Mystery • Cecil Hotel • 2013 • Los Angeles
January 31st, 2013. The Cecil Hotel, downtown Los Angeles. A twenty-one-year-old Canadian student named Elisa Lam checks in alone. She's traveling the West Coast by herself. She's been posting photos on Tumblr. Texting her parents daily. She seems fine.
The Cecil Hotel is not a normal hotel. Built in 1927, it sits on Skid Row, surrounded by homelessness, drugs, and despair. It has hosted at least sixteen deaths. Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, stayed there in 1985. Jack Unterweger, an Austrian journalist who strangled three women, lived there in 1991. The hotel's nickname: "The Suicide."
Elisa checks in on January 26th. Her roommates complain about strange behavior. The hotel moves her to a room by herself. On January 31st, she vanishes. Police search every floor, every room, the roof. They find nothing.
On February 13th, the LAPD releases four minutes of elevator security footage from the night Elisa disappeared. What it shows has haunted millions.
Elisa enters the elevator and presses multiple buttons. She steps out, looks both ways down the hallway, steps back in. The door doesn't close. She presses herself flat against the wall as if hiding from something. She starts making strange hand gestures, her fingers splayed, her arms moving in jerky, unnatural patterns. She appears to be talking to someone who isn't there.
Then she leaves. The elevator door finally closes. A full minute of footage appears to be missing. The timestamp seems altered. The internet explodes. Theories multiply — the Korean elevator game, a portal to another dimension, something unseen holding the door open.
For nineteen days after she disappears, guests at the Cecil Hotel complain about the water. Low pressure. Strange taste. Dark discoloration. Some brush their teeth with it. Some drink it. Some bathe in it.
On February 19th, a maintenance worker climbs to the roof to check the hotel's four large water cisterns. Each one is roughly eight feet tall and four feet wide, with a heavy lid. He opens one. Inside, floating facedown in the water that has been flowing to every faucet in the hotel, is the body of Elisa Lam.
She is naked. Her clothes, watch, and room key are floating beside her. The tank's lid was closed. There is no ladder on the outside. The tanks sit on a platform accessible only through a locked, alarmed rooftop door.
The coroner ruled accidental drowning. Bipolar disorder was listed as a significant contributing factor. Toxicology showed she had stopped taking her prescribed medications — a pattern her family confirmed. When unmedicated, Elisa experienced hallucinations and paranoia.
The official theory: in a psychotic episode, Elisa fled to the roof believing she was being pursued. She climbed the fire escape, accessed the water tank platform, lifted the heavy lid, climbed inside seeking refuge from a threat that existed only in her mind, and drowned. The lid could have fallen closed on its own.
The internet was not satisfied. A death metal musician was identified from the hotel and harassed so severely he attempted suicide. Web sleuths swarmed the Cecil. A tuberculosis test being conducted nearby was called LAM-ELISA — a coincidence so eerie it was treated as proof of a government experiment.
Strip away the theories, the viral footage, and the hotel's gruesome history, and what remains is a young woman who was failed. Failed by a mental health system that let her travel alone while unmedicated. Failed by a hotel that didn't notice a guest was missing for nineteen days. And failed by an internet that turned her death into entertainment.
The elevator door closes. Elisa walks away, down a hallway, toward the roof, toward the water. And the camera keeps recording an empty elevator, door opening and closing, over and over, for no one.