“The Suicide” Hotel
The Cecil Hotel is no stranger to crazy things, including suicides, serial killers, and overdoses. The hotel is located in Los Angeles and has been open since 1924. The hotel has had this reputation as the “The Suicide” since the beginning, with ten deaths occurring there before 1950, six of those happening during the Great Depression. Some say that Elizabeth Short was seen there before her murder, and it is also the known hangout for serial killers such as Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger.
Even with this reputation, people continue to stay and visit the hotel, even in recent years, despite eighty people have died there in just ten years, starting in 2007.
Elisa Lam’s Disappearance
Elisa Lam was a twenty-one-year-old college student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who was on a solo trip from San Diego to Santa Cruz California. On January 26th, Lam checked into the hotel, not having known its reputation, and was supposed to check out on January 31st, but never did.
She had spoken to her parents, Yinna and David Lam, every day of her trip, as they were nervous about her traveling alone. When they didn’t hear from her, they called the LAPD and they then searched the hotel as much as they could– not being able to look in people’s rooms– and came up empty. That is when they found a video of Lam in the hotel elevator.
The video soon went viral for being so unnerving and chilling. In the video, Lam can be seen hitting every elevator button and looking outside the elevator several times. The door remains open for a couple of minutes and it is unclear if there is someone there, right out of frame. No one else is seen on the camera, but that didn’t stop people from coming up with conspiracies.
Still, the police had nothing, she was nowhere in the hotel, but there was no footage of her leaving. It baffled everyone.
Funny Tasting Water
After weeks of looking, one maintenance worker went to check out the water tanks on the roof of the hotel.
People had been complaining of low water pressure and the tap water tastes strange. Santiago Lopez found her naked body on February 19th, 2013, in a water tank on the roof, nineteen days after she went missing.
Initially, Lam’s parents tried to sue the hotel for wrongful death, but the case was eventually dismissed as the hotel had no reason to believe that someone could even get to the water tanks. Lopez agreed that to get to the water tanks, alarms would have to be turned off, and if alarms were triggered, the front desk would have been notified.
After an autopsy, it was ruled that her death was accidental, as there was no sign of physical trauma to her body nor were there any illegal drugs or alcohol in her body at the time of her death. They believe that she accidentally drowned as a result of her being off her bipolar medication and no one was ever arrested for her death.
Conspiracies
Although her death was ruled an accident, people still weren’t convinced. Some believed that her death was supernatural in nature, but now there are two main theories for how she died that are a little more complicated than ghost stories: suicide or murder.
The murder option is the less likely of the two but is still harped on pretty heavily. The main reason why people thought she might have been murdered was because of the video with Lam in the elevator. In the video, some said that her movements looked like someone who was paranoid or afraid. They thought that her looking out the elevator doors might mean she was trying to get away from someone. People also think that her being found naked points the case in the direction of murder, along with the lid of the water tank being on when police arrived. It would have been impossible for her to put the lid back on herself while she was in there. However, Lopez said that the lid had been off when he found her body and that he had put it back on, closing it before the police came.
None of this ever stirred the pot enough to change anything. Again, the autopsy found no evidence of foul play, and somebody language experts denounced that she was acting paranoid and found it more likely that she was going in and out of the elevator in an attempt to get the doors to close.
The suicide theory is the most prevalent and backed up one. As it was revealed in the investigation, Lam was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression. Lam also had a blog and kept up to date on social media, some of her posts likening the possibility that she committed suicide, despite there being no evidence that she had ever shown any intention to do so or any known attempts.
Initially, Lam had booked a shared hotel room, in a hostel style, but because of her strange behavior, Lam was moved to a private room after complaints were filed against her.
In 2012, she wrote on her blog how she had to drop classes because of a relapse, making her feel completely lost and alone. She would post quotes online, some of the most troubling ones were talking about death. Even more concerning was that her final post that day consisted of five pictures of landscapes, all of them featuring people on top of high buildings or structures, prompting people to think that she was hinting at where she would be.
Even still, it was not likely that she killed herself. Authorities believe that she might have gotten into the tank as a result of her going off of her medication, and then, as people used the water, the level went down and she was no longer able to get out, causing her to drown.
With all of this said, what happened to Elisa Lam was a tragedy and most likely an accident, but the fact that it happened at “The Suicide” Hotel only makes the story stranger.