What you need to know about Eloise -- more than just the haunting memories of a mental hospital -- is this was once a city unto itself.
Eloise was originally the Wayne County Poorhouse when it was built in 1832 and grew to more than 75 buildings across 900 acres. In addition to the general hospital, it had its own police and fire, dairy and pig farm, bakery, even a school for the kids who ended up there.
Many have gotten lost in rabbit holes reading about the history of Eloise, but few know more than Ryan Eberhart, the president of the Westland Historic Village. Something he and past presidents have tried to do, is identify the estimated 7,100 people who were buried near Eloise in nameless graves.
“This ledger and this ledger over here are one of, I believe, five that tell all the deaths from 1926 to 1948,” Eberhart pointed out to me.
Potter’s Field, as it’s generically named, was where patients who died with no next of kin or no identity were buried and marked with a simple numbered brick.
“We’re hoping to help genealogists figure out what numbers match what names and where they’re at, actually in the Potter’s Field,” Eberhart says.
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But after they stopped burying people there, it became overgrown and many of those grave locations are now lost-- somewhere in the field. That’s led to very few being of those numbered bricks actually being matched to a name.
“I would say less than a percent (have been identified),” Eberhart says.
The field doesn’t look big enough to have 7,100 gravesites but that’s because they were crudely buried-- almost one on top of the next.
“Part of the reason I don’t think a lot of them will ever be identified, is a lot are John and Jane Does in this field,” Eberhart continues. “Because this was a general hospital, there were people who were victims of a crime that were never identified.
“So, we’ll never know who that person is.”
Eberhart was able to track down two death certificates after a Local 4 viewer reached out to me looking for answers as to what happened to her great grandmother and great great uncle.
Her instincts were correct. They both died at Eloise-- both in 1936-- and just a month and a half apart. Martin Mungovan suffered from schizophrenia and Eva Mungovan died of cancer. But according to the death records, they weren’t buried in Potter’s Field.
“The death certificates do give a lot of information for genealogists and just family researchers that want to know what happened to their loved ones,” says Eberhart.
Unfortunately for the 7,000 or so people who were buried in Potter’s Field, the details of their lives may never be known.
By the 1970s the “city” of Eloise started to dwindle. In 1984, it closed for good and because the hospital building was one of the five remaining buildings, it became known as one of the spookiest places in all of Michigan.
Eloise opens for paranormal tours
“It’s almost as if the city was erased,” says Desiree Harper, who is a manager at Eloise Asylum, one of the most popular haunted attractions in the country.
She also leads paranormal investigations on the property and has seen some things that can’t be explained. “We have (taken) photos of shadows in doorways, some showing figures peeking out,” says Harper.
When John Hambrick examined the property before buying it in 2018, he said they walked in to blaring fire alarms. Upon inspecting the top three floors that had basically been sealed off since it was closed in 1984, he found a flickering light at the end of a hallway. After buying it, he wasn’t sure what to do with it until fans of the supernatural and all things ghosts were lining up for access.
“I realized this was the Holy Grail of paranormal activity,” Hambrick says. He decided to build a haunted attraction.
“We imported a guy from New Orleans that’s built haunted attractions all over the world,” says Hambrick. “We built a shop down behind this building and we create every set now on site.”
They employ 100 actors as part of the haunt and after just two years of being open, they’ve been recognized as number one in Michigan and top five in the nation, according to Hambrick.
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Harper wears a lot of hats as a manager, but she’s also fascinated by the actual history of Eloise. She says you can’t help but feel the presence of hundreds of years of life and death on each floor... in each room.
“It makes you feel like you’re stepping back in time,” she says. While her business is frights and ghosts, she also recognizes the good that happened in this hospital.
“There were country-changing things that happened here,” Harper says.
Many people don’t realize the first x-rays were done at Eloise. It had the first kidney dialysis unit and even the first music therapy.
“This place did have its horrors, but it had some beautiful things as well.”