It’s late at night, and the hallways of the historic but run down Cecil Hotel are empty
save for a young woman. She hurries down the hallway, looking over her shoulder, yet nobody is
behind her. Just row after row of silent, closed doorways leading to occupied guest rooms. Still,
she hurries on, nearly in a panic, as if something only she could see was chasing her.
The woman hurriedly ducks into an elevator and takes a moment to press several of the buttons.
Then she backs against a corner far from the door. The elevator does not move.
Cautiously, she leans forward and quickly sticks her head out of the open doors,
checking both directions of the hallway before ducking back into the elevator.
She seems agitated, backing against the wall of the elevator car, then
into a front corner as if she was hiding from something in that hallway. Something coming
her way. She remains in her corner for almost two minutes before finally exiting the elevator again.
The doors remain open as the young woman seems to be speaking to someone or something in the
hallway. She’s clearly having a very animated discussion, moving her arms and hands around
in an expressive fashion. Finally, with the conversation apparently over, the woman turns
and leaves down the hallway to the left. Whatever she had been talking to does not appear to follow.
As the woman leaves the frame of the camera,
she will never be seen alive again, and it will be many days before her body is
discovered... inside a sealed water tank on the roof of the Cecil Hotel.
If you're planning a trip to Los Angeles, the Cecil hotel isn’t the classiest place you could
stay to say the least. Built in the 1920s, the hotel never fully recovered from the Great
Depression, and has seen more than its fair share of murders and suicides. It’s historically been
a residence for transients, and has even played host to infamous serial killers Richard Ramirez
and Jack Unterweger at different points in its history. So, given it’s reputation,
it wouldn't have seemed too out of the ordinary on February 19th, 2013 when multiple calls were
made to the front desk complaining about low water pressure. Several guests also complained
about the water in their rooms having an unpleasant taste and black colour to it.
However, what initially sounded like a simple problem of rusty pipes
quickly revealed itself to be something much darker.
When maintenance went up to the roof to investigate, and opened one of the hotel’s four
1000-gallon water tanks, they found something truly horrifying, the naked body of a young
woman. There were no signs of physical trauma or sexual assault, and the level of bloating
and discoloration seemed to indicate that she had been in the tank for several days.
People had been showering in and drinking water from that tank without ever knowing what else was
inside. Despite the decomposition, the question of the woman's identity was never up for debate.
Elisa Lam – also known by her Cantonese name, Lam Ho Yi – was a 21-year-old university student
who had gone missing from the Cecil Hotel that January while on vacation from her hometown of
Vancouver. Her parents, who had been having daily phone calls with her during her trip,
reported her missing after she missed a call and failed to check out of the
Cecil at the end of her trip. Lam was on several medications for depression
and bipolar disorder, and although she had no history of suicidal ideation,
she had gone missing before for a brief period of time. Her parents, understandably worried,
flew from Vancouver to LA to help the police conduct their search at the beginning of February.
On the 19th of that month, their worst fears were confirmed when the hotel's staff
made the tragic discovery of their daughter's body.
So, a Canadian student travels alone to Los Angeles, disappears after missing
her check-out date, then is found 19 days later floating in a water tank that she
logically shouldn't have been able to access. Already this might sound like a creepypasta,
but the details of the death alone aren't what made the tragic tale of Elisa Lam
such an international media sensation. It was the personal details that the police discovered during
their search for the missing woman, combined with the dark history of the location itself,
that really turned this tragic accident into a real-life episode of the X-Files.
Had the Cecil Hotel and whatever evil force that lived there claimed another victim? Or
was Elisa Lam another case of someone living with mental illness meeting a tragic end?
Elisa Lam had been a student at the University of British Columbia, but at the time of her death,
she hadn't enrolled to study for the next semester due to health issues. On her blog, which became a
key part of the police investigation, Lam spoke openly about the fact that a recent relapse had
prompted her to drop several of her courses. Her writing paints a picture of a young woman
going through a period of serious depression and dissatisfaction with her life. She posted
frequently about disappointing relationships, the feeling that she had accomplished very little in
comparison to her classmates, and her regret at having given up running after high school.
In one post, she admitted to feeling “directionless and lost”, titling one post
“You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life” a quote from Chuck Palahniuk she
seemed to be very fond of, having used it as the title of her blog on both wordpress and tumblr.
It seems likely that this fear of wasting her life was what prompted her to take time off of
university and plan a trip down the west coast of the US. Starting in her home city of Vancouver,
Elisa took a train to California and spent a few days in San Diego before hopping on a bus to Los
Angeles. On January 26th, she checked into the Cecil Hotel and was originally placed in
a shared room for two days before being moved to a single room. People who interacted with Lam in
the days leading up to her death recounted that she seemed excited about the rest of her trip.
Little did anyone know that soon, the happy, bright young woman they had encountered,
would turn into one of the most infamous mysteries of the 21st century.
Bookstore owner Katie Orphan, who was one of the last people to see Lam alive, recalled in
an interview with CNN that she was “very outgoing, very lively, very friendly” while chatting about
books she intended to bring home as gifts for her parents and sister. From an outside perspective,
at least, it would seem that Lam's trip to California was providing her with the
change of scenery that she had so desperately needed to improve her mental health. This fact
made it all the more confusing that she would apparently commit suicide just a few days later.
Four days before the missing woman was discovered, the LAPD released a CCTV video
featuring Lam to the public in the hopes it would aid the investigation. The video,
which has since become infamous among fans of true crime and unsolved mysteries,
shows Lam entering an elevator in the Cecil Hotel's lobby.
Once in the elevator, she pushes multiple buttons at once and waits for the door to close.
The door doesn't close, and for the rest of the video, she goes in and out of the elevator
multiple times, looking around the lobby and fidgeting nervously. At other points,
she hides in the corner of the elevator, and at others, she stands in the doorway.
Eventually she leaves the elevator, and steps out of frame entirely, never to get back in.
When the video was posted, it went viral almost overnight, spawning a deluge of conspiracy
theories from amateur internet sleuths. Some people posited that Elisa Lam was murdered,
and her video showed her running away from the person who would eventually kill her.
Others theorised that she had taken drugs and her actions were the result of a bad trip. Others were
sure that Lam's death was supernatural, and the video was evidence of demonic possession.
Strangely, no evidence of foul play has ever been discovered and the toxicology reports on her body
showed no drugs in her system outside of her prescribed medication, as well as ibuprofen
and a negligible amount of alcohol. As for the demonic possession explanation,
while it's not exactly something that can be disproven, we still think it's highly unlikely.
But if it wasn’t foul play and the supernatural wasn’t involved,
how in the world did this young woman get through a locked and alarmed security door,
lift the lid of a water tank that would take a very strong man would struggle with alone,
and then slide it back into place while inside the tank?!
The door to the roof of the Cecil Hotel is protected by several keys and passcodes
that only hotel staff have access to, and any attempt to reach the roof without a key would
have triggered an alarm, however the roof is still accessible via the building's fire escape.
Was Elisa Lam somehow able to climb up the fire escape onto the roof
and into the water tank? While the toxicology report found that she
had taken her prescribed medication for bipolar disorder, they found no trace of the
mood stabilisers that she usually took along with that medication. Without these mood stabilisers,
people with bipolar disorder risk suffering manic episodes, during which they may act erratically
and experience hallucinations. Did Elisa Lam, triggered by the recent stress in her life,
suffer a manic episode, climb up the fire escape and get into the water tank
in order to escape from some perceived threat, resulting in her tragic accidental drowning?
Even if that is the case, the question of how she was able to get into the water tank has
still never been conclusively answered. All four of the hotel's water tanks have no fixed access,
requiring a ladder for staff to look into the tanks. Furthermore, the lids are very heavy, and
while there is some evidence to suggest that one of the tanks may have been left open, allowing Lam
to fall in, the lid was closed on the day she was found, despite the fact that it would have been
extremely difficult if not impossible to close from the inside. This, coupled with the fact that
her phone was never found with her belongings, suggests that someone else may have been present
on the roof at the time of her death. Chillingly, Elisa Lam's tumblr blog continued to be updated
after her death, but it's impossible to know if the posts were made by a hacker, someone using her
stolen phone, or if she had simply scheduled a few posts ahead of time using tumblr's queue feature.
Beyond the details of Elisa Lam's death, a new layer of mystery emerges
when you add in the Cecil Hotel’s very violent and bloody past.
In 1931, a man who had checked in under the name 'James Willys' was found dead
after ingesting poison capsules in his room at the Cecil. The man was in fact
a 46-year-old Manhattan Beach resident named W.K Norton, and he was the first
person to ever take their own life in one of the Cecil's rooms. He wouldn’t be the last though.
In 1934, Army Medical Corps Sgt. Louis D. Borden, aged 53, checked into a room at the Cecil,
and slit his throat with a straight razor in the bathroom. In 1962, 27-year-old Pauline Otton
threw herself out of the window of her 9th floor room at the Cecil following an explosive
argument with her husband. When she fell, she landed on top of a passing pedestrian,
65-year-old George Gianni, resulting in both of their deaths.
And not all of the deaths there have been solved. In 1964, retired telephone operator Goldie Osgood,
affectionately known to locals as the Pigeon Lady, was found stabbed,
and beaten in her ransacked room. The murderer was never found.
In total, there have been 16 deaths reported at the Cecil Hotel, the vast majority of
them suicides. But for two of its guests, the Cecil was the haven they returned to
night after night, murder after bloody murder.
Richard Ramirez, the infamous Night Stalker murderer, who terrorized Los Angeles in 1985,
and visiting Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger in 1991 both called the Cecil
home for a time. More chillingly, the Cecil was where they returned to after committing multiple
murders. There were also unverified reports that Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia,
was seen drinking at the Cecil's bar shortly before her own gruesome death in 1947.
In 2011, the hotel was rebranded as 'Stay On Main', and it went through extensive renovations
in 2017, but it seems that no matter how hard they try, the managers of the Cecil can never
seem to shake the building's grisly reputation. The story of the Cecil hotel has inspired
movies like 1991's Barton Fink, as well as the setting for season 5 of American Horror Story.
Elisa Lam herself has already inspired elements in countless other films and TV shows, including
Castle, How to Get Away With Murder, and the Hong Kong-made horror film Hungry Ghost Ritual,
which features a scene of a ghost terrorising a woman in an elevator,
shot in a very similar style to the Elisa Lam footage.
Whatever or whoever was ultimately the reason for Elisa Lam climbing that fire escape
and into the water tank, the tragedy of her death cannot be overstated. She was an unhappy
young woman who came to LA just looking for a break from the stress of her daily life.
Four months after Lam's death, journalist Steve Erickson stayed in the Cecil and published a
short piece about his stay in LA Magazine. “The Cecil will reveal to you whatever it is
you’re a fugitive from,” he writes, “Bolts and latches on the door will not only keep
everyone else out but trap you within, where there are no locks at all on the windows.”
Now check out “Real Life Ghost Story- Mystery of the Mary Celeste Ghost Ship”
and “The Most Shocking Unsolved Murders in the World.”!