Historic. Spooky. Ethereal. Abandoned. Even calm. There are lots of words you could use to describe the Eloise facility in Westland, Michigan, commonly known as Eloise Psychiatric Hospital or Eloise Asylum. Many visitors have been intrigued by the history of the huge complex, which once encompassed 902 acres and 78 buildings and now has been reduced to just a handful of buildings on a small parcel. Eloise housed thousands and thousands of patients over its lifetime of operation from 1839 to early 1982, ranging from the poor and homeless to the outright criminally insane. Though the facility was a pioneer in technologies such as the X-ray, it also was known to do treatments such as lobotomy, shock therapy and "hydrotherapy," which this author kinda doesn't even want to know the details of.
I did a tour of Eloise over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. A few years back I worked as an extra in a horror film that was set there and that did some exterior filming there, "Eloise," starring Eliza Dushku and Chase Crawford, and ever since then I, too, have been intrigued by its history. There's a lot of chatter about paranormal activity at Eloise, and there have been episodes of "Expedition X" and "Portals to Hell" shot there. I don't subscribe to any of that, as a believer in the Lord, but I am still interested in the history of the patients there and how they were treated. A lot of people in Metro Detroit know someone who was at Eloise at some point, and there are some stories.
Here are a few shots I took there on the historical tour, which you can also book at the site's Facebook page. The tour was over three hours, concentrating, of course, on the Kay Beard Building (once labeled the "D" building). There are lots more photos on my Flickr channel, and I'm going to be uploading some walking-around video to my secondary YouTube channel in the coming months.
Photos by Billie Rae Bates
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