its walls feathered boards over packed mud, its framing held by wooden pegs because iron was too scarce to waste on nails. The outbuildings still stand — a milk house, a carriage house, a plantation kitchen, a worker's cabin of brick-between-post construction. The house was probably built by enslaved laborers, as nearly everything in colonial Louisiana was; the record is silent on who did the carpentry because the carpenters were not the kind of people the record kept. A later owner from Maryland named it for Kent County, and the name stuck. The house was moved two miles in 1964 to save it, restored, and opened as a museum in 1975 — a French colonial cottage that predates the state, the parish, and the nation it now belongs to. WHY THIS FILE MATTERS Kent Plantation House is the archive's colonial-survivor file — the oldest structure in central Louisiana, built under Spain, preserved by being moved, a document of a construction tradition that died with the colony that produced it. A house built of mud and deer hair outlasted the empire that commissioned it — the file's suggestion being that the bousillage was always the point: Louisiana was built by hand, and the hands are still in the walls. FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified · [Documented legend] named ghost legend: The dead are reportedly seen. The presences go by the Kent dead in the file. A house with Alexandria's history behind it gives the reports a setting that needs no exaggeration. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. 'Kent Plantation House' carries the account. A ghost with a name outlasts a ghost without one; the reports keep it employed. source: Kent Plantation House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Plantation_House) · [Anecdotal] apparition: Reported figures in the house. Kent Plantation House in Alexandria, Louisiana is the kind of old house where every sound eventually gets a name. Witness accounts, no evidence file: the claim is anecdotal and stays that way. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting. The lore keeps its witness. source: Kent Plantation House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Plantation_House) HISTORY — 1 documented facts · [1796] The 1796 house is documented. A house in Alexandria, Louisiana with this much documented history gives the dossier substance underneath the lore. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. Sources including 'Kent Plantation House' carry the record. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it. SOURCES — 1 cited · Kent Plantation House — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Plantation_House — HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not. Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/