{"id":1276,"slug":"shreveport-municipal-auditorium-shreveport-louisiana","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The Municipal Auditorium is where Elvis became Elvis — the Art Deco memorial dedicated Armistice Day 1929, Samuel Wiener's finest Louisiana work, the barracks and radar station that became the Cradle of the Stars when the Louisiana Hayride took the stage April 3, 1948. Hank Williams made his name there; Cash and Horton and Reeves all came through the KWKH broadcast; and on October 16, 1954, a Memphis truck driver played his first Hayride for eighteen dollars.","Colonel Parker bought the contract for ten thousand eighteen months later; the stage had already made the star. The statues out front — Elvis and James Burton, the hometown guitarist who backed him — mark the avenue renamed for the show's biggest product. The building that was dedicated to the Great War's dead is a National Historic Landmark for the music it made.","The file keeps the Auditorium: the 1929 dedication, the Hayride years, the eighteen-dollar debut, and the Cradle of the Stars' stage.","Shreveport Municipal is the archive's music file — the war memorial that birthed rock and roll's biggest act."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["Shreveport Municipal is the archive's music file — the 1929 Deco memorial and the Louisiana Hayride.","A memorial hall keeps its stage — the file's suggestion being that the Auditorium's hold is the pivot: the Armistice building that became the Cradle of the Stars, and the truck driver who played it for $18 a Saturday."]}],"name":"Shreveport Municipal Auditorium","aliases":[],"type":"AUDITORIUM","type_label":"Auditorium","cats":["HAUNTED_PLACE"],"groups":["hauntings","institutions"],"desc":"Auditorium in Shreveport; research record.","full_desc":"Shreveport Municipal Auditorium is an auditorium in Shreveport, Louisiana. Auditorium in Shreveport; research record. It sits in the archive under haunted places. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.","address":null,"city":"Shreveport","county":null,"state":"Louisiana","postal":null,"region":"South","lat":32.466879,"lon":-93.792193,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Discovery pass. Precise location, historical chronology and current visitor conditions require independent enrichment. Confidence concerns provenance only.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":43.1,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0,"source_quality":0.6,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":547,"type":"HAUNTING","description":"Explore Louisiana recounts a girl-in-blue apparition and allegedly self-closing doors. An old theatre in Shreveport, Louisiana keeps its dead in the dark between shows — the reports just turn the house lights up. The account has a collector's pedigree — written down as legend, which is the most honest status it can hold. It's the kind of claim that outlives debunkings — too many witnesses, too few explanations.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.65,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Louisiana’s Spooky Side","url":"https://www.explorelouisiana.com/blog/louisianas-spooky-side","publisher":"Louisiana Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Explore Louisiana recounts a girl-in-blue apparition and allegedly self-closing doors. An old theatre in Shreveport, Louisiana keeps its dead in the dark between shows — the reports just turn the house lights up. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. The report is preserved in sources like 'Louisiana’s Spooky Side'. The legend does what legends do — it explains the place in a way the records can't.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"Louisiana’s Spooky Side","url":"https://www.explorelouisiana.com/blog/louisianas-spooky-side","publisher":"Louisiana Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Louisiana’s Spooky Side","url":"https://www.explorelouisiana.com/blog/louisianas-spooky-side","publisher":"Louisiana Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shreveport_Municipal_Memorial_Auditorium","desc":"Theater and meeting hall in Shreveport, Louisiana, United States","extract":"Shreveport Municipal Memorial Auditorium is a historic performance and meeting venue at 705 Elvis Presley Boulevard in Shreveport, Louisiana. It is an Art Deco building constructed between 1926 and 1929 during the administration of Mayor Lee Emmett Thomas as a memorial to the servicemen of World War I. In 1991, the auditorium was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and on October 6, 2008, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/Shreveport_September_2015_102_%28Shreveport_Municipal_Auditorium%29.jpg/330px-Shreveport_September_2015_102_%28Shreveport_Municipal_Auditorium%29.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":93,"lat":32.50793,"lon":-93.75296},"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}