Located off notorious Livernois Avenue on the edge of Southwest Detroit sits an abandoned funeral home. The funeral home, which was known as Gates of Heaven, operated out of a 4,000 square foot single family home during its approximately 20 years of business.
Gates of Heaven Funeral Home opened for business around 2000. The owner converted the 1955 single family home into a funeral business with the chapel, casket display room, visitation area, and embalming room on the main level. Upstairs is where the offices and a small living quarters were also located.
The exact reason for the funeral homes closure remains a bit of a mystery, but it appears to have closed sometime around 2019.
It seems that Gates of Heaven Funeral Home initially enjoyed good success but over time, but eventually funeral services began to decline after a series of bad fortunes.
First, Gates of Heaven had been looked at several times due to complaints for mistreatment of decedents bodies and remains. Second, they had some rather shady business dealings and allegedly they owed venders money, and finally, business really started to suffer after their irate clients began to express anger and frustration regarding god-awful customer service. I guess the customer is always right and after making their opinions public, business nosedived in the late 2010s and eventually was closed by 2020.
If any of you watched our Abandoned Detroit documentary, you might recall me saying that at that time, I had just uncovered another Detroit funeral home and it had over 100 cremated remains inside. Well that was actually gates of heaven, this exact funeral home!
With Gates of Heaven Funeral Home being within stones throw one of perhaps the busiest intersection in southwest Detroit, I was pretty much on top of its closure. I always knew about the funeral home as any abandoned funeral home loving urban explorer would and would often wonder what it looked like inside and how great it would be if it ever went abandoned. Little did I know that I would soon find out…and from what I eventually did discover, could this possibly be yet another infamous Detroit funeral home of horrors?
Gates of Heaven Funeral Home was a simple layout with the chapel serving as the building’s centerpiece and the small embalming room tucked into a corner. But when I went downstairs I made a grizzly discovery when I found over 100 cremated remains, some scattered on the floor in the most disrespectful way and the majority of the others were in various urns and containers stacked on a table.
Shortly after notifying the authorities of the over 100 cremated remains in the basement of the funeral home, it appeared that they did come out and remove the remains and lock down the funeral just as I thought they would.
It never ceases to amaze me what we can find in these abandoned locations and gates of heaven funeral home will forever remain one of the most shocking and grotesque explores of all time.
As of 2022 the funeral home continues to sit abandoned, However it was recently sold and they are currently cleaning everything else out. It will be interesting to see what comes of the former gates of heaven funeral home.
For more photographs from Gates of Heaven Funeral Home and our other abandoned locations, check out abandonedcentral.com.

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