Hurricane Katrina Abandoned Hospital Mystery: ‘Creepy’ Christmas Tree Lights Up in Dark Building
'Tis the season to be jolly but recent viral images on social media conjure up spooky Halloween vibes instead of the traditional Christmas cheer that the season warrants.
According to a report from The Epoch Times, an abandoned hospital in New Orleans caught the attention of passers-by when Christmas lights lit up inside the empty Charity Hospital. The facility has been shut down since Hurricane Katrina back in 2005.
Lisa Walley Staggs of Tulane Medical Center worked directly across the abandoned building and snapped some photos of the "down-right scary" lights, posting the images on Facebook.
"I work at an inner city New Orleans hospital that happens to be situated directly across from Charity hospital," Staggs wrote on the Facebook post. "Charity Hospital has been closed, its windows darkened, since Hurricane Katrina, and is a gloomy and dreary sight on the best of days... At night it's downright scary. Until tonight."
She added, "See, I park on the roof of my parking garage, and tonight as I was leaving work, I glanced over at the forgotten building, only to see the lights of a tiny Christmas tree! I wish the pictures did it justice. I don't know how it's lit. I don't know how it's even in there, but it made me smile just a little bit tonight!"
Another Facebook user, Mike Arbon, re-posted the images and was a little more creeped out by the mystery than Staggs.
""In the middle of the dark building is this small bright Christmas tree that was put in the window," he wrote on Facebook via The Epoch Times. "It's really pretty and little creepy."
He added, "It gave me chills when I saw it and, of course, made me think of my brother, who passed away at charity hospital. But a very nice sight to see in the window of a dark building."
Other social media users speculated about the lights, offering theories from a set-up that was forgotten to ghostly figures haunting the abandoned hospital.
The speculations surrounding the mysterious lights were resolved later in a WWL-TV report that revealed the purported Christmas tree was merely a makeshift one. Leslie Capo, a spokesperson from the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center confirmed that the university police investigated the hospital that created such a buzz in social media and discovered two-by-fours with Christmas lights wrapped around them.
It is still unknown who put the lights in Charity Hospital.
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