UPDATE:

The mystery of the strange lights shining from inside a room of a dark and abandoned hospital building has been solved. Director of Information at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Leslie Capo says university police investigated the sighting Tuesday at Charity Hospital. They determined that the lights came from wooden boards wrapped in lights. Police say it appears someone broke into the building. They say the items left inside the room will be removed. Social media lit up this week after images of the lights surfaced. People who spotted the lights from the neighboring Tulane Medical Center posted photos of the sighting. Some thought the lights had come from a Christmas tree. The hospital has been abandoned since Hurricane Katrina.

A strange yet beautiful image has gone viral on social media: photos of what appears to be a miniature, lit Christmas tree in a window of the abandoned Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

Facebook user Lisa Walley Staggs posted the images, which she took from the parking garage of the hospital where she works. The hospital is across the street from the former Charity Hospital, abandoned since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005.

Here are Stagg's comments from the Facebook post that accompanied the pictures:

I work at an inner city New Orleans hospital that happens to be situated directly across from Charity hospital. Charity hospital has been closed, it's windows darkened, since hurricane Katrina, and is a gloomy and dreary sight on the best of days...at night it's down-right scary. Until tonight.
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!

How the tree came to be the abandoned hospital and what's powering its lights remain mysteries at this time.

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