Overview
The old Jefferson Davis Hospital in Houston was built in 1924 on ground the city had used as a cemetery through the 19th century — burials that included epidemic victims and the poor, and which were not fully moved; the hospital literally stands over them, its basement level set among old graves, a documented fact that seeded everything after. The hospital served the city's charity patients until mid-century, then cycled through uses and long abandonment, decades in which broken windows, trespassers' tales and its cemetery foundation made it Houston's definitive haunted ruin: stories of figures in windows, cries, lights and shadowed wards filled local telling and urban-explorer lore. In the 2000s a celebrated preservation project restored the building as the Elder Street Artist Lofts, and it is now private residences — the record must say plainly that visiting means the pavement only, and residents' privacy is absolute. The lore should be presented as the abandonment-era telling it is, and the disturbed dead beneath the site treated with respect rather than relish.