Echoes from Eloise Asylum, Part One | Grave Talks CLASSIC

The Grave Talks | Haunted, Paranormal & Supernatural

Ghost Stores, Haunted, Paranormal & Supernatural Stories

Science, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Spirituality, Natural Sciences

4.6 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a Grave Talks CLASSIC EPISODE!

Step beyond the rusting gates of Michigan’s infamous Eloise Asylum, where more than a century of pain and hope still echo through cracked corridors. Founded in 1839 as a poor farm and psychiatric hospital, Eloise ballooned to a 902-acre, 75-building city of the forgotten, housing over 8,000 patients at its peak. Lobotomies, experimental treatments, and packed wards left indelible scars on the living and, some say, on the very walls themselves. After the sweeping mental-health budget cuts of the 1980s shut Eloise’s doors, the silence only amplified the voices that never left. Join us as former staff, historians, and paranormal investigators revisit a place where the lights went out—but the stories never did.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Today on the Grave Talks, the haunted Eloise Asylum.
0:26.6	Originally constructed in 1839, the haunted Eloise Asylum was designed to be a place of refuge for the souls that society didn't want to see. They're mentally ill, rejected, poor, sick,
0:33.7	and those that didn't fit the mold of being normal would call the Eloise Asylum Home.
0:39.8	Over the course of more than 100 years, the campus would grow to 75 buildings and house more than 8,000 patients at its peak.
0:48.2	Eventually, the United States government would choose to massively defund care for the mentally ill and would result in the closing of the Eloise Asylum.
0:56.1	It is at this time that the spirits of those who call the Eloise home
1:01.5	would find the silence a perfect platform to be heard again by the living.
1:07.7	Today we discussed the haunted Eloise Asylum with Todd Varner of Detroit paranormal.
1:12.5	Eloise started around 1839 as a poor farm or poor house or infirmary too, they called it.
1:19.4	Back in those days, I guess you could compare it to, I guess maybe a homeless shelter or there
1:24.2	was no federal program, social services, or welfare at that time so you know different
1:29.1	communities would set up or counties at this point would set up um poor poor houses poor farms
1:33.8	for people that didn't have anywhere to go um sometimes it'd be wives that their husbands were killed
1:38.4	um children even would go there um and they would work to kind of earn their keep to stay on the farm. And it kept
1:46.8	growing and growing. And it was an infirmary at one time too. And then it expanded because they
1:53.0	needed health care. So that's when the first hospital was built on the otherweighs property. And it
1:57.8	was on 902 acres. It was a huge, huge piece of property.
2:03.9	But it went from the Wayne County Poorhouse to, it just kept growing.
2:08.7	I don't understand why exactly it grew so large.
2:13.1	But it grew to 78 buildings, I believe, on 902 acres.
2:19.8	And it had its own, basically it was its own self-contained city.
2:25.6	They had a bakery, a police department, fire department, greenhouse, actually, they had a farm.
	...

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