Overview
Eloise began in 1839 as the Wayne County poorhouse on the Chicago Road west of Detroit and grew across a century into an institution the size of a city — asylum, general hospital, tuberculosis sanatorium, farms, bakery, even its own post office named Eloise — housing up to ten thousand patients through the Depression's crush; thousands who died unclaimed lie in the nearby potter's field under numbered stones, a resting place volunteers now tend. Most of the complex fell to demolition after closure phases ended in the 1980s, leaving the Kay Beard administration building and a few structures, and in recent years private owners opened part of the site as a commercial haunted attraction and paranormal-event venue — a use that sits uneasily with some, noted here neutrally. Telling from staff, urban-explorer and event eras describes figures at the windows, cries and voices, shadow shapes in basements and tunnels, and touches. The record leads with the poorhouse's real humanity and its numbered dead; the reports are event-era telling, hedged, with access only via the venue's official channels.