Elisa Lam and Life Imitating Art

Heard there’s discount pricing at the Cecil Hotel if you act fast!

Mystery Nibbles

Mar 26, 2021

Mystery Mob!

Happy Friday! Before we start - here’s Wednesday’s riddle again, this time with its solution:

We're quite the couple, you and I

If you let me live, I'll surely die

If you kill me to live another night

I'll be there next evening, at your side

Whenever I cry, you just leave me be

While your tears are like poison to me

I see the pain in your eyes, whenever we touch

I shiver when you speak or shush

If you let me live, I’ll surely die

We're quite the couple, you and I

Answer: A candle/candle flame

Did y’all solve it? Are we all geniuses? (duh, of course!)

But back to regular programming -- this week: Elisa Lam & the Cecil Hotel.

A Hotel… of DEATH??

Okay, the title is a little dramatic. But seriously. The Cecil Hotel has a pretty strange history and far too many deaths for a hotel (at least for one where I’d consider booking a room). Amy Price, a former hotel manager at the Cecil, said there were “about 80 deaths” during her 10-year tenure... yikes.

The hotel was built in 1924 in the heart of downtown Los Angeles near “Skid Row.” The first suicide within its walls happened in 1927. It eventually earned a reputation for violence, suicides, and murders.

Both Richard Ramirez (The Night Stalker) and Jack Unterweger (an international serial killer) lived at the Cecil at one point in their life. Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, was rumored to be seen at the bar of the Cecil Hotel just a few days before her murder. And that’s not even close to all of it. Here’s a long list of weird things that happened at the hotel.

But the most famous case that occurred at the Cecil Hotel involved a woman by the name of Elisa Lam.

You’d like to trust the water supply at the hotel… right?

In 2013, Elisa Lam disappeared while staying at the Cecil Hotel. A Canadian student, Lam had been traveling across the US with plans to head to Santa Cruz after her stay in LA.

About two weeks after Lam disappeared, the police had no real leads to go off of. They had released flyers, brought in canines for scent, and investigated as much of the hotel as they legally could. But they needed a boost. So they released a video of Lam caught by security tapes in the elevator and it’s, well, strange.

Because of its bizarre nature, the video was shared & viewed widely across the internet. Lam suffered from bipolar and depression and much of that video was ‘explained’ by those diagnoses.

Nineteen days after first being reported missing, guests began complaining about the quality of the hotel’s water. Shortly after, her body was found in a water tank on the top of the hotel.

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The conspiracy/mystery side of the internet exploded with many hypotheses over how someone could end up in a water tank. And some thought it looked like she was talking to someone in the surveillance videos. But the “Occam’s Razor” of it all still appears to be a suicide.

Here’s a very interesting take on this story (and on true crime in general) from Rolling Stone that critiques the Netflix documentary about Lam & the Cecil Hotel.

Life Imitating Art?

In 2005, the film Dark Water was released starring Jennifer Connelly. Based on a 1996 short story by Koji Suzuki, the film received mixed reviews. Overall, it seemed like a rather average horror film of the 2000s. But the movie came back into the public eye after the Elisa Lam incident. Why? Because:

“A dysfunctional elevator and discolored water gushing from the building's faucets eventually lead them to the building's rooftop water tank, where they discover the body of a girl who had been reported missing from the building a year earlier.”

Boy that story sounds a little too familiar, huh? Since the 2013 incident, popular fiction has now told similar stories to this one, but this one was well, before the actual incident. Weird.

Either way, this stuff led me down some collective consciousness rabbit holes that I won’t subject you to.

Instead, here are a few more examples of when life imitated art.

So what do you think happened?

Murder? Suicide? Other dimensions? Let us know your thoughts on the Cecil Hotel and Elisa Lam in the comments.