Do You Love Me? Inside Yorktown Memorial Hospital

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Yorktown Memorial Hospital sits on the edge of a small town in DeWitt County, Texas, a mid-century medical building that has spent longer empty than it ever spent open. It was founded in the 1950s by the Felician Sisters, an order of Roman Catholic nuns, and dedicated to the memory of soldiers who died in World War II. Today it is peeling, water-stained and stripped, and better known to ghost hunters than to anyone seeking treatment.

Quick Orientation

• Where: Yorktown, Texas
• Founded: 1950s, by the Felician Sisters
• Original purpose: rehabilitation for people suffering from alcohol and drug addiction
• Later role: full-service hospital, then a return to rehabilitation work by 1986
• Closed: 1992
• Condition now: abandoned and decaying, used for organized paranormal events

The Felician Sisters and a Hospital Built as a War Memorial

The founding story is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. This was not a county hospital or a company clinic. It was established by a religious order, and its first purpose was narrow: treating addiction at a time when few small towns offered anything of the kind. The building was dedicated to the memory of local men killed in World War II, which is how it came by the word Memorial in its name.

That original mission did not hold. As the surrounding area’s medical needs grew, the hospital broadened into a general facility, taking in surgical patients, maternity cases and the dying alongside those in recovery. A nursery, a surgical suite, a morgue and long tiled corridors all belonged to the same relatively small structure, and all of them are still there in outline for anyone who walks through today.

Two Thousand Deaths and the 1992 Closure

The figure repeated most often about Yorktown Memorial Hospital is that more than 2,000 people died within its walls across its working life. For a hospital that operated for roughly four decades and served an aging rural population, that is not an extraordinary number, though it is the kind of statistic that takes on a different weight once a building goes dark. Alongside it sits a persistent claim that some of those deaths involved malpractice. That allegation is part of the local narrative rather than a documented finding, and it should be read as such.

By 1986, a newer hospital nearby had taken over the general medical work, and Yorktown Memorial went back to what it had started as, a rehabilitation center. That second act was brief. The doors closed for good in 1992, and the building was left to the weather. Decades of decay have done what decay does: buckled ceilings, scattered furniture, a nursery and a kitchen left half furnished, and rooms that look abandoned mid-shift.

The Nursery Doll, the Red Eyes and Other Reports

Everything in this section is reported experience. None of it is verified, and none of it is tied by record to a named patient or a documented event at the hospital.

The account that has traveled furthest concerns a baby doll in the old nursery. Visitors say it speaks, and that the phrase it produces is a whispered question: “Do you love me?” It is the sort of detail that spreads easily, and a battery-operated toy in a ruined building is a poor witness, but it is the story most people arrive already knowing.

Beyond the nursery, the reports fall into familiar categories for an abandoned hospital:

• Shadow figures said to move along corridors, look out from doorways, appear in windows and stand at the top of staircases
• Red, glowing eyes reported in unlit rooms
• Objects moving without contact, including nursery toys, kitchen utensils and wheelchairs
• Disembodied voices and unexplained footsteps in empty wings
• The sound of a wheelchair rolling down a hallway with nobody in it

Some of that has ordinary company. A derelict building of this age settles, drafts move through broken windows and gaps, and floors that have taken thirty years of Texas humidity make noise on their own. Expectation does the rest, particularly in the dark, and most visitors come in already primed by the stories. What the reports do not include is any single named tragedy that the haunting is pinned to. The lore here attaches itself to the institution as a whole: the 2,000 dead, the morgue, the nursery, the malpractice rumor.

Getting Inside Yorktown Memorial Hospital

This is not open parkland and it is not a museum with a ticket window. The hospital is a structurally deteriorated abandoned building, and access is through organized paranormal events and investigations run at the site rather than by turning up at the fence. Anyone considering a visit should arrange it in advance. Walking in uninvited is trespassing, and the physical condition of the place is a genuine hazard: rotten flooring, broken glass, collapsed ceiling material and no lighting.

The honest appeal of Yorktown Memorial is not the doll. It is the building itself, a small-town hospital founded by nuns as an addiction clinic and a war memorial, expanded into a full hospital, shrunk back to its beginnings, then abandoned entirely, all inside forty years. The ghost stories are what keep people coming. The history is what makes it worth the trip.

See Yorktown Memorial Hospital for Yourself

Sources

• Block, Harlon Henry – TracesOfWar.com
• A Texan at Iwo Jima
• Famed Iwo Jima flag raisers gone but not forgotten
• Harlon Block.
• Marine Corps University > Research > Marine Corps History Division > People > Who's Who in Marine Corps History > Abrell – Cushman > Corporal Harlon Henry Block (Usmcu (official site))
• Wikipedia: Harlon Block

Address: 728 W Main St

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