Riverside Osteopathic Hospital

I was the third generation in my family to work for Riverside. I was there from 1998-2002 when it closed. Henry Ford bought out Horizon Health System which owned Riverside and Henry Ford was ultimately the ones who shut the hospital down. With Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital just down the street there was no perceived necessity to maintain Riverside which was a much older and land-locked hospital without room for expansion. They "tried" to make it an emergency center but it quickly closed then they built the Henry Ford Emergency Facility in Brownstown to act as the secondary EM Facility for Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital. The original hospital was the Church Home which was built by the Church Family who owned Arm and Hammer. When I worked there I encountered some unusual things but most of it was explainable in it being an old building with limited maintenance being performed in it's twilight years. The Church building had long been closed to patient care by the time I started working at the hospital but since I worked in Radiology we used the basement of the Church building to store the old X-Ray films. It was definitely creepy down there with very low ceilings and lots of peeling paint and exposed beams. The lights sometimes turned off on their own and we kept a flashlight by the door just in case of being plunged into darkness. It didn't help it was down the hallway from the morgue. Another place that was very rarely used by this time in the hospitals existence. When I was working midnight's I had a few heart palpitations at noises of a door randomly closing and a ceiling tile suddenly falling in the middle of the main hallway. Nothing that couldn't be explained by the age of the building at the time but it is something I still remember almost 20 years later. The Church building has finally been torn down but the rest of the hospital is still standing sad and vacant. With how much damage has been done to it by vandals and lack of repairs over the last 2 decades I doubt it will ever be able to "reopen" into anything useful so it should probably be torn down to make room for new things on the riverfront. I miss how close our work family was and that it was a place I could walk where my Grandmother had walked (she passed in 1997). My Mom has a lot more stories than I do since she worked there from 1971-2002 but as to it being haunted I think it experienced a lot of joy and sadness in it's year of operations the cycle of birth and death was repeated there for decades. There might be some echoes of the past there still.

June 2020