On February 1,
2013, Elisa Lam vanished while staying at the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los
Angeles. The 21-year-old Canadian college student was in the middle of a solo
west coast tour at the time of the disappearance. In an attempt to locate her,
the Los Angeles Police Department released the last known images they had of
Lam—a snippet of security footage taken in the hotel’s elevator on the day of
her vanishing.
But the clip
was far from ordinary.
In the video,
Lam enters the elevator and presses nearly all the buttons, causing the car to
stall. As the doors remain open, Lam peeks out into the hallway, exiting and
re-entering several times. She rocks in place and gestures with her arms, as if
communicating with someone off-camera. Her movement is unsteady. Finally, Lam
disappears down the hall to her left, the elevator doors closing behind her.
And this rather chilling clip made its way online, where it quickly went viral.
Some people theorized
that Lam was on drugs, that she was possibly mentally ill, or even both. Others
claimed she was possessed, or hiding from someone—or something—that can’t be
seen on the video.
The Cecil
Hotel is known for its dark history. Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, supposedly
stayed at the Cecil before she was murdered in 1947.
Goldie Osgood,
known as the “Pigeon Lady of Pershing Square”, was raped and murdered in her
hotel room back in 1964. Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, and his copycat
Jack Unterweger lived at the Cecil while they committed most of their crimes.
The hotel has also played host to many suicides over the years, including one
woman who killed a passing pedestrian after jumping from above.
Two weeks
passed, and Elisa Lam remained missing. At the same time, guests at the Cecil
began complaining of low water pressure in their rooms and brownish water
seeping out of the tap, and the foul tasting water.
Thus, on the
morning of February 19, a hotel employee named Santiago Lopez went to check on
the hotel’s four rooftop water tanks. He noticed the top hatch to one tank was
open. Lopez climbed a set of ladders and peered inside; he was absolutely horrified
by what he saw. Floating face up in the water near the top of the tank was the
body of a young woman. It was indeed the lifeless body of the missing girl, Elisa
Lam.
Lopez told the
police that no one could access the roof without tripping an alarm. In fact, he
had to deactivate the alarm system before stepping out himself. Only hotel
staff possessed the keys to the rooftop stairwell and door.
This coupled
with the fact that according to the hotel’s engineer, even if you did reach the
roof without setting off an alarm, you’d have to climb onto the water tank
platform, scale a second ladder to the top of the tanks, lift the heavy metal
hatch, and then jump inside. Whuch us a daunting task by itself.
To this day,
no one knows how Lam reached the roof without setting off the alarm system, or
how she gained entrance to the tank—and then, how or even why she drowned, or would
want to.
Stills from
the elevator security footage c an be found here on YouTube.
The autopsy
revealed that Lam’s body was found naked in the water, with her clothing—the
same clothes she had been wearing in the elevator video—strewn around her. Her
body was moderately decomposed, as it had been approximately 16 days since she
was last seen alive.
And there was
no evidence of assault, sexual or otherwise. No drugs, besides ibuprofen, were
found in her system. At the time of her death, the water tank was about half to
three-quarters full—leading some to question how an the small but able-bodied
woman could drown in a relatively small amount of standing water.
In preparation
for her ill-fated tour of the West Coast Lam had started a Tumblr, Nouvelle/Nouveau, a landing place for quotations and fashion
photography. There was nothing unusual about the site itself—though eerily it
continued to update even after Lam’s death. While clearly Lam had scheduled her
Tumblr to post automatically, it left many to wonder if the dispatches might be
messages from beyond the grave.
The Lam family
filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Cecil Hotel, but their case was
dismissed in late 2015. The judge said that there was nothing that the hotel
did to allow Lam to enter the roof, or to suggest that the roof or the water
tanks were safe. Though the Cecil Hotel had seen its fair share of deaths, the
notoriety of by Lam case pushed its reputation over the edge—the hotel rebranded
as the the “Stay on Main” hotel.
New name or
old, the rather bizarre death of Elisa Lam lingers on in the halls of this Los
Angeles hotel. The chilling security footage lingers on as well … haunting you
long after you’ve watched it.
Elisa Lam's
final moments in this left continue to mystify all who watch the footage.
As always, stay safe !
-Bird
***
