Eloise Asylum

Seventy-one hundred people are buried in unmarked graves behind Westland's Eloise Asylum, and the surviving buildings haven't settled down.

Seventy-one hundred people are buried in a field behind the Eloise Asylum grounds, and almost none of them have names. From 1910 to 1948, the field served as the cemetery for the sprawling Westland complex, and the people interred there, inmates of the poorhouse, patients of the psychiatric wards, residents of the tuberculosis sanatorium, were buried under numbered concrete blocks instead of headstones. Find A Grave volunteers have identified 6,158 of the 7,100 so far. The rest are likely lost for good.

What became Eloise started in 1839 as the Wayne County Poorhouse, a last-resort shelter for the destitute, the orphaned, and the mentally ill. Over the next century it grew into the largest and most complex public welfare institution in Michigan, a 902-acre campus of more than seventy buildings that at its Depression-era peak held around 10,000 residents at one time. There was a psychiatric hospital. A tuberculosis sanatorium. A general hospital. A working farm. A bakery, a power plant, a fire department, a train station. It was its own city, and people who grew up in Wayne County talked about it the way people in other states talked about prisons.

The medicine happened here. Michigan's first kidney dialysis unit was installed at Eloise. Music therapy was pioneered here. So was electroshock therapy on a scale that drew researchers from across the country. Insulin shock. Hydrotherapy, which at Eloise meant patients strapped into bathtubs for hours at a time. Lobotomies through the 1950s. The asylum's scale meant every experimental treatment of the twentieth century got tried, and not always with records kept. Patients died of tuberculosis, of influenza, of pneumonia, of old age, of treatment, of neglect. Orphaned children lived on campus until they were adopted or aged out or died. The psychiatric division wound down through the late 1970s and early 1980s; the last patients left in 1982. The general hospital closed in 1986.

The activity inside the surviving buildings reads like a protest. Doors slam shut with the force of someone kicking them. Medical carts and gurneys get overturned when no one is in the room. Two children have been seen running through the hallways of the D Building, turning corners, and dissolving into the wall. Investigators who've spent the night in the basement report voices coming from empty rooms and the sensation of hands pressing on their shoulders and arms. A Fox 2 Detroit crew filming at Eloise had trouble telling which sounds belonged to the haunted-house production company that now operates on site and which were coming from the building itself.

The D Building at 30712 Michigan Avenue has been converted into a haunted attraction with escape rooms and historic tours. Some of this feels uncomfortable when you know the actual history. Tourists pay to be frightened in a building where thousands of people died of cholera and tuberculosis, and where orphaned children slept two to a bed until they were old enough to be put to work. The scares are staged. The source material isn't.

The cemetery sits just off Henry Ruff Road near Michigan Avenue, and there's no ceremonial entrance. A small plaque, a stretch of grass, and numbered concrete markers that look like fallen dominoes. Most of the names beneath the numbers have been lost to county record-keeping gaps from the 1910s and 1940s. What's buried under marker 2,814 or marker 6,507 is mostly a number that corresponds, or used to correspond, to a name in a ledger that may not exist anymore. The poorhouse's accounting outlasted the people it was accounting for, and even the accounting is starting to fail.