Linda Vista Community Hospital

Film crews shooting horror movies inside this abandoned Boyle Heights hospital kept catching things on camera they couldn't explain, including a little girl in the old surgical suite and an orderly still making rounds. The place closed in 1991 after its death toll spiked under sketchy circumstances, and it sat empty for two decades before being converted to senior housing in 2015.

The little girl in the old surgical room is the one film crews remember. Linda Vista Hospital closed its doors in 1991 and spent the next two decades as one of Hollywood's go-to shoot locations for horror movies, medical dramas, and music videos. Crews loved it because it looked like a hospital and cost less than a soundstage. They did not love what kept turning up on their footage and showing up in the hallways.

Three ghosts show up again and again in the accounts from actors, grips, and location scouts who worked the building. A little girl in the surgical suite on the upper floors. A young woman who paces the third-floor hallways and never seems to reach the end of them. And an orderly, still in uniform, still making his rounds like he clocked in and nobody told him he could go home. Reports of shadows darting past doorways, nighttime cries with no source, and a low humming in empty rooms turned up in cast interviews for years.

The building opened in the fall of 1905 as the Santa Fe Coast Lines Hospital, built to treat injured railroad workers from the Santa Fe Railroad. It sat on a hill at 610 South St. Louis Street in Boyle Heights, east of downtown Los Angeles. The handsome Mission Revival exterior was one of the neighborhood's landmarks. The interior, by the end, was something else. In the 1980s, as funding collapsed, staff was cut and the patient population of the surrounding immigrant neighborhood surged. The death toll climbed.

That's the part people tend to skip past. When urban explorers and paranormal investigators got inside the abandoned building in the 1990s and 2000s, they found patient records scattered across the floors. Some of the deaths in the final months, according to accounts that have circulated since, looked strange enough that people quietly used the word 'negligence.' Linda Vista was a hospital people went to when they had nowhere else. By the end, some of them didn't make it out.

The hospital's movie resume is long. End of Days, Pearl Harbor, ER, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Outbreak, parts of Suicide Squad, countless music videos, and dozens of indies all shot inside those hallways. Crews who worked nights picked the ghost stories up like superstitions. Actors swapped them between takes. The Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures did an investigation. Paranormal investigation groups came through regularly while it sat empty. Nearly all of them came away with something.

What makes Linda Vista different from most 'haunted hospital' stories is how many of the accounts come from working professionals, not thrill-seekers. A film crew has no particular incentive to see things. A gaffer who has seen a thousand call sheets does not usually describe an orderly turning a corner and disappearing.

In 2011, the building was sold. In 2015, after a careful restoration that preserved the Mission Revival shell, it reopened as Hollenbeck Terrace, a low-income senior living facility. Residents live in the same hallways where the little girl used to drift between takes. Whether she's still there is not something management advertises. They do not, however, shoot horror movies inside anymore.