Est. 1906 · 1906 Los Angeles Sanatorium — fraudulent radium-milk tuberculosis treatment · Death of founder Dr. H. Russell Burner under suspicious circumstances · Later use as Jewish Orphans' Home · Boyle Heights historic neighborhood, Los Angeles
The building at 2033 E 4th St in Boyle Heights opened in 1906 as the Los Angeles Sanatorium, established by Dr. H. Russell Burner. Burner promoted a treatment approach that had no scientific basis: he claimed that milk infused with radium could cure tuberculosis, and he operated a sanatorium on that premise in an era when radium's dangers were not yet understood and medical regulation was in early formation.
The State Board of Medical Examiners eventually moved to build a criminal case against Burner for his fraudulent practices. Before the case concluded, Burner was found dead inside the building — his body discovered holding a chloroform bottle. Whether his death was suicide or something else was not resolved definitively in sources accessible during this build; the circumstances remained at least ambiguous.
After the sanatorium closed following Burner's death, the building was taken over for use as the Jewish Orphans' Home. The Jewish Museum of the American West has documented the site's subsequent history as an orphanage, part of the network of Jewish charitable institutions that served the growing immigrant community in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles. The building's conversion from fraudulent tuberculosis sanatorium to children's orphanage represents a sharp shift in institutional purpose, though both phases left their mark on the physical structure.
The building is located in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood that became one of Los Angeles's most historically documented multi-ethnic working-class communities. Its haunted reputation, as documented in a Boyle Heights Beat feature, reflects the area's emerging interest in its own dark history.
Sources
- https://thelalocal.org/boyle-heights-beat/5-haunted-spots-in-boyle-heights/
- https://www.jmaw.org/vista-del-mar-los-angeles/
- https://laeastside.com/2010/02/boyle-heights-paranormal-project/
Sounds of children playing in empty spacesGeneral presence attributed to Dr. Burner's death
The haunting at 2033 E 4th St has two distinct sources. The first is Dr. Burner himself: a man found dead under ambiguous circumstances inside a building he ran on fraudulent medical claims, his death coinciding with a criminal investigation that was closing in on him. Whether he died by his own hand or otherwise, the image of the man with a chloroform bottle in an empty sanatorium is a specific and unsettling historical fact.
The second layer comes from the building's orphanage period. Residents of the area and people familiar with the site have reported hearing the sounds of children playing in spaces that are empty — an auditory phenomenon that the Boyle Heights Beat attributed to the decades when the building housed orphaned children. The Jewish Orphans' Home was not a place of abuse or dramatic incident in the documented record; the child-sounds phenomenon appears to be more atmospheric than trauma-driven in the reported accounts.
The combination of a suspicious founder's death and the lingering sounds of the orphanage era gives the building a layered paranormal character unusual in the Boyle Heights neighborhood, where most haunted-site lore tends toward more straightforward violence or tragedy.
Notable Entities
Dr. H. Russell Burner (found dead on-site)
