TLDR: Baltimore City has been ignoring E Lombard Street collapsing beside Bayview Hospital due to the mass graves of unclaimed remains of "paupers" who died in the times of the building acting as an almshouse in the 1700s, and an asylum in the 1860s-1930s. This would be a far trickier repair and would look very bad for the hospital, and Baltimore City, who claimed 50+ years ago that the thousands of bodies were exhumed and moved during Bayview's rapid expansion.

Since this past winter (January) there have been shallow dips appearing in the west bound lane of E. Lombard Street right outside of Bayview Hospital. Not potholes, the road was still very much intact, just wavy.

At first, it was just one, and the crater started getting bigger, and bigger, and after a good 3-4 months, the city finally came out, slapped some asphalt down, and left. (3rd picture indicates where these large dips were covered in asphalt and just how big they'd gotten before the "repairs" had been made)

However, to no one's surprise, adding more weight to the dips in the road did not solve the issue at all, in fact, it just caused the amount of dips to increase, and now (just about 7 months later) there's a good 60ft span of road that is very wavy, and now, there is an actual break in the asphalt that has partially swallowed the large traffic cone they used to warn drivers.

I drive this stretch of road daily, so I've been watching all of this occur in real time.

Here's where the conspiracy theory comes in:

I did research on this almost 300 year old hospital (because history nerd) and I believe there is a mass burial site, known as a "paupers burial ground", is partially under E. Lombard St (which assuredly did not begin as the 4 lane street it is today; it used to be west-bound only and unpaved) and there has been a shift as the bodies (and possible cheaply made coffins they may or may not have been laid to rest in) continued into advanced decay.

This would explain how the dips in the road are all on one side of the street, and they're all running pretty symmetrically to each other. Continued traffic would absolutely cause more shifting/expansions of the sinkholes.

Hear me out:

Bayview Hospital was founded in 1773, first as an almshouse. Then in 1866, they renamed it to Bayview Asylum. They were heavily focused on the homeless, mentally ill, and those with infectious diseases (ie; tuberculosis). This continued well into the 1920-30s until it was renamed again to City Hospitals (plural, because at this point there were 3 buildings (one for acute care, chronic care, and infectious diseases).

Just like with most hospitals and prison way back in the day, they had a "pauper burial ground" where they buried the nameless and/or unclaimed bodies over the course of 200-ish years. This would have been in the far back of the building (where E Lombard St runs), towards the railroad tracks.

Supposedly, when the hospital began expanding they exhumed and moved all of the paupers' graves to a new location. Respectfully, I seriously doubt that. There would have been at least one thousand nameless bodies buried on the grounds.

The amount of time, money and resources it would take to move all of those bodies (that had no markers, so those workers would be going in blind with just a vague idea of where the plots were) would have been astronomical. And for what? To be respectful to people who were considered "the less dead" because they were homeless and/or severely mentally ill and no one was looking for them? Doubtful.

If history has taught us anything, it's that "people are always gonna people" and I would not put it past the city government to claim they were moved, but didn't move them whatsoever, just to placate the general public. To this day, the mentally ill and homeless (the paupers of society), are not exactly treated with dignity, and local, state, and federal governments continue to be corrupt and cut corners to save money.

This, to me, also explains why in 7 months, nothing has been done. In fact, after the large cone was partially swallowed up, the city just surrounded it with about 12 additional cones. The city was out there with trucks and flashing traffic signs yesterday morning (6/29/26) and I thought that at long last they were fixing that stretch of road.

Nope. They packed up and left without having done a thing. Nothing changed. All the cones remained, seemingly untouched.

I'm hypothesizing that the city is aware that there are human remains under that stretch of road, making this a far more expensive and complicated repair than a simple re-paving. This is probably going to cost too much money than what the city has available, and it's also a PR nightmare. And I'm sure the average city infrastructure workers are not paid nearly enough nor trained for an archaeological side quest being tacked onto their job.

Now I could just be completely over-thinking it, but as of right now, this is my theory and it's kinda fun.