Boyle Heights is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles and is known for its high concentration of cemeteries, making it ripe for ghost stories. But it’s not just grave sites where spirits are said to linger.
At the 101-year-old Boyle Heights City Hall building — now home to Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s field office and Rize Beyond Banking — local historian and sixth-generation Boyle Heights native Shmuel Gonzales says employees have reported strange occurrences. Shortly after he co-founded Boyle Heights History Studios in 2018, he walked inside the brick building on 1st Street to deposit a check at the credit union and was met by tellers eager to know about its past.
According to Gonzales, some city employees claimed to have seen shadows — some even felt they were pushed — and few wanted to be alone inside the former Masonic temple. Since then, Gonzales has woven these ghostly anecdotes into his historical walking tours of the neighborhood formerly known as Paredón Blanco (White Bluff).
The Jewish Chicano history buff gave us a personal tour of local haunted hotspots, retelling stories passed down through generations with widely known Boyle Heights legends.
Hollenbeck Estate
Now known as Hollenbeck Palms and Hollenbeck Park
Before it became a retirement facility and neighboring park popular for quinceañera photo shoots, this corner of Boyle Heights was the 21-acre estate of philanthropic landowners John and Elizabeth Hollenbeck, built in 1886.
According to Gonzales, employees at the Public Storage next to the property report motion detectors mysteriously going off after closing and cameras not working properly. In nearby Hollenbeck Park, some locals claim to see the apparition of a woman in a black dress near the homeless encampment — a figure Gonzales believes is the ghost of Elizabeth Hollenbeck, who dedicated her life to helping the poor and remained in mourning after the death of her son and husband.
In 1985, much of the Victorian mansion was razed to build the Hollenbeck Palms, a retirement facility located on Boyle Avenue. The original chapel remains unused, Gonzales notes, because of its eerie cherub decor. In 2017, Gonzales says he saw the woman in black while drinking and watching the sunset on the 6th Street Bridge with some friends. “If you drink spirits, you may see them,” he said.
Hollenbeck Palms, 573 S. Boyle Ave., Los Angeles, 90033; Hollenbeck Park, 415 S. St. Louis St., Los Angeles, 90033
Linda Vista Community Hospital
Now operates as Hollenbeck Terrace
Once considered one of the most haunted hospitals in the world, the cream-colored building closed in 1991 after years of financial troubles and malpractice lawsuits. Patient records and equipment were left behind — fuel for ghost stories that spread through Boyle Heights. The abandoned building became a popular filming location for TV shows like “ER” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and horror films like “End of Days” and “Insidious.”
Gonzales says his grandmother mysteriously checked herself out of Linda Vista while receiving cancer treatment in 1983. She later claimed she was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement after witnessing the death of her roommate during a botched procedure.
After appearing on “Ghost Adventures” in 2009 — where strange voices were caught on camera and a cast member was scratched — the hospital became known around the world as being haunted. In 2015, it reopened as Hollenbeck Terrace, affordable housing for seniors.
According to Gonzales, the hollow scream of a doctor who committed suicide there in the late 1920s can still be heard and the ghost of a little girl who was hit by a car chasing a ball across the street in the 1950s causes cars to swerve.
Original Name: Santa Fe Coast Lines Hospital, 610 S. St. Louis St., Los Angeles, 90023
Los Angeles Sanatorium & Jewish Orphans’ Home
At the corner of 4th and St. Louis streets stands a grey, three-story apartment building with a layered past. Opened in 1906, it first housed the Los Angeles Sanatorium and was operated by Dr. H. Russell Burner, who promoted a highly controversial radium-laced milk cure for chronic illnesses like tuberculosis. The doctor was later found dead inside the neoclassical building while holding a chloroform bottle in his hand. The State Board of Medical Examiners had been collecting evidence against him for criminal charges, the L.A. Times reported.
The building later became the Jewish Orphans’ Home of Southern California, the city’s first-ever adoption and foster agency. The home cared for children displaced by poverty and war and celebrated Jewish holidays in what was then a largely diverse immigrant neighborhood.
Today, the former sanatorium and orphanage operates as a 24-unit apartment building. According to Gonzales, some residents report hearing the sound of children playing, which scares some away and comforts others.
Original Names: Los Angeles Sanatorium & Jewish Orphans’ Home of Southern California, 2033 E. 4th St., Los Angeles, 90033
Japanese Hospital
Now operates as Infinity Care of East Los Angeles
Many locals who live near the Infinity Care of East Los Angeles nursing home say ghosts of Japanese Americans return to reclaim belongings they buried before being sent to incarceration camps during World War II.
The site’s history is deeply tied to that tragedy. Opened in 1929, the original Japanese Hospital was built after five Issei doctors sued the State of California for not being allowed to lease land — a victory for Japanese Americans who faced discrimination.
In the 2015 documentary “East L.A. Interchange,” a local Mexican American family unearths a vintage vase dug up in their backyard and returns it to a Japanese American man whose mother buried it before her 1942 incarceration.
Original Name: Japanese Hospital, 101 S. Fickett St., Los Angeles, 90033
Evergreen Cemetery
Founded in 1877, Evergreen Cemetery is Los Angeles’s oldest operating burial ground and the final resting place for generations of Angelenos.
Chicanos often link the cemetery to the “Vanishing Girl” urban legend. Artist Frank Romero of Los Four immortalized the tale in his 1987 painting “Ghost of Evergreen,” inspired by his father’s story about being haunted by a ghost that rose out of the cemetery while waiting for a streetcar.
Legend says that in 1947, a young man picked up a girl dressed in a white ball gown and took her dancing at Petrolly’s Ballroom across the street from where Jim’s Burgers now stands. The girl mysteriously disappeared and he later learned she had died in a car accident years earlier and was buried at Evergreen, where the jacket he lent her was found.
According to Gonzales, folks believe the ghost of the girl haunts the site of Self Help Graphics’ first-ever Día de los Muertos celebration in 1973 to this day.
Evergreen Cemetery, 204 N. Evergreen Ave., Los Angeles, 90033