LA’s skid row is a notorious hotbed of human misery. hundreds of people with nowhere to
go are forced to live on the streets, and no part of this dismal place is more infamous
than the Stay On Main Hotel. But it’s only been called that since 2011. Once, it was
known as the Cecil Hotel - They changed the name to distance themselves from the establishment’s
long history of murder, suicide, and mysterious disappearances.
Sadly for the managers and employees of this cursed hotel, sometimes there’s just too
much blood to ever be washed away.
This is the insane but all-too-real story of the Cecil Hotel, also known as “Hotel
Death.” A tale so bloody and violent it’s been the source of a Coen Brothers movie,
a Stephen King novella, and an entire season of American Horror Story. But the reality
is even more gruesome than the fiction.
From its earliest days, the hotel seemed like a bad omen. The hotel was first opened between
1924 and 1927. Fifteen stories, seven hundred rooms, and an opulent marble lobby. The three
hoteliers that funded the venture - William Banks Hanner, Charles L. Dix and Robert H.
Schops - wanted the Cecil to be a classy place for traveling businessmen and Hollywood tourists.
But within five years of the hotel first opening, America sank into the Great Depression, and
the Cecil's dreams of class and refinement sank with it. The place practically became
a seedy boarding house for the poor, the desperate, and criminals overnight, as the homeless population
boomed to 10,000 people within a five mile radius. Nobody respectable would even dream
of staying there - it was the last refuge of people running from something.
The Cecil Hotel had already become a grim, sleazy place to hang your hat. And then the
deaths started.
In 1927, while staying at the Cecil Hotel, Percy Ormond Cook was having marital troubles.
He and his wife were teetering on the edge of divorce, and Cook’s wife was adamant
that she’d take the couple’s child with them. When Cool felt that the relationship
couldn’t be salvaged, he checked into the hotel, and checked out with a self-inflicted
gunshot to the head. The hotel’s first suicide, but sadly, far from the last.
In 1931, Manhattan Beach resident W. K. Norton checked into the Cecil Hotel under the fake
name “James Wily” for unknown reasons. Several weeks later, he was found dead in
his hotel room, having ingested capsules of poison. To this day, we don’t know if his
death was murder or suicide.
The year after that, Benjamin Dodich was also found dead in his room. Like Percy Cook, he’d
committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Dodich never left a note, so the reason
for him taking his own life at the Cecil is lost to history. Three deaths in five years
is already bad, but the deaths were about to become more violent.
In 1934, former Army Medical Corps Sgt. Louis D. Borden checked into the Cecil Hotel. The
Sergeant, who was 53 at the time, was experiencing declining health and wanted to go out on his
own terms. The Cecil was simply where he chose to take a straight razor and slash his own
throat, bleeding to death in his room shortly after.
In 1937, Grace E. Magro checked into the Cecil Hotel, and was given a room on the ninth floor.
She would later fall to her death from the window of that room - landing on some telephone
wires on her way down, and succumbing to her injuries at a hospital hours later.
In 1938, US Marine Corps fireman Roy Thompson went the same way. He jumped to his death
from the window of his room, his corpse crashing down onto the skylight of a neighboring building
and terrifying everyone underneath. In 1939 and 1940, two different people - Navy Officer
Erwin C. Neblett and School Teacher Dorothy Seger - would die from ingesting poison while
inside the hotel.
Things took a particularly grisly turn in September of 1944, when Dorothy Jean Purcell
and her boyfriend, Ben Levine, checked into the hotel. What Dorothy Purcell didn’t know
was that she was pregnant, and when she went into labor during the night, she didn’t
want to wake Ben up. Instead, she snuck into the bathroom and quietly gave birth there.
When her baby was born, Dorothy assumed the infant was dead for reasons unknown - perhaps
just sheer confusion and panic. But the infant was definitely dead when Dorothy, in an almost
trancelike state, threw it from the window.
She was arrested, but declared not guilty by reason of insanity. The Cecil Hotel has
a funny way of messing with your head.
Over the next fifteen years, the Death Hotel experienced an astonishing five different
deaths from people falling from its windows, and many of them were clearly no accident.
In November of 1947, Robert Smith died after jumping from a seventh story window at the
hotel. In 1954, San Francisco stationery firm employee Helen Gurnee checked into the hotel
under the false name “Margaret Brown.” A few weeks later, she fell to her death from
the seventh floor, landing on the hotel’s marquee.
Eight years later in 1962, Julia Frances Moore jumped to her death from the eighth story,
landing fatally on the second story interior light well of the hotel. There was never any
suicide note, and the only possessions on her were a bus ticket from St. Louis, 59 cents
in pocket change, and the details of a bank account containing $1,800. However, Julia’s
death would soon be overshadowed with one of the strangest deaths ever logged at the
hotel, occurring that same year.
This death started as many others at the Hotel did: With a desperate individual at the end
of their tether.
Pauline Otton and her estranged husband, Dewey, were having an explosive argument in their
hotel room on the ninth floor of the Cecil Hotel. Dewey stormed out when the argument
was over, leaving the 27-year-old Pauline alone and in despair. In that moment, she
decided to end it all, and jumped from the window of her room. Tragic, but all too common
for the Death Hotel.
What was decidedly uncommon was the bad luck of one George Gianinni, a 55-year-old local
who happened to be walking below when Pauline decided to end her life. George was struck
with Pauline’s falling body at incredible velocity, killing both of them instantly.
It was such a brutal incident that police first assumed that George had jumped too,
but the fact his hands were in his pockets and his shoes were still on his feet proved
that he was just walking in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Suicide and accidental deaths are one thing, but murder is another horrifying ballpark
altogether. In 1964, a local woman named Goldie Osgood - nicknamed “Pigeon Goldie” - checked
into the Cecil Hotel. Goldie was a retired telephone operator, and was well-liked in
the local community. Her nickname, Pigeon Goldie, was given to her because she adored
feeding the local birds.
But even the good don’t last long in the darkness of the Death Hotel. A worker found
Goldie dead in her room - she’d been beaten, stabbed, and raped. A bag of birdseed and
her favorite LA Dodgers cap were both laying near her corpse.
Shortly after Goldie’s body was found, a man named Jacques B. Ehlinger was walking
through Pershing Square, the place where Goldie loved to feed the pigeons. He seemed dazed,
and had blood on his clothes. He was arrested and brought in on suspicion of killing Goldie,
but he was later cleared of all charges. The murder of Goldie Osgood remains unsolved to
this day.
Next came another two falling deaths with one freaky commonality: Neither victim has
ever been identified. In 1975, a woman checked into the hotel under the name Alison Lowell.
She was given room 327 on the twelfth floor, and jumped to her death from its window. It
was later found out that Alison Lowell was an alias, and the true identity of the dead
woman was never found. In 1992, an unidentified African-American man was found dead on the
sidewalk. Based on the gruesome state of his corpse, police speculated that he either fell,
jumped, or was pushed from the fifteenth floor of the Cecil Hotel. To this day, he has never
been identified.
A number of darkly eventful things happened between those last two deaths. It’s important
to note that while the Cecil Hotel is a place of great suffering, not everyone who it draws
in is a tormented, innocent victim. In fact, two of the Hotel’s most high profile guests
are quite the opposite.
During the 1980s, a man named Richard Ramirez was said to have rented a room at the hotel
for a number of weeks. Ramirez is better known to many as The Nightstalker, a brutal rapist
and serial killer who terrorized Los Angeles.
Ramirez would break into people’s homes and commit unspeakable atrocities against
them when they thought they were safe. And in case he wasn’t creepy enough already,
he was a literal Satan worshipper. Ramirez frequented LA’s skid row while cruising
for victims, so the Cecil Hotel was a natural place for Ramirez to want to stay. Some even
speculate he committed part of his killing spree while staying at the Cecil.
In 1991, the Cecil Hotel became a stopgap for another monstrous individual: Austrian
serial killer Jack Unterweger. Jack was a particularly intelligent and insidious killer
- he murdered a woman, was sent to prison, and managed to leave jail and find success
as a journalist and author as well as a supposedly “reformed” criminal. In fact, Jack was
still a psychopathic murderer, generally strangling women to death with their own underwear.
During Jack’s brief stay at the Cecil Hotel, it’s possible he murdered as many as three
women, perhaps even trying to emulate Ramirez’s earlier crimes. All this just further added
to the Cecil Hotel’s local infamy as Hotel Death.
But in 2013, there was one incident that changed everything. An incident that turned the Cecil
Hotel from a local shame to a horrifying worldwide sensation, inspiring countless discussions,
videos, podcasts, and documentaries since. A sinister video was posted onto the internet...
The video depicted a 21-year-old Canadian tourist named Elisa Lam in an elevator at
the Cecil Hotel. It’s a strange and frightening watch. She appears to be afraid, paranoid,
acting strangely. She presses the elevator buttons in seemingly random orders. She looks
out of the elevator doors, afraid, as though something was chasing her. It was like something
out of a horror movie.
And the reason the footage went so viral is that Elisa Lam had gone missing shortly after
it was taken.
The internet speculation machine exploded, as the sordid history of the hotel went global.
Was Elisa being chased by killers? Ghosts? Demons? The evil forces of the Cecil Hotel
itself?
Some questions were answered when, a short while later, people at the hotel complained
about low water pressure and funny-tasting tap water. When maintenance workers checked
the water tank on the hotel’s roof, they found Elisa’s decomposing, naked body inside.
People had been drinking and bathing in this contaminated water for days without even knowing
it.
Theories on Lam’s death ranged from murder to the supernatural, but the most likely reason
is arguably more tragic. Lam suffered from bipolar disorder, and was under a huge amount
of stress after deciding to drop out of college and travel. It’s likely that Lam experienced
a manic episode - explaining her strange behavior in the elevator - which led to her climbing
to the roof, accidentally falling into the water tank, and drowning.
The latest death to occur at the Cecil Hotel happened in 2015, but if the pattern holds
true, it won’t be the last. The body of an unidentified 28-year-old man was found
on the sidewalk outside the building. It’s suspected by many that he fell to his death,
but the LA County Coroner has yet to make an official declaration on this matter.
This brings the dark tale of the Cecil Hotel to an end...for now. Is it an evil place,
or just a place where evil things seem to happen at unusually high rates? We’ll never
know for sure. All we do know is that something isn’t right about the Cecil Hotel. And those
who check in often have very strange ways of checking out...
Now check out “Body Found In Hotel Water Tank Used for Washing Hair and Brushing Teeth”
and “Morgue Employees Reveal Things That Would Scare Anyone” for more REAL tales
of horror!