SANTA MIRA COMMUNITY HOSPITAL
Location: Tall, imposing and barred against vandals and intruders, Santa Mira Hospital is located in Cortez Court off Buchanan Road in the Buchanan district of Los Angeles. It is private property; no trespassing is allowed.
Description of Place: A vast plain five-story white structure, the derelict hospital is in a partial state of renovation and is basically used as storage space, containing old patient files, equipment, tissue samples and chemicals. With over two hundred available rooms, twelve operating stations and a full basement, a loose staff of employees still work on the location in paperwork capacity and a recurring security guard on weekends. Although no longer used as a medical facility, the structure still carries out medical research on the first floor. The top three stories are out of use. A service tunnel links the property with the Santa Mira Funeral Home across the street.
Ghostly Manifestations: Vannacutt Mental Hospital in California, Waverly Hills Tuberculosis Hospital in Kentucky, Old Roosevelt Asylum in Illinois, Danvers Mental Hospital in Pennsylvania, Swingle Hospital in East Tennessee, Kingdom Hospital in Maine, the former Beckham County Community Hospital in Oklahoma.... On the surface, all institutes of mental and physical health, most of them abandoned and deserted to the elements and the will of the idly morbid, others converted into hotels or apartment houses while some still serving the public to full capacity. One would think they would have very little else in common, but for the obvious... shadows peeking round corners, footsteps from empty hallways, whispers and disembodied gasps from deserted locked up stairways, an inexplicable feeling of dread in places the living fear to tread, even for would-be movie-makers. What is it about haunted hospitals that fascinates Hollywood screen writers? Is it the fact that so many people suffered in these locations while others drew their last breaths here. Why do so many of these deserted medical structures dot the American landscape?
An hour and a half drive from Vannacutt Sanitarium north of Los Angeles in a location known for street gang activity is a heavily locked up edifice known as Santa Mira Community Hospital that looms overhead in the semblance of a mad scientist's headquarters. No one knows what occurs inside, but something happens there; a few cars dot the parking lot during the day. However, at night, when the shadows grow longer and noises come from the deserted parts of the building, no one stays for long. Between medical assistants doing outside medical work for other hospitals and workmen doing maintenance, a ghostly nurse wanders through unaware of the living. The ghost of a young girl can be heard playing in the closed off top floors. Rumors of a former mental patient scream from the elevator shaft.
Actual stories of the ghosts started shortly after the 2003 fire which devastated most of the third floor. This was the location of J-Ward, the wing where the mentally-handicapped were restricted and contained. Several patients escaped the fire with minimal injuries, while others were left begging for death as a release from their pain. In the end, twenty-two deaths were reported, among them a nurse, and two patients had vanished, a young girl and one of the mental cases. With the blaze and damage mostly contained to the third floor, it was assumed that the hospital would be up and running within another year. However, workmen endured a bit more than just the smell of ash and cinders. An electrician checking the wiring in the basement could not abandon the feeling he was being watched. A mechanic on a test run of the elevator was rattled by the appearance of a young girl in the elevator with him. Other men heard voices calling to them. Laborers razing walls at one end of the forth floor came running downstairs after a blonde nurse appeared out of no where and floated past them down the hall. They all mentioned the same thing; she didn't have any legs reaching to the floor.
A second work team was brought in a few weeks later skeptical of the ghost stories to finish the restoration, but soon the same old stories began occurring. Voices and footsteps from empty rooms, a child's teddy bear was being left in location where no child should be. A dark shadow watched and vanished from the end of the hall. The foreman walked past the nurse's station and noticed a nurse standing at attention. He stopped and turned back for a better look. There was an empty black void where her face should have been.
A year after renovations started, a third renovation team had to be called in to once again complete the job. By now, the stories of ghosts had hit the newspapers and work slowed down as Mexican, African-American and underage workers nervously peeked over their shoulders and gazed down dark hallways. Men picked up from the previous team sweeping, cleaning, painting, moving furniture and replacing walls and fixtures. Banging noises were common, but it is not for certain who was doing all the banging. Someone reported piano music from the chapel even after the room was locked shut. Men would not enter J-Ward except in pairs and even then they couldn't stay long. Inexplicable panic attacks forced many men to run from the most damaged part of the building because if an unbearable feeling they should not be there. Out of no where, a man replacing the plumbing in an operating room screamed he had been touched by something and work stopped once again.
Afterward, the place became set as sort of a location for fascination for local youths with too much time on their hands. Left-over hospital employees would return to find shattered windows, signs of burglaries and occult symbols painted on walls. The security guard was often racing upstairs to chase out teenagers who had come in through the roof, or sometimes returning without finding anyone in the corporeal sense. He once followed a figure into a closed off room from J-Ward to the former X-Ray room. Thinking he had trapped someone, he drew his gun, stepped in and found the room empty but for himself.
At night, officers parked out front on guard duty started reporting a figure in white drifting past the third floor windows above the entrance. He'd radio for help, enter the structure and cover the main stairs as the security guard on duty checked the back stairs. No one was ever found, but eventually it was guessed that the image was caused by headlights reflecting off the front windows.
Every Halloween, Santa Mira lures more teenagers trying to get inside to verify the stories. As one group would get caught and distract the guard, another group would sneak inside past his back. Depending on the guard on duty, some teens have been party to private tours, and pictures inside the old hospital have popped up on websites and blogs. Following a movie filmed inside in 2006, one such tour caught a picture of J-Ward with something different - a figure in white standing just left of the hall.
History: Back in 1990 when Santa Mira Community Hospital opened, the Buchanan district was a location of propriety and decency, but after the 2003 fire, gang activity ruined the area and the businesses pulled out of the area. Built between 1987 and 1989, the hospital was established to relieve the burden of the over-worked and understaffed other local hospitals, but then in 2003, one of the mental patients, Jacob Sawyer, a clinical depressive with homicidal tendencies went berserk and attacked one of the nurses, starting a fire in the process. Sawyer's body was not found immediately after the hospital fire although the murdered nurse was found not far from where her neck was cut. In 2006, his remains were finally located in a forgotten janitor's closet clutching the remains of the dead girl was was holding captive.
Identity of Ghosts: Head Nurse Marcie Walker was forty-three at the time of the fire. Six-year-old Cassie White was a foster child being attended by the hospital at the time of the fire. She had been found clutching her teddy bear in the closet where Sawyer held her as the floor burned down around him. Neither of Walker or the girl seem particularly overwhelming, but Sawyer seems to emote negative trepidations from the living.
Source/Comments: Boo! (2006), Loosely compared with Waverly Hills Tuberculosis Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, Danvers Mental Hospital near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Swingle Hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee