Residential Community Beside the Former Eloise Hospital
Westland Meadows community (private residential), Westland, MI 48185
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Private residential community; not open to the public. View the adjacent Eloise Asylum grounds from Michigan Avenue.
Access
Limited Access
Private community streets
Equipment
No Photos
Westland Meadows is a private residential community on the western Wayne County, Michigan side of the metropolitan Detroit area, in the city of Westland. The community is located near the former grounds of the Eloise Hospital complex, the institutional site that gave rise to much of the area's documented history and folklore.
The Eloise complex traces to 1839, when Wayne County purchased the Black Horse Tavern stagecoach stop on the Chicago Road and established a county poorhouse. The complex expanded rapidly. By 1894 it received an Eloise post office and the name became collective for the campus, which by the early twentieth century included the Eloise Hospital (psychiatric), Eloise Infirmary (poorhouse), and Eloise Sanitarium (tuberculosis facility). At its peak the complex housed roughly 10,000 patients and operated as a self-sufficient town on 902 acres with 75 buildings, a fire and police department, a post office, a power plant, a bakery, a working farm, and a private rail system. Eloise was an early adopter of x-ray equipment and of music and art therapy.
Eloise stopped psychiatric admissions in 1979 and closed its general hospital in 1984. Most of the complex was demolished in the 1980s and 1990s; the surviving Kay Beard Building and a handful of related structures stand at 30712 Michigan Avenue. Wayne County sold the remaining property in 2018, and a portion of the surviving footprint now operates as the Eloise Asylum haunted attraction with seasonal tours.
The Eloise Cemetery, half a block east of the main asylum building on Henry Ruff Road, contains approximately 7,100 burials marked only with numbered concrete blocks. The cemetery operated as a Wayne County potter's field from approximately 1910 to 1948 and is fenced, posted, and not open to public entry. The Eloise Cemetery Research Project began documenting and excavating the markers in December 2015; Find a Grave entries now exist for roughly 6,158 of the burials.
Sources
Shadowlands-collected accounts from Westland Meadows residents describe a varied catalog of phenomena: footsteps, doors that open and close on their own, electrical devices switching on without apparent cause, brief and localized power failures, and a generalized pattern that the original narrative describes as prankster-like activity. A small wooded section near the center of the community is described as containing an 1800s-era cemetery, though the wider documented Eloise burial site is the off-site Eloise Cemetery on Henry Ruff Road rather than a feature inside the residential community.
Local tradition holds that the Westland Meadows community is built atop former Eloise grounds; the larger institutional history and the documented 7,100-burial Eloise Cemetery provide the context for why the area carries a strong paranormal reputation regionally. A reference in the Shadowlands narrative to a suicide in the community and to indigenous burial ground origins is unsubstantiated in public records.
The residential nature of the property means that genuine site visits are not appropriate. Visitors should engage the Eloise material through the Eloise Asylum attraction at 30712 Michigan Avenue rather than through the private community.
Westland Meadows is a private residential manufactured-home community; it is not open to public visitation. Visitors interested in this corner of Westland should view the adjacent Eloise Asylum from public roads. Eloise is the residual structure of the former Wayne County Poorhouse and psychiatric hospital complex, which closed in 1979 (psychiatric) and 1984 (general hospital).
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