  (abridged) In this paper, we examined XMM Newton EPIC spectra of 14
ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs)in addition to the XMM RGS spectra of two
sources (Holmberg II X-1 and Holmberg IX X-1). We determined oxygen and iron
abundances of the host galaxy's interstellar medium (ISM) using K-shell (O) and
L-shell (Fe) X-ray photo-ionization edges towards these ULXs. We found that the
oxygen abundances closely matched recent solar abundances for all of our
sources, implying that ULXs live in similar local environments despite the wide
range of galaxy host properties. Also, we compare the X-ray hydrogen column
densities (n_H) for 8 ULX sources with column densities obtained from radio H I
observations. The X-ray model n_H values are in good agreement with the H I n_H
values, implying that the hydrogen absorption towards the ULXs is not local to
the source (with the exception of the source M81 XMM1). In order to obtain the
column density and abundance values, we fit the X-ray spectra of the ULXs with
a combined power law and one of several accretion disk models. We tested the
abundances obtained from the XSPEC models bbody, diskbb, grad, and diskpn along
with a power law, finding that the abundances were independent of the thermal
model used. We comment on the physical implications of these different model
fits. We also note that very deep observations allow a breaking of the
degeneracy noted by Stobbart et al. (2006) favoring a high mass solution for
the absorbed grad + power law model.
