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4. A Lethal Location Pt. 1: Accident, Cover Up or Cult?
4 Plays4 years ago
TOPIC: Cecil Hotel//Elisa Lam
This Halloweek, we begin to explore the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, CA and the very mysterious death of Elisa Lam. This disturbing case was deemed an accident, but was it? Unpack the eerie with us this week as we dig deep into the life of Elisa Lam, the suspicious circumstances that surrounded her untimely death in February 2013 and the location where it took place: a site that has seen a shocking number of unnatural deaths since its grand opening in the 1920s.
This is the first episode in a series about the Cecil Hotel.
CW: ableism, suicide, sexual, physical and racial violence, mental illness
Sources:
Articles/Blogposts/Websites
- https://www.countryliving.com/life/travel/a45235/creepy-history-cecil-hotel-los-angeles/
- https://allthatsinteresting.com/cecil-hotel-los-angeles
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Hotel_(Los_Angeles)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_and_violence_at_the_Cecil_Hotel
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongva (Learn more about indigenous LA here)
- http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi06e.hp
- https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/chinese-massacre-1871
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/yvezpv/hospitals-are-dumping-mentally-ill-patients-in-los-angeles-skid-row
- https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2587-6-morbid-facts-about-people-dying-in-hotel-rooms.html
- https://medium.com/@jddean/the-serial-killers-who-haunted-the-cecil-hotel-5586e6f7d2d1
- https://abc13.com/archive/9412802/ | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7NwnYRej6o&feature=share
- https://allthatsinteresting.com/elisa-lam-death
- https://www.reddit.com/r/elisalam/
- https://www.historicmysteries.com/what-happened-to-elisa-lam/
- Her blog: https://etherfields.blogspot.com/
- Her tumblr: https://nouvelle-nouveau.tumblr.c
Thank you for listening to our passion project <3 You can find us on social media here! We're a team of 2 people & have always been ad-free. If you are enjoying, please consider supporting our sustainability on Patreon or by making a one-time contribution via CashApp $unpacktheeerie.
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Transcript
Disturbing Incident at Hotel
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And they also talk about how somebody chopped off his penis.
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Anyway... In a hotel?
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In a hotel!
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Oh my god.
Introduction to 'Unpacking the Eerie'
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Hello, I'm Akshi.
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And I'm Shayna.
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And you're listening to Unpacking the Eerie.
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Over the course of our friendship, we quickly learned that we had very specific overlapping interests in true crime, the occult, conspiracy theories, and other unknowns, and also intergenerational and historical trauma,
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Social, racial, gender, and economic justice.
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Psychology.
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Humor.
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And obviously lots of podcasts.
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After many conversations, we thought the intersections of all of these things would be prime content for a podcast we've always wanted but have never found.
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This is That Podcast.
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Before we get started, we want to offer our usual content warning.
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We'll be talking about ableism, suicide, violence, including sexual, physical, and racial violence.
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We'll also be talking about mental illness.
Casual Halloween Chat
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Okay, here we are.
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Here we are.
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It's the weekend before Halloween.
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My fave.
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Okay.
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What's our...
Podcast Preferences and Unsolved Mysteries
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housekeeping for today housekeeping i don't like calling it that you don't like calling it that no it sounds not fun yeah okay housekeeping sounds absolutely the opposite of anything i want to do ever that's fair i also hate doing chores yeah but i love podcasts because they make it better podcasts do make chores a lot better i get so much shit done when i'm into a podcast me too me too wow
00:01:44
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Turn some Crime Junkie on.
00:01:51
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I honestly haven't really dug into Crime Junkie.
00:01:55
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Yeah, I basically am just trying to get through all of their missing person ones because somehow missing person cases really intrigue me.
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I think they just really creep me out.
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Yeah, those ones are really scary because usually it's open-ended, right?
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Yeah, they're all unsolved.
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Yeah.
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Oh, I hate that there are so
Reality TV and Privacy Concerns
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many.
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Unsolved, but like they clearly know who did it, but there's just not enough evidence to like, you know, call that person in or whatever, or there's some corruption going on, as we know.
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See, this is where Dexter comes in.
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Did you hear about that?
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The reviving Dexter.
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Really?
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You know what they're also doing?
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I saw my sister's story.
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They're doing a Laguna Beach reunion.
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Who asked for that?
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Absolutely nobody.
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Who the fuck asked for that?
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No one asked for that.
Listener Feedback and Shoutouts
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I don't think anyone wants to know how...
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Lauren and Heidi are doing.
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No, oh my gosh, Heidi.
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Heidi and what was her boyfriend's name?
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Spencer.
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Oh my god, they were the worst.
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They were the worst.
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They were the worst.
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I don't know how I watched both that show and The Hills for so long when I was like, whatever, 13.
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The phenomenon around it too, who decided?
00:03:16
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I think it'd be really interesting.
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People are gonna love it.
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We're gonna follow some teens.
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In Orange County, California.
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Yeah, who have too much money.
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Yeah.
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What if you were picked to be on that show?
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I would absolutely not be picked to be on that show.
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That's full stop right there.
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They would not pick me.
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I would hate to have my life be on a reality show.
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I would overthink what I do like a thousand times more.
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No, there's no privacy.
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That sounds horrible.
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No, that sounds horrible.
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Anyway, we don't need to spend more time on this.
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We went on a tangent.
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It's true.
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We both have attention issues.
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Yes, it's true.
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Especially during the pandemic.
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Yeah.
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My goodness.
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Shout out to Wendy who prescribed me meds.
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Hey-o, Wendy.
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Thanks, Wendy.
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Is Wendy listening to our podcast?
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Next time I have an appointment with her, I'll bring it
Creepy Cecil Hotel Case
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up.
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Listen, Wendy, you're really helping me out here.
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Listen to this quality content I have for you.
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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Should we start?
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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Well, we wanted to start by...
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Just shouting some people out, shouting some things out.
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We got our very first review ever on Apple Podcasts.
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Thank you very much.
00:04:41
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That was very nice.
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It says, Meow69 says, Best kind of true crime.
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Five stars.
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Love that y'all actually talk about the causes of crime, in parentheses, racism, misogyny, patriarchy, poverty, etc., and are critical of the police and care about the people who are killed and not just the gory details.
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And we thought that was so nice.
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So thank you.
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That is the purpose of our podcast.
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Thank you for seeing us.
00:05:08
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Yes, thank you for seeing us.
00:05:10
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I looked at this username and I was like, we could know this person.
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We totally couldn't know this person.
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There are so many people in my life who would name themselves Meow.
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Yep.
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69.
00:05:19
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Yep.
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Let us know.
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Yeah, thank you so much.
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We also wanted to shout out to Caro and Spanglish in Seattle podcast that gave us a little shout out on their most recent episode that they did, which is also Halloween themed.
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I mean, I guess our whole podcast is kind of Halloween themed, but theirs isn't.
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So they did a Halloween themed episode where they covered Chilean ghost stories and I listened to it and it was very creepy.
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So I really suggest it.
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And they also have good, good banter.
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So yeah, shout out to them for shouting us out and you should definitely take a listen to their podcast.
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And I've also been marketing our podcast on my Tinder.
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So shout out to everyone from my Tinder who's listening.
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Shout out to Tinder.
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Wow.
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Great marketing platform.
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You know what?
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Yes.
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It is.
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People totally use Tinder to market.
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On another note, I also listened to the Spanglish in Seattle episode.
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Seattle?
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What the fuck's wrong with me?
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Spanglish in Seattle episode.
Elisa Lam's Background and Journey
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And there's the story of like the crying woman, the wailing woman, which is very creepy.
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But on TikTok, like a couple hours later, I ran into a video of...
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Someone recording what they thought was a woman wailing for her children.
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And they called the cops and the cops came and couldn't find anybody outside.
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But they cited that ghost story and I was like, that is very synchronous.
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Okay.
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Also, final shout out to just everyone who was really kind and generous with their time and listened to, like, the draft versions of the first two episodes and gave really lovely feedback.
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Specifically, Jill, my cousin Katrina, to Micheline and Val and Liz.
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And I'm sure I'm missing people, and I'm so sorry.
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We also collected, like, informal messages.
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stuff from a lot of people.
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So if you gave feedback at all, thank you.
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We appreciate.
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And I'm going to shout out to my sister, Thrithi, Rini, my roommate, and Amike for also giving us some good feedback on the first couple episodes.
00:07:56
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Yeah, we appreciate the work y'all put in that you didn't have to support us and everyone else who listened and gave us feedback and continues to listen.
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Yeah.
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I didn't expect so much support.
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I thought people were going to be like, oh, this is fun.
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I'll listen to it.
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But we've been getting a lot of really awesome feedback.
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So that's just really nice.
00:08:22
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Thank y'all so much.
00:08:23
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Yeah, we appreciate it.
00:08:26
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Okay, well now that we've done that... Should we get into it?
00:08:31
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I think we should get into it.
00:08:32
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Alright, this one, we say this every time, but this one's going to be a real creepy one.
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I will say that while I was doing research for it, I got pretty scared because I was doing it at night by myself.
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Yeah, it's a real creepy one.
00:08:49
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It is a real creepy one.
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Yep.
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Yeah.
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So, hold on to...
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Gird your loins.
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Gird your loins.
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Hold on to your horses.
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Okay, I'm going to start.
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This is also a pretty recent one.
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So in...
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Mid-February 2013, a hotel in LA called the Cecil Hotel started receiving complaints from their guests of low water pressure, water that was coming out of the taps that had a weird smell and a weird taste, and every now and then the water would come out black, right?
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And so on February 19th, a maintenance worker, Santiago Lopez, was sent up
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to the roof to check the water tanks to see what was up.
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And when he went up there and opened one of the lids of the water tanks, he was shocked and horrified to find the body of 21-year-old Chinese-Canadian student Elisa Lam, who had gone missing a few weeks ago, naked, floating, and dead.
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Her death was ruled an accidental drowning, but there are a lot of aspects to this case that make me question that ruling that we're going to get into.
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But before we get into that, I'm going to introduce a little bit of who Alisa was, because I relate to her a lot as a person.
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So who was Alisa?
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Alisa Lam was born on 30th April 1991.
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Her Cantonese name was Lam Ho Yee.
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She was a 21-year-old college student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, which is very close to where we live, when she was in L.A.
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Her parents emigrated to Canada from Hong Kong and have a restaurant in Burnaby just outside of Vancouver.
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She's described by people who know her as level-headed, caring, someone who volunteered her time.
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She was also pretty funny and used a lot of gallows humor on her blog.
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She was pretty active on her blog spot for a while, and then she switched over to Tumblr.
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So I spent some time, because both her blog and her Tumblr are still up,
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And so I spent some time looking through them, and I really was like, wow, I relate to her so much because I definitely posted a lot of similar venti posts on my Tumblr.
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So I'm just going to read some of them so we can get to know a little bit of what she was like.
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So one of her posts from 2011 goes titled Expecto Patronum.
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Depression sucks.
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I have no control over my emotions.
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I'll be angry for two minutes and then sad again.
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I'll be happy for a half an hour and then emotional again.
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So far, all I've done is lay on my bed and watch episodes of Chopped.
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I'm just waiting for it to pass.
00:12:00
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Another quote from her blog is just her ranting about men being trashed.
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Wise people say dress for yourself and not for anyone else.
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For both men and women, it is as though you must follow a guideline in order to be considered feminine or masculine, when in reality, it's a little of both.
00:12:19
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But with women, it's majorly fucked up to think that if I'm wearing a six-inch leather boots, it means I'm looking for sex.
00:12:27
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I wear those boots because I feel strong in them, and women ought to wear whatever makes them feel strong without worrying about getting raped.
00:12:33
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And I'm like, wow, I would totally write something like this too on my blog.
00:12:37
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But just from skimming her blog and her Tumblr, it seems like she was really into fashion.
00:12:41
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She posts a lot of, like, pictures, or she did post a lot of pictures of people in, like,
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cool aesthetic fashionable clothing.
00:12:49
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She was diagnosed with bipolar so she also posted a lot about her mental health and depression.
00:12:55
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And you know she was a young adult so she obviously also posted about the crushes she had and the boys that she liked.
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She was kind of like a tomboy in her aesthetic so she also posted about like her fashion style and like being feminine and masculine and what that meant to her.
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and she even posted about her skincare routine sometimes so clearly she was just like very normal college student very average um her the quote that was like basically in the description of both her blog and her tumblr is a quote by chuck palanwick and it's you're always haunted by the idea that you're wasting your life so clearly she was an existential
00:13:35
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Bitch, just like me.
00:13:39
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In January 2013, which is when she went missing, the last post that she had, you can tell that her posts were really optimistic and she had a strong desire to improve her mental health and was like working on it.
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So what happened?
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Basically, in January of 2013, she wanted to do a little solo trip to take a break from school.
00:14:02
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And she called it her solo West Coast tour.
00:14:05
Speaker
And she booked a trip to California.
00:14:08
Speaker
And it was supposed to be like a nice holiday to take a break from school.
00:14:13
Speaker
Her family was wary of her traveling by herself, but I think that's pretty normal.
00:14:17
Speaker
Like, I went on a solo trip to Turkey last summer, and my family was definitely wary of me doing that too, I think.
00:14:25
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Especially, like, Asian parents will be wary of, like, you know, their kids traveling on their own, especially if they're girls.
00:14:31
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So I don't think that that's that abnormal.
00:14:35
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But she made it happen because she wanted it to happen.
00:14:38
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And right before she left, she had a party with her childhood friends.
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And on the 22nd of January, she flew to San Diego.
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She posted on her blog about how she missed one of her connecting flights, but thought that it was funny because she got to spend some time in an airport.
00:14:54
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When she was in San Diego, she visited the San Diego Zoo.
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And during her trip, she spoke with her parents every day, told them that she was happy and having a good time.
00:15:03
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And that was also the way that they knew that she was okay.
00:15:05
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You know, she called them every day, just being like, I'm alive, which is also something that I did when I was traveling, just sending my parents a text being like,
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Still alive today.
00:15:16
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So on the 26th of January, she arrived in LA.
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She took the Amtrak from San Diego and the next spot that she was headed after LA was Santa Cruz.
00:15:25
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I'm not sure what she was doing for the first couple of days she was in LA, but she checked in
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to the Cecil Hotel on the 29th of January.
00:15:34
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She posted on her blog, I have arrived in La La Land, and there is a monstrosity of a building next to the place I'm staying.
00:15:42
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When I say monstrosity, mind you, I'm saying as in gaudy.
00:15:47
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But then again, it was built in 1928, hence the Art Deco theme.
00:15:52
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So yes, it is classy, but then since it's LA, it went on crack.
00:15:58
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fairly certain this is where Baz Luhrmann needs to film The Great Gatsby, which is interesting because I think The Great Gatsby movie came out the summer of 2013, so it was being filmed at the time.
History of Violence at Cecil Hotel
00:16:10
Speaker
So yeah, the Cecil Hotel.
00:16:12
Speaker
What is that, Shayna?
00:16:15
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Tell us about it.
00:16:16
Speaker
What is that?
00:16:17
Speaker
What is this hotel where she ended up staying?
00:16:20
Speaker
Okay, well,
00:16:23
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Yeah, I'm going to get into that, but I also just want to say that I don't think I saw a single shred of coverage on this Elisa Lam case that humanized her in this way, you know?
00:16:38
Speaker
Like, no one talked about who the fuck she was.
00:16:41
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I agree with that, minus, like, one documentary that I watched by the paranormal scholar that tried to start off the documentary by humanizing her and kind of
00:16:51
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describing her and a lot of the information I got outside of her blog about her life was from that.
00:16:56
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That's good.
00:16:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:58
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That's something.
00:16:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:59
Speaker
That's not enough.
00:17:00
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It's not enough, but it is something.
00:17:02
Speaker
I think a lot of people who cover cases like this or podcasts that cover cases like this or documentaries that do like really miss that like all of the people involved in these cases are like
00:17:15
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real life humans, like what if it was you, you know, like what would you want, like how would you want your story to be told?
00:17:22
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Obviously you would want all aspects of yourself to be shown and not just like, you know what I'm thinking of?
00:17:27
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The bad parts.
00:17:29
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You've watched that, everybody's seen, well I can't say everybody, but most people have seen this TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I think that's how you say her name,
00:17:41
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I hope that's how you say her name, the danger of a single story.
00:17:45
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Yes.
00:17:45
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And how she talks about when, the most salient example I can think of is like, if you start the story of the United States with colonization, then you have a completely different story than if you were to start centuries back when people have been living here this whole time.
00:17:59
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And like, I feel like with this case and with a lot of cases, the story starts with the horror and like, you know,
00:18:09
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kind of dehumanizes the people who are involved.
00:18:11
Speaker
Like no one started with who is Elisa Lam?
00:18:14
Speaker
They started with what is this body floating in this like water tank?
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Upsetting.
00:18:22
Speaker
Okay.
00:18:22
Speaker
So
00:18:23
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The Cecil Hotel has a dark-ass history.
00:18:27
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This is not the only horrifying thing that has happened there.
00:18:34
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By far.
00:18:35
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By far.
00:18:36
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It is outrageous, the amount of things that have happened at this hotel.
00:18:41
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But when we were talking about this before, Akshu was like, I wonder what's up with the land?
00:18:46
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Like, what's the story of the land that it's on?
00:18:48
Speaker
And so I looked that shit up and it's fucked.
00:18:51
Speaker
I wanted to start with like initially to myself, I was like, well, obviously it started with violence because there's no part of this, the United States that didn't start with violence, like violently removing the people who had been there for centuries before.
00:19:04
Speaker
The Tongva are indigenous to the Los Angeles basin.
00:19:08
Speaker
It covers approximately 4,000 square miles.
00:19:13
Speaker
And in the pre-colonial era, the people lived in as many as 100 villages and primarily identified by their village name rather than by pan-tribal, their pan-tribal name, the Tongva.
00:19:24
Speaker
That's like an umbrella term that we've
00:19:27
Speaker
ascribed.
00:19:28
Speaker
Then the Spanish come in in the late later 1700s and started like placing missions everywhere.
00:19:39
Speaker
There was the founding of Mission San Gabriel by a Christian missionary in 1771 and initiated an era of forced relocation, enslavement, and exposure to old world diseases.
00:19:52
Speaker
And this led to a rapid collapse of Tongva society and their ways of living.
00:19:59
Speaker
There was resistance and rebellions that happened, but they were overpowered by Spanish militia.
00:20:07
Speaker
The land was then ceded.
00:20:10
Speaker
to like the U.S. took over the rest of California from what was then established as Mexico.
00:20:16
Speaker
The U.S. government signed 18 treaties between 1851 and 1852, promising 8.5 million acres of land for reservations.
00:20:24
Speaker
However, these treaties
00:20:25
Speaker
like all the other treaties, were not ratified.
00:20:28
Speaker
They were negotiated with people who did not represent the Tongva and had no authority to cede their land, so they were like, this is mine now.
00:20:37
Speaker
During American occupation, many of the people were targeted for arrest and used as convict laborers, quote unquote, this was the term that was used, in a system of legalized slavery to expand the city for white settlers who became the new majority in 1880.
00:20:54
Speaker
So this is the birthplace of what we know as Los Angeles.
00:21:00
Speaker
So some really bad juju.
00:21:03
Speaker
Just not great.
00:21:04
Speaker
Not a great start.
00:21:06
Speaker
Ugly, violent start.
00:21:08
Speaker
Around this time, there was also a pretty sizable Chinese population that came to the Los Angeles area to, you know,
00:21:19
Speaker
to work, to start a new life.
00:21:21
Speaker
And then in 1871, there was a massacre.
00:21:25
Speaker
Have you heard of the 1871 Chinese massacre?
00:21:28
Speaker
No.
00:21:28
Speaker
Yeah, me neither, until I did research for this.
00:21:32
Speaker
It's about 10 minutes away from where the Hotel Cecil, Cecil Hotel.
00:21:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:36
Speaker
They're interchangeable.
00:21:38
Speaker
They've changed the name like multiple times to brand the place.
00:21:40
Speaker
There was a feud in the Chinatown area, and the shootout led to a white citizen being killed and a cop being wounded.
00:21:49
Speaker
And so in response, a mob of 500 people
00:21:53
Speaker
White men attacked and lynched 18 Chinese people, which is 10% of the entire Chinese population that was there at the time.
00:22:01
Speaker
Oh my god.
00:22:02
Speaker
The mob ransacked practically every Chinese-occupied building on the block and attacked or robbed nearly every resident.
00:22:09
Speaker
And then through a grand jury returned 25 indictments of the murders.
00:22:14
Speaker
Only 10 men stood trial.
00:22:16
Speaker
Eight rioters were convicted on manslaughter charges, but the charges were overturned on a legal technicality and the defendants were never retried.
00:22:23
Speaker
Wow.
00:22:25
Speaker
So... When was this, in the 1800s?
00:22:26
Speaker
1871.
00:22:29
Speaker
Yeah, so that's fucked up.
00:22:31
Speaker
Wherever I pulled this from said that the local newspapers made no mention of it in the year-end recap of major events of the year.
00:22:39
Speaker
So maybe they covered it when it happened, but it wasn't cited as like a major thing that happened.
00:22:43
Speaker
It's how history is rewritten.
00:22:45
Speaker
Right.
00:22:47
Speaker
By white people.
00:22:48
Speaker
Right.
00:22:49
Speaker
Who's telling the stories?
00:22:50
Speaker
That is horrific.
00:22:53
Speaker
And it horrified me that I grew up in California and didn't know about this.
00:22:56
Speaker
Like, it wasn't taught to me.
00:22:58
Speaker
And it got me thinking about how, like, probably one of the most harmful parts of the model minority myth is the erasure of the deep exclusion and violence that Asian Americans faced.
00:23:09
Speaker
Definitely not the only one, but one that we don't really talk about.
00:23:13
Speaker
We don't even know the shit that happened.
00:23:15
Speaker
Okay.
00:23:16
Speaker
Anyways, then...
00:23:18
Speaker
Five blocks away from Hotel Cecil, or where it is now, this is before it was built, there was also a bombing at 1.07 a.m.
00:23:25
Speaker
on October 1, 1910, an explosion rocked the printing plant of the Los Angeles Times at First and Broadway.
00:23:32
Speaker
Basically, so I guess the LA Times were pretty openly anti-union.
00:23:38
Speaker
There were these dudes who were trying to unionize, and to scare them, they wanted to, like,
00:23:45
Speaker
make a small explosion happen.
00:23:47
Speaker
So it wasn't intentional that this big explosion happened, but it was very large.
00:23:52
Speaker
And 17 people were injured and an additional 20 bodies were found in the wreckage.
00:23:58
Speaker
Was it accidental?
00:24:01
Speaker
The bombing or on purpose?
00:24:03
Speaker
The bombing was on purpose, but I think that they planted it as a scare tactic, not as a we're going to kill all of these people.
00:24:09
Speaker
They wanted to be seen, I guess.
00:24:11
Speaker
Right, right.
00:24:12
Speaker
Who was it done by?
00:24:14
Speaker
People who were trying to like form unions at the time.
00:24:17
Speaker
Labor rights union activists.
00:24:21
Speaker
Gotcha.
00:24:22
Speaker
So this is where Hotel Cecil comes in.
00:24:26
Speaker
It's been named the Cecil Hotel, Hotel Cecil, The Cecil, and it is now called Stay on Main, so they've tried to rebrand this multiple times.
00:24:34
Speaker
It's now a budget hotel in downtown Los Angeles, located at 640 South Main Street.
00:24:39
Speaker
It opened in 1927, and this source says it has about 700 rooms, but I've seen a mix of...
00:24:49
Speaker
numbers that people have been citing.
00:24:52
Speaker
I've seen 600 rooms.
00:24:54
Speaker
That's a big difference.
00:24:55
Speaker
I don't know which one is correct.
00:24:57
Speaker
There were three hoteliers invested in this $2.5 million project.
00:25:04
Speaker
which is a lot of money in 1927.
00:25:08
Speaker
And they were accompanied by several other hotels who were trying to do the same thing, trying to build this luxury experience in downtown hotel.
00:25:17
Speaker
Downtown town?
00:25:18
Speaker
What the fuck is wrong with me?
00:25:20
Speaker
Downtown LA.
00:25:22
Speaker
But within five years of opening, the U.S. sank into the Great Depression.
00:25:26
Speaker
Although the hotel flourished as like a fashionable destination through the 40s, the decades beyond saw the hotel decline as the nearby area that it's on was coined Skid Row.
00:25:39
Speaker
And it became increasingly populated with people who didn't have anywhere else to go.
00:25:45
Speaker
And to this day, Skid Row is a place of a lot of suffering, and it's really neglected.
00:25:51
Speaker
I read recently that fucking hospitals... There's, like, some lawsuits with some hospitals in L.A.
00:25:57
Speaker
for taking, like...
00:26:00
Speaker
People who were in the emergency room, psychiatric patients, people with chronic illness who didn't have anywhere else to go, just like dropping them off at Skid Row.
00:26:08
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:26:09
Speaker
It's like, it's so, it's so common that they've coined it, what do they call it?
00:26:15
Speaker
Patient dropping?
00:26:16
Speaker
Dumping?
00:26:17
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:26:17
Speaker
Patient dumping.
00:26:20
Speaker
Isn't that disgusting?
00:26:20
Speaker
That's disgusting.
00:26:21
Speaker
Fucked up.
00:26:23
Speaker
So anyways, Hotel Cecil, this is where it's situated.
00:26:26
Speaker
It's situated in a space with like a really dark history, a really sad history, and shit just kept going from there.
00:26:35
Speaker
Hotel Cecil is a site of many suicides, of many murders, and even serial killers have stayed there.
00:26:41
Speaker
I also wanted to include some creepy stuff I found out about hotels in general, because I have some bad news about hotels.
00:26:48
Speaker
Oh, no.
00:26:49
Speaker
Hotels in general are a magnet for suicide and, quote-unquote, unnatural deaths.
00:26:53
Speaker
There are so many unsolved things that happen in hotels that hotels do not want you to know about because it would ruin their reputation.
00:27:00
Speaker
Right.
00:27:01
Speaker
I guess that kind of makes sense.
00:27:03
Speaker
At least for suicides, it kind of makes sense.
00:27:05
Speaker
I mean, I guess even for murders, it makes sense.
00:27:07
Speaker
It's like...
00:27:08
Speaker
people want to go to a space that's not like their home or where they live um and for murderers I guess it's like easy to like check out and like use fake names and things like that yeah yeah that's what they were saying it's like easy to be anonymous it's easy to go in and out and you're like in a sea of people so you're not super easy to identify and on on the suicide front you're right people can like leave their homes and not have to worry this is this sucks but um
00:27:39
Speaker
They were saying similar things or suicide researchers were saying similar things like people would leave so that like their loved ones wouldn't have to find them, that they wouldn't make a mess in the home.
00:27:50
Speaker
Yeah, that is really shit like that.
00:27:55
Speaker
Anyways, so suicide researchers regard hotels and motels as lethal, quote-unquote, locations.
00:28:02
Speaker
People are over 19 times more likely to die by suicide in them, according to one study done in King County, Washington, which... It's where we live.
00:28:11
Speaker
It's where we live, and also King County has outrageously high rates of suicide.
00:28:16
Speaker
Dang.
00:28:17
Speaker
Anyways, so that's something to consider, too.
00:28:20
Speaker
And they also noted on this list, which we'll link,
00:28:24
Speaker
in our sources.
00:28:25
Speaker
They interviewed two people.
00:28:27
Speaker
They interviewed someone who had done crime scene and vet like cleanup.
00:28:30
Speaker
That was their job, which wild ass job.
00:28:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:33
Speaker
And then a desk manager, like a hotel desk manager.
00:28:37
Speaker
It's kind of wild.
00:28:37
Speaker
Both of them were in agreement like, yeah, that shit happens.
00:28:40
Speaker
So they've seen some shit.
00:28:41
Speaker
They said that unless you work at the Overlook Hotel winter shift, we wouldn't assume staffing in the front desk included frequent brushes with death and horrific mutilation.
00:28:50
Speaker
But if you ask Daniel, you'd be horribly wrong.
00:28:52
Speaker
He said, I've had employees discover bodies in rooms they were about to clean, and I've personally worked during multiple jumpings.
00:28:58
Speaker
We even had a woman die from falling down a laundry chute.
00:29:01
Speaker
Oh my god.
00:29:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:03
Speaker
So hotels are wild.
00:29:05
Speaker
Wait, Overlook Hotel, like, from The Shining?
00:29:08
Speaker
Yeah, well, they were saying, like, you would expect this maybe at a place like this, but you wouldn't expect it other places.
00:29:13
Speaker
Right, right.
00:29:15
Speaker
But you should.
00:29:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:16
Speaker
They even talk about how you might be able to tell someone died or was, like, you know.
Elisa Lam's Disappearance and Death
00:29:24
Speaker
There was a mess made in your room that, you know, a quick cleanup had to happen.
00:29:30
Speaker
It was like a little bit too much mess to just scrub it out.
00:29:35
Speaker
They asked the crime scene cleanup person.
00:29:39
Speaker
He said, look for mismatched carpet or anywhere.
00:29:42
Speaker
The carpet seems to have been replaced.
00:29:43
Speaker
Same thing with wallpapers and blinds.
00:29:46
Speaker
Sometimes you get lucky and things are replaced because of feces, but it's usually because someone bled on it.
00:29:52
Speaker
You get lucky.
00:29:54
Speaker
Like, Cillian's seen it all.
00:29:55
Speaker
He's not fazed.
00:29:57
Speaker
What about vomit from parties?
00:29:59
Speaker
I feel like that also.
00:30:01
Speaker
Vomit, I guess, is lucky too in comparison.
00:30:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:05
Speaker
Party is definitely better than murder.
00:30:08
Speaker
Cillian says he was once in a room in Las Vegas, and when he noticed the carpet had clearly been replaced, he said, I didn't think anything of it until I looked up and I saw a huge blood stain on the ceiling.
00:30:18
Speaker
It had been sort of cleaned, but you could see the pattern on the wallpaper where the blood had run down.
00:30:22
Speaker
Somebody must have been sitting on the bed and put a gun under it.
00:30:25
Speaker
Oh my god.
00:30:27
Speaker
You can fill in that blank.
00:30:28
Speaker
Yep.
00:30:29
Speaker
Yep.
00:30:30
Speaker
And when they tried to tell, like, ask Las Vegas police about it, they were like, someone probably threw food up there.
00:30:36
Speaker
And Cillian was like, as if I've not seen, like, a thousand crime scenes.
00:30:41
Speaker
I know what I'm talking about.
00:30:43
Speaker
So that is wild.
00:30:45
Speaker
And they also talk about how somebody chopped off his penis.
00:30:48
Speaker
Anyway...
00:30:50
Speaker
In a hotel?
00:30:51
Speaker
In a hotel.
00:30:52
Speaker
Oh my god.
00:30:52
Speaker
So like hotels are just like hotbeds of wild ass shit happening for a lot of different reasons probably.
00:31:00
Speaker
But this all compounded together I guess just framing.
00:31:04
Speaker
Bringing it back.
00:31:05
Speaker
Bringing it back to a hotel, the Cecil Hotel.
00:31:09
Speaker
Even knowing all of this, all of these things considered people who've done like extensive research on this insist that the Cecil Hotel is like an anomaly that
00:31:20
Speaker
extra bad things happen there, which I'll get into later, but we're gonna come back to Elisa's story so we don't lose momentum on that.
00:31:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:29
Speaker
So where we left off is that she checked in to the Hotel Cecil as part of her trip on the 29th of January 2013.
00:31:36
Speaker
She was last seen alive on the 31st of January 2013 at a bookstore and
00:31:49
Speaker
And because her parents didn't hear from her on the day she was meant to check out of the hotel, which was February 1st, and also didn't hear from her the day before, they contacted the LAPD who searched the premises for her and her room, didn't find her, and so she was a missing person, basically.
00:32:08
Speaker
The CECL also filed a report on the 1st of February because she never checked out either.
00:32:14
Speaker
So on the 6th of February, a report was released about her suspicious disappearance, and the LAPD even held a press conference because they took it pretty seriously on the 7th of February with, like, all of her descriptions and that she was missing.
00:32:29
Speaker
About a week later, the LAPD released a surveillance video, which many of you might have seen because it kind of went viral on the Internet, and it was the last video where she was seen alive.
00:32:42
Speaker
in the Hotel Cecil.
00:32:43
Speaker
Now, I totally recommend everyone watch this video, but just a warning that it's pretty creepy.
00:32:49
Speaker
Probably if you Google, and we'll put it in our sources too, but if you Google Elisa Lam elevator video, you should be able to find it.
00:32:56
Speaker
I'm going to describe it a little bit.
00:32:58
Speaker
Basically, it shows Elisa entering one of the hotel elevators on the day of her disappearance and acting very, very strangely.
00:33:08
Speaker
Some notable things that she does in the video that are weird is jumping in and out of the elevator, pushing all of the buttons for the floors.
00:33:19
Speaker
There were 14 floors in the building, hiding in parts of the elevator,
00:33:25
Speaker
looking in and out of the elevator as though she was looking for someone or trying to hide from someone.
00:33:32
Speaker
At one point she steps out and makes like weird box step type movements and also weird movements with her hands and her arms.
00:33:44
Speaker
Another thing that creeped me out about the video a lot is that even though she's like pressing all of these buttons to go to different floors,
00:33:52
Speaker
walking in and out of the elevator, the door remains open for most of the video until the end where she actually exits and the elevator is empty and then finally the elevator door closes.
00:34:05
Speaker
But the video is literally like four minutes and the elevator door is open the whole time.
00:34:09
Speaker
It is so freaky.
00:34:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:10
Speaker
This video really creeps me out.
00:34:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:13
Speaker
I've watched it so many times now, and I really wish that there was like some kind of audio because I feel like that would provide some more information, but there's no audio.
00:34:21
Speaker
So that was released on the 13th of February to the public to, I guess, show like this is what she looks like.
00:34:28
Speaker
This is the person that we're looking for.
00:34:30
Speaker
If anyone's seen her, please let us know.
00:34:34
Speaker
So bringing it back, we all know that her body was found, and that happened six days later on the 19th of February.
00:34:41
Speaker
That's when the maintenance worker went up after the complaints happened and found Elisa's body in the water tank.
00:34:49
Speaker
So at that point, she was in that water tank for three weeks, and her body was just decomposing in this water tank for three weeks, and people in the hotel were...
00:35:01
Speaker
using this water to drink this water, showering in this water, using it for everything, which is just really fucking wild.
00:35:10
Speaker
As I said, her body was naked, but her clothes and her shoes were also in the tank, and they were the same ones she was wearing in the video.
00:35:19
Speaker
So like I said, her death was ruled
00:35:22
Speaker
an accidental drowning, but everything around it is very suspicious.
00:35:26
Speaker
So I'm going to go into some theories about what happened.
00:35:30
Speaker
So the first theory, which is the theory that the LAPD subscribes to and have closed the case based on, is the accidental drowning theory.
00:35:42
Speaker
So basically, as I mentioned before, Elisa was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder, and she basically is suspected to have been in a manic episode during the video.
00:35:54
Speaker
And I did read some posts on Reddit in the rElisaLam.com.
00:36:01
Speaker
subreddit from people who have bipolar disorder and they agree that it does look like she's having a manic episode.
00:36:08
Speaker
She seems very high energy.
00:36:10
Speaker
She looks like she's talking and one of the symptoms of being in a manic episode is that you have pressure to speak.
00:36:16
Speaker
It also looks like she's interacting with someone which might be an indication that she's having visual or auditory hallucinations such as a sign of psychosis.
00:36:27
Speaker
I watched a video by Med Bros on YouTube covered by a student doctor.
00:36:32
Speaker
Med Bros.
00:36:33
Speaker
Med Bros, yep.
00:36:36
Speaker
Where they kind of just like went into her autopsy and toxicology report.
00:36:42
Speaker
And basically she was on a bunch of different meds were found in her system when they did the toxicology report.
00:36:51
Speaker
What was found was Advil,
Theories on Elisa's Death
00:36:53
Speaker
which is pretty normal to find.
00:36:56
Speaker
dexedrine, spansule, which is stimulant, lamotrigine, which is a mood stabilizer, quetiapine, which is, so these are the meds that she was on, quetiapine, which is an atypical antipsychotic, flu medication, a serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, which is an antidepressant,
00:37:18
Speaker
and Welbutrin, which is an atypical antidepressant.
00:37:22
Speaker
So I think it's pretty common for people with bipolar to be prescribed these medications.
00:37:28
Speaker
When you have bipolar, basically, you face in and out of periods of mania and periods of depression.
00:37:34
Speaker
And what mood stabilizers do is reduce the intensity of both of those periods.
00:37:39
Speaker
So if you think of it like waves, it reduces how intense the waves are.
00:37:46
Speaker
And the antidepressants help with the depressive episodes and the antipsychotics help with the manic episodes.
00:37:54
Speaker
However, for people who have bipolar disorder, antidepressants can push someone into mania if they're not taking their antipsychotics properly.
00:38:03
Speaker
And from her talk, The Collegary Report, it seems like she wasn't taking her meds in the way that she was supposed to be taking them.
00:38:11
Speaker
And she hadn't taken her meds.
00:38:13
Speaker
antipsychotics in a couple of days, but was taking her antidepressants.
00:38:18
Speaker
And so it is, she was at an increased risk of falling into a manic episode.
00:38:24
Speaker
And severe mania can include hallucinations, paranoia, and psychomotor agitation, which is just like movements that seem kind of odd.
00:38:35
Speaker
And so like her hands moving
00:38:37
Speaker
strangely in the elevator video could be an indication of psychomotor agitation.
00:38:43
Speaker
There's definitely evidence in favor of the fact that she was experiencing a manic episode based on the fact that she wasn't taking her antipsychotics.
00:38:54
Speaker
And this video shows some indications of being in a manic episode.
00:38:59
Speaker
There also weren't any other recreational drugs found in her system and very minimal amounts of
00:39:04
Speaker
alcohol.
00:39:05
Speaker
Some blog posts also that I found on her blog from the 29th of January, which were not things that she posted on her Tumblr, but things that she reblogged were, my laptop screen is brighter than my future.
00:39:18
Speaker
And also, I wish I could put part of my brain into a taped shut box and shove it into the back of my closet for the night.
00:39:28
Speaker
So like,
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, she might have been experiencing kind of a hard time mentally, but I've reblogged things like this too because I also have depression.
00:39:42
Speaker
And here are some things that don't really fit with this theory.
00:39:46
Speaker
If this theory were true, it means that in her manic episode, she went to the roof, took off all of her clothes, jumped into the water tank, and drowned.
00:39:56
Speaker
And that just seems like a really far-fetched thing for me to happen.
00:40:02
Speaker
Like, I think it's kind of ableist to say that just because someone is experiencing a manic episode or has a mental illness, that, yeah, they probably went to the roof of the hotel they were staying on while they were on vacation, jumped into a water tank, and died.
00:40:19
Speaker
I feel like it's a really far reach for that to happen.
00:40:23
Speaker
And she would have had to close the door behind her, right?
00:40:26
Speaker
And the lid of the water tank was 20 pounds and she's like a tiny girl.
00:40:32
Speaker
Right, and they found the clothes inside.
00:40:35
Speaker
They found the clothes inside the water tank.
00:40:37
Speaker
And so for one, there is no evidence prior to show that Elisa's manic episodes ever resulted in anything like this.
00:40:47
Speaker
It has never before happened in her life.
00:40:49
Speaker
She has not experienced psychosis in this way.
00:40:53
Speaker
She was more inclined to experiencing pain.
00:40:55
Speaker
deep depression and not like engaging in like life endangering behaviors.
00:41:02
Speaker
As I mentioned also like she would have to have be in such a manic episode that somehow she got the strength to lift a heavy steel lid of a water tank and then close it shut behind her and like on one of the documentaries I watched it was just like this seems just like too calculated
00:41:20
Speaker
for someone who's experiencing a manic episode.
00:41:23
Speaker
And also if you like see her in the video, like it just doesn't seem like she's okay.
00:41:28
Speaker
The clothes as well were covered in a sand-like particulate, which seemed like dust or like sand that was on the roof.
00:41:37
Speaker
So what that would have to mean is that she went to the roof, took her clothes off and shoes off while she was still on the roof.
00:41:43
Speaker
They like fell on the floor, collected some sand,
00:41:46
Speaker
and then she carried her clothes up with her and then jumped into the water tank and dropped her clothes in there too.
00:41:54
Speaker
It's very convoluted.
00:41:56
Speaker
It just doesn't make much sense at all.
00:42:00
Speaker
And another thing is that the hinged, so the tank when they found her was half to a three quarters full, so she wouldn't even have been able to reach it from the inside to pull it shut based on how deep in the tank she would have been.
00:42:15
Speaker
Yeah, this doesn't check out at all.
00:42:17
Speaker
Even when it came out, I was like, that's suspicious.
00:42:21
Speaker
How are you going to rule it an accident?
00:42:24
Speaker
And just use mental illness as a really convenient way.
00:42:27
Speaker
Remember the how can you rule it an accident thing because that comes back later.
00:42:33
Speaker
Her family also said she had no history of suicidal ideation or attempts.
00:42:37
Speaker
And sure, maybe she didn't share that with her family, but they were clearly aware of her mental health issues.
00:42:45
Speaker
Some other stuff doesn't really match with her doing this on purpose, which is the day before she went missing, she went to a bookstore and interacted with the bookstore manager, Katie Orphan.
00:42:58
Speaker
And Katie Orphan remembers interacting with her and her coming by the bookstore to buy books and records.
00:43:04
Speaker
And Elisa expressed worry about being able to fit all of these gifts that she was getting for her friends and
00:43:11
Speaker
parents in her bag so it seemed like she had plans to return home because she was going to buy stuff for her friends and family so like this is the theory that is supposedly what happened but I don't buy it I don't buy it I do think that it is possible that she was experiencing a manic episode but I don't think that that is the reason that she died right
00:43:40
Speaker
So let's go on to the next theory.
00:43:42
Speaker
The next theory is just kind of weird.
00:43:47
Speaker
It's kind of a little bit all over the place, but just, I guess, try to keep with me.
00:43:52
Speaker
Basically, as Jaina said, the Cecil Hotel is just a very dark place, which has a very dark history, and a lot of people are aware of that.
00:44:02
Speaker
People who are definitely aware of that are occultists,
00:44:06
Speaker
And another theory was that she was lured to the hotel by either a cult or a government agency.
00:44:14
Speaker
And this is based on some circumstantial evidence.
00:44:17
Speaker
Basically, one of the theories is that she was picked as
00:44:23
Speaker
some kind of test subject for this new invisibility cloak technology.
00:44:28
Speaker
What the hell?
00:44:29
Speaker
Wait, what's the circumstantial evidence here?
00:44:32
Speaker
The circumstantial evidence here is that she tweeted about a Canadian company that was testing an invisibility cloak very around the same time that this happened.
00:44:44
Speaker
And in the video, because it looks like she's interacting with someone,
00:44:48
Speaker
This theory suggests that there was a person there.
00:44:51
Speaker
They were just wearing the invisibility cloak and she was kind of playing around with them while that was happening.
00:44:57
Speaker
And yeah, there was also like this agency that was kind of suspicious that had their office in the hotel at the time.
00:45:06
Speaker
It was called the Invisible Light Agency.
00:45:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:11
Speaker
And then another kind of theory that's related to this was this cult lured her to the hotel for like some kind of bio weapon experiment.
00:45:23
Speaker
And this is just like a lot of weird synchronicity, but basically like the week after Elisa was found or like around the same time Elisa was found, the largest outbreak of tuberculosis
00:45:38
Speaker
happened on Skid Row, which is the area that Shanna mentioned was around the Cecil Hotel, which is also the area, I think, of one of the largest unhoused populations in the United States.
00:45:51
Speaker
And there was just a huge TB outbreak that happened at the time.
00:45:55
Speaker
And how people link that back to Elisa Lam is that this is really weird, is the name of the test used to diagnose tuberculosis is called
00:46:06
Speaker
LAM Elisa?
00:46:09
Speaker
Enzymed link immunosorbent assay.
00:46:12
Speaker
It was a test that was created before her death.
00:46:15
Speaker
So people theorized that she was chosen by this cult because of her name.
00:46:22
Speaker
There was also some weird culty graffiti on the water tank that looked kind of new when she was found.
00:46:30
Speaker
And the same graffiti was found somewhere else on the roof as well.
00:46:34
Speaker
And it said,
00:46:35
Speaker
Fecto kunt her summa, which was in piggish Latin is what they said it was.
00:46:41
Speaker
And piggish Latin is basically a perverted form of Latin.
00:46:46
Speaker
And what it meant was, I am finished with her.
00:46:51
Speaker
And occultists use perverted Latin a lot.
00:46:55
Speaker
So it's suspected that this was a mark of their actions.
00:47:00
Speaker
So those are kind of like the circumstantial evidence that make it seem like this theory might be real.
00:47:04
Speaker
I think it's just a lot of like weird synchronicities and the fact that the hotel is a place that probably a lot of cultists did go to.
00:47:14
Speaker
One thing is the invisible light agency, which is somehow associated with this theory, is
00:47:19
Speaker
was not a secretive agency at all.
00:47:20
Speaker
They just were building a VR visual effects project at the time, and it's also common for offices to be held in hotels because they're a lot cheaper than renting an actual office space.
00:47:34
Speaker
The tweet about the invisibility cloak, she was a fan of Harry Potter.
00:47:37
Speaker
I read earlier one of her posts was titled Expecto Patronum, so I don't think it's that weird that she retweeted something about an invisibility cloak.
00:47:47
Speaker
Yes, the TV test name thing is super weird and pretty much the only thing that makes me even consider this theory as real, but it's probably also a coincidence, you know, because Elisa is a pretty common name.
00:48:02
Speaker
Lam is also a pretty common name.
00:48:03
Speaker
So, yeah, it's really fucking weird that the largest TV outbreak in a decade happened right after she was staying there, but...
00:48:16
Speaker
No, like, I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, Shayna.
00:48:21
Speaker
And the internet sleuths really do, I mean, just wow.
00:48:26
Speaker
Did you see the theory that there was, that people are saying it's related to the smiley face murders?
00:48:31
Speaker
No, I didn't.
00:48:32
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:48:32
Speaker
I ran into this, but I was like, I'm not gonna go too deep into it because I want it to be surprised if Akshi is going to be sharing about this, but...
00:48:38
Speaker
And I don't know a lot about the Smiley Face murders, but apparently it was... Crime Junkie has a good episode on Smiley Face killer conspiracy.
00:48:45
Speaker
Well, maybe I will check that out.
00:48:48
Speaker
But they were saying that because they found some graffiti on the water tank and it was happening around the same time that there was a bunch of young boys who were going missing and found in water tanks...
00:48:59
Speaker
That it was somehow related to the smiley face murders, especially because it's not just, they don't think it's just one person who was doing it.
00:49:05
Speaker
It's like a bunch of people.
00:49:07
Speaker
So I was like, that's interesting.
00:49:09
Speaker
Because I do think she was fucking killed.
00:49:11
Speaker
I do think she was killed also.
00:49:12
Speaker
I think she was killed.
00:49:13
Speaker
I will share what I think happened at the end.
00:49:18
Speaker
The smiley face killer theory is is is cool.
00:49:22
Speaker
I don't really see how it relates to this case, because it seems like all the other people involved in it, all the other victims involved in it are like.
00:49:30
Speaker
young adult males who are kind of like party bros.
00:49:35
Speaker
Like those are the stories that I hear.
00:49:36
Speaker
It's basically like people going missing when they're like out on nights out, like when they're in situations that are, I guess, make them more vulnerable to like being kidnapped or harmed because they're intoxicated.
00:49:48
Speaker
I also don't really believe in the smiley face killer theory as a whole because it has a lot of holes in it.
00:49:55
Speaker
And it's suspected that some of the people who went missing attributed to the smiley face killer are some of Israel Keyes' victims, which I think is much more likely to be true than like this group of smiley face murderers.
00:50:11
Speaker
Maybe a copycat.
00:50:12
Speaker
Huh?
00:50:12
Speaker
We know copycat killers.
00:50:14
Speaker
Yeah, we do know copycat killers are a thing.
00:50:19
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm going to go on to the next theory, which is also a supernatural theory.
00:50:27
Speaker
And so this theory is that Elisa was playing...
00:50:30
Speaker
this game called The Elevator Game, which I actually found out about in like 2017.
00:50:40
Speaker
And when I first found out about this game, it's kind of like Bloody Mary in terms of like, it's a game where you're trying to either
00:50:49
Speaker
Like Bloody Mary, you're trying to get Bloody Mary to come to the mirror.
00:50:52
Speaker
And there's a ton of different games like that where you're trying to summon stuff or try to go into like a different dimension.
00:50:59
Speaker
And the elevator game, it's a game that originated from Korea.
00:51:05
Speaker
And basically, it's a game that you have to play in a building that has at least 10 stories.
00:51:10
Speaker
And if you have to play it by yourself, and I'm going to read a little bit about it from this blog called scarymommy.com.
00:51:20
Speaker
Scary mommy.
00:51:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:24
Speaker
So basically, what's needed to play is one player and a 10 story building.
00:51:32
Speaker
And the point of the game is to get yourself to another world.
00:51:37
Speaker
And the rules are really complicated where you're like, oh, you have to press this floor first and then a different floor and then a different floor.
00:51:44
Speaker
So I'm not going to go into all of the rules.
00:51:46
Speaker
And you can look it up yourself.
00:51:48
Speaker
But basically, some things that happen during this game are...
00:51:56
Speaker
If you follow the rules carefully, you might meet a woman who will enter the elevator at one point during the game who you should
00:52:03
Speaker
Apparently ignore at all costs and if you interact with her at all, like basically you're fucked for the rest of your life.
00:52:11
Speaker
And if you follow the rules correctly and you get off at the 10th floor, you might be in another world.
00:52:17
Speaker
And the way that you'll know you're in the other world is that it'll be completely dark and the only thing you'll see is a window at the end of the hallway and there will be a red cross that
00:52:28
Speaker
in the distance that you can see.
00:52:30
Speaker
And then there's like these specific rules that you basically have to follow to get back into your world.
00:52:35
Speaker
I think it's a little bit racist for people to attribute Elisa playing this game because I think they're like, oh, this game originated in Korea and she's a Chinese Canadian.
00:52:49
Speaker
So she must have been playing this game.
00:52:52
Speaker
They didn't even know she was Chinese.
00:52:54
Speaker
Yeah, literally.
00:52:54
Speaker
They're just like all East Asians are the same.
00:52:56
Speaker
Exactly, exactly.
00:52:58
Speaker
We're not.
00:52:59
Speaker
So the only things that maybe...
00:53:02
Speaker
So she's hiding, pressing a lot of buttons.
00:53:06
Speaker
They theorize, oh, maybe she's trying to hide from this creepy lady.
00:53:10
Speaker
But those are basically only circumstantial evidence that match this theory.
00:53:15
Speaker
She was also on the 14th floor.
00:53:17
Speaker
She should have been on the 10th floor.
00:53:19
Speaker
None of the steps in the game involve a 14th floor.
00:53:22
Speaker
So how does that make any sense?
00:53:25
Speaker
Doesn't really make that much sense.
00:53:27
Speaker
Weirdly, though, there are a couple of similar cases where in Kuala Lumpur, a 43-year-old man was found in a water tank and the water tank was locked.
00:53:39
Speaker
And then a 30-year-old maid in Singapore was also found.
00:53:43
Speaker
in a water tank.
00:53:45
Speaker
And another weird connection is that the movie Dark Water, which is a horror movie from the early 2000s, also is a story about someone who moves into a building and the water pressure is like weird and then they find that there's a woman who died in the water tank.
00:54:02
Speaker
So and then the theory is like, oh, are all of these connected to the elevator game?
00:54:08
Speaker
But yeah, the elevator game is definitely like very creepy.
00:54:13
Speaker
And you should totally look into it if you like creepy games like that.
00:54:17
Speaker
But it's another theory that I find is a fun theory, but doesn't have that much evidence to back it up at all.
00:54:30
Speaker
What do you think, Shayna?
00:54:32
Speaker
What do I think?
00:54:34
Speaker
It's interesting to consider, but, you know.
00:54:39
Speaker
Doesn't seem highly likely.
00:54:41
Speaker
Not highly likely.
00:54:41
Speaker
No.
00:54:42
Speaker
It's very weird that it's a phenomenon that people get found in water tanks, though.
00:54:46
Speaker
What the fuck's that about?
00:54:47
Speaker
Yeah, and then what you just said, too, about...
00:54:51
Speaker
who getting found in a water tank?
00:54:54
Speaker
The smiley face.
00:54:56
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't know that.
00:54:57
Speaker
That is pretty weird, too.
00:54:59
Speaker
Yeah, it is a very weird phenomenon.
00:55:02
Speaker
I guess people trying to get rid of evidence somehow.
00:55:05
Speaker
I don't know why they don't think someone's going to realize water's not working right.
00:55:09
Speaker
Yeah, definitely you're going to get found out about that.
00:55:12
Speaker
What the fuck?
00:55:13
Speaker
Maybe it will take a little while.
00:55:15
Speaker
Sure.
Cover-Up Suspicions
00:55:17
Speaker
Anyway, I'm going to go on to the last two theories, which...
00:55:21
Speaker
This next theory is basically the one that I really think is connected and is that there was a cover-up.
00:55:29
Speaker
Someone murdered her in the hotel and it was covered up both by people in the hotel in collaboration with the LAPD and other people involved in investigating her case.
00:55:40
Speaker
So some evidence to back this theory up is the video footage is fucked up.
00:55:48
Speaker
first of all, when it was released, it was released at 20 frame rates per second when the actual video was at 15 frame rates.
00:55:57
Speaker
So it's a slowed down video for some reason.
00:56:02
Speaker
I watched like how it should actually look and it still looks like she's like being strange, but I think it makes it look stranger in the version that
00:56:11
Speaker
was shown to the public at first.
00:56:13
Speaker
Like it just looks a little weirder than it does in the original speed of the video.
00:56:19
Speaker
I see.
00:56:20
Speaker
That isn't that weird.
00:56:22
Speaker
What is weird is that from 24.04 minutes or the time stamp is 24.04 to 25.05, there's one minute of elevator footage missing.
00:56:38
Speaker
So maybe there was someone in that footage that they didn't want to be seen on there, but it's deliberately been corrupted to conceal this one minute.
00:56:47
Speaker
And from 25.05 to 25.15, there's a second smaller series of jumps that are also missing from the video.
00:56:56
Speaker
So that's very suspicious that parts of that video have been cut out.
00:57:00
Speaker
Like, why?
00:57:01
Speaker
Yeah, why?
00:57:03
Speaker
I don't see any reason for that to happen other than the fact that, like, either a hotel employee or someone else like that was in that video, and they didn't want to show that because they wanted people to believe this theory that, oh, it was her bipolar, and that's what led her to act all weird.
00:57:20
Speaker
I hate that.
00:57:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:23
Speaker
More stuff.
00:57:24
Speaker
So a book was written called Gone at Midnight that went...
00:57:29
Speaker
into this case and interviewed a ton of people.
00:57:33
Speaker
And I haven't read this book, but I did read some summaries of it on Reddit.
00:57:41
Speaker
So on the Elisa Lam subreddit, Sandunes18 did a good summary of stuff from the book that relate to this coverup theory.
00:57:53
Speaker
One, although the autopsy did not show
00:57:56
Speaker
any external physical trauma or sexual trauma.
00:58:01
Speaker
The LAPD also did not process a rape kit for her, so we have no idea whether she was sexually assaulted.
00:58:10
Speaker
They did not test for date rape drugs in the toxicology report.
00:58:15
Speaker
The medical examiner that released Lam's autopsy changed the cause of death a couple times.
00:58:23
Speaker
It was first
00:58:25
Speaker
And accidental drowning.
00:58:26
Speaker
Then it was changed to undetermined.
00:58:29
Speaker
And then it was changed back to accidental drowning.
00:58:33
Speaker
So weird.
00:58:35
Speaker
The medical examiner that released the autopsy has also been sued for falsifying information in another autopsy and misclassifying a death.
00:58:45
Speaker
So has some precedent for being sketchy as fuck.
00:58:50
Speaker
A second opinion on the autopsy said that there's not sufficient testing that's been done and that there were no signs of drowning and she most likely died before being put in the tank.
00:59:01
Speaker
What?
00:59:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:05
Speaker
Okay.
00:59:06
Speaker
See?
00:59:07
Speaker
Some content warnings coming up regarding sexual assault, but there's strong evidence of...
00:59:15
Speaker
hotel staff at the Cecil sexually assaulting women that are staying in the hotel.
00:59:22
Speaker
At the time, there were three registered sex offenders living or staying in the hotel while she was there.
00:59:31
Speaker
It was also said that there was
00:59:39
Speaker
Evidence that in the past, hotel employees would use the master key to sneak into guests' rooms and rape them.
00:59:53
Speaker
So that's fucked up.
00:59:55
Speaker
And it's really not unbelievable, based on knowing all that information, that someone in the hotel did something to her.
01:00:02
Speaker
Someone else said about the Hotel Cecil that if you stayed at the Hotel Cecil for one month,
01:00:08
Speaker
you would probably experience an attempted rape, assault, and you might have criminal charges put on you if you mixed with the wrong sorts of people that were staying there.
01:00:18
Speaker
Around the same time that she stayed there, the Hotel Cecil was also in the middle of trying to rebrand the hotel because...
01:00:27
Speaker
since the 1920s, which is when the hotel opened, a lot of fucked up stuff has happened there.
01:00:32
Speaker
So the hotel just did not have a great reputation at that point.
01:00:36
Speaker
And they were trying to make it the kind of hotel that was more upscale, more expensive, so that more people would stay there.
01:00:46
Speaker
But there was a lot of long-term residents who were lower income who stayed in the hotel.
01:00:52
Speaker
And they were worried that
01:00:56
Speaker
If the hotel's prices went up, they would no longer be able to live there.
01:01:00
Speaker
So there's a theory that disgruntled residents wanted something bad to happen so that the reputation of the hotel would be ruined even further.
01:01:11
Speaker
And the cover-up they wanted to do because, I don't know, they wanted it to seem like it wasn't the hotel's fault that this happened.
01:01:20
Speaker
Some more stuff.
01:01:21
Speaker
The LAPD has a...
01:01:24
Speaker
What the fuck?
01:01:24
Speaker
Which is fucking weird.
01:01:42
Speaker
So while they were getting the water tank fixed, a lot of people left the hotel, but some people decided to stay even though the water was bad, so that was kind of suspicious.
01:01:56
Speaker
Eleven rooms remained filled during that time, and those who willingly stayed in the hotel were informed of the health risks and provided information.
01:02:05
Speaker
bottled water.
01:02:06
Speaker
So definitely this is a hotel that had a very bad reputation and was a dangerous place and poorly maintained.
01:02:18
Speaker
The autopsy was also not released to the public until June 1st.
01:02:22
Speaker
which is kind of suspicious.
01:02:24
Speaker
And another thing that I forgot to mention was in the autopsy, but they clearly didn't look into it at all, but she had blood pooling in her rectum.
01:02:34
Speaker
And they never looked into why that happened.
01:02:39
Speaker
And I think if they had done a rape kit, maybe they would have found more information.
01:02:45
Speaker
Isn't it pretty standard to do that as like,
01:02:50
Speaker
part of an autopsy especially when it's like a young girl who was found dead yeah in like a sketchy ass hotel that has a history of um guests being sexually assaulted and raped and yeah so kind of fucked up yeah
01:03:10
Speaker
So that's the theory about the cover-up.
01:03:13
Speaker
And this last theory is kind of also related, and it's just about the hotel being cursed.
01:03:21
Speaker
Basically, Shana will probably get into this later, but so she was in the elevator on the 14th floor when this video was found, and Richard Ramirez, the original night stalker, who is a serial killer, lived on the 14th floor of the hotel,
01:03:39
Speaker
while he was there.
01:03:40
Speaker
He was also a Satanist who was suspected to have conducted rituals on the roof of the building.
01:03:47
Speaker
And so one of the theories was like, oh, it was like Richard Ramirez's ghost because there's like these, if you look at the video, there's also definitely some weird shadows if you really look hard.
01:03:56
Speaker
So you're like, is there a ghost in the video?
01:03:58
Speaker
But Richard Ramirez was still alive at the time of her death.
01:04:01
Speaker
He died on the 7th of June of that same year.
01:04:03
Speaker
Come on, the internet's loose.
01:04:05
Speaker
So it doesn't really track.
01:04:06
Speaker
Um,
01:04:08
Speaker
But also in 2009, there were six suicides in four months in the area that the Cecil Hotel is in.
01:04:19
Speaker
And like Shana said, there's so many murders and suicides that have occurred at the Hotel Cecil.
01:04:25
Speaker
And the hotel is always filled with people who are passing in and out.
01:04:29
Speaker
And the FBI suspects 25 to 50 serial killers being active in the U.S. at any one time.
01:04:38
Speaker
And the Cecil Hotel is definitely a place that serial killers might go because Richard Ramirez and someone else who is a serial killer used to live there.
01:04:46
Speaker
And it could have been like a nomadic serial killer who was just there and used it as like kind of like a crime of opportunity.
01:04:55
Speaker
Maybe took advantage of the fact that she was experiencing a manic episode.
01:05:00
Speaker
And by putting the body in the water tank, he could move on way before her body was discovered and they would have no idea.
01:05:08
Speaker
And a lot of people who stayed at the Cecil did not use their real names.
01:05:13
Speaker
And so that would be really hard to track.
01:05:15
Speaker
There was also a second piece of surveillance video that was never released to the public, but the police saw it.
01:05:22
Speaker
And it showed Elisa with two mysterious men who she came into the hotel with
01:05:27
Speaker
They gave her a box and then she went up the elevator and they never saw them again.
01:05:31
Speaker
So I have no idea who these two men were.
01:05:35
Speaker
Was never looked into.
01:05:36
Speaker
Or maybe it was.
01:05:37
Speaker
But like, yeah, that was also something that happened.
01:05:41
Speaker
To get to the roof, you would have to take the elevator up to the 15th floor, walk up the stairs to the roof.
01:05:48
Speaker
climb onto the platform where the water tanks were, climb another ladder to get on top of the tank.
01:05:53
Speaker
And the hotel staff potentially said that, like, oh, that would, like, set off some alarms.
01:06:01
Speaker
So her parents actually filed a wrongful death suit against the Cecil.
01:06:06
Speaker
And the hotel fought back saying that there was no way that someone should be able to get into those water tanks.
01:06:12
Speaker
But actually, this is not true at all.
01:06:16
Speaker
I think about a couple months after Elisa's body was found, a Chinese YouTuber actually went to the Hotel Cecil.
01:06:28
Speaker
and attempted to get up to the roof.
01:06:30
Speaker
It was very easy for them to do so, and no alarms went off.
01:06:36
Speaker
It was very easily accessible, and some of the water tank lids were also open when they were up there.
01:06:41
Speaker
So it would have been pretty easy for either a hotel staff member or someone who was staying there to just go up there.
01:06:51
Speaker
I definitely think that Elisa was...
01:06:55
Speaker
killed and was a victim of foul play.
01:06:59
Speaker
I think that she was experiencing a manic episode probably because she wasn't taking her meds properly and that maybe she was targeted by either a hotel staff member or a guest there.
Personal Reflections and Real-Life Parallels
01:07:15
Speaker
Maybe that was a person that she was hiding from in the video.
01:07:18
Speaker
The only way that I can think of the elevator door staying open for that long is someone
01:07:23
Speaker
holding it open and it definitely looks like she is like stressed out and interacting with someone who's not in the frame of the video and looks like she's scared and hiding from someone maybe trying to get away from them.
01:07:35
Speaker
I think that's really suspicious and I really think that she was like murdered.
01:07:40
Speaker
and put in this tank and that people in the hotel and the LAPD helped to cover it up.
01:07:46
Speaker
They changed the name of the hotel after this happened to the Stay on Main Hotel.
01:07:50
Speaker
Last thing that I will say about the Cecil Hotel before I kind of pass it back to you, Shana, is that from what I learned, there's 600 rooms in the hotel.
01:08:01
Speaker
And this is also from the Gone at Midnight book.
01:08:05
Speaker
Apparently, someone has died in each and every room of the Cecil Hotel.
01:08:11
Speaker
That's fucking wild.
01:08:13
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:08:15
Speaker
So, yeah, that is my theory of what happened.
01:08:18
Speaker
I think it's much more likely that she was, you know, targeted because she was, like, a young Asian woman staying there by herself.
01:08:27
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:08:29
Speaker
And I was feeling really weird while doing this research because I was like, this could have totally been me.
01:08:36
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:37
Speaker
You know, I was traveling by myself in somewhere that's not super safe for women.
01:08:44
Speaker
And while I was traveling, someone tried to roofie me.
01:08:47
Speaker
So like things like that happen all the fucking time.
01:08:51
Speaker
Just casual drop that story in there, actually.
01:08:56
Speaker
I saw them do it, so I got out of the place after.
01:08:59
Speaker
But like, you know, it's actually super common for people to get roofied.
01:09:07
Speaker
I've heard so many stories and it's wild to me that they did not check for date rape drugs either.
01:09:16
Speaker
for her or do a rape kit.
01:09:17
Speaker
Like that is so suspicious, so, so suspicious.
01:09:21
Speaker
And the autopsy guy being someone who was previously sued for falsifying information is also very, very, very suspicious.
01:09:31
Speaker
Wow.
01:09:32
Speaker
Wow, this makes me so upset.
01:09:34
Speaker
It's such an injustice.
01:09:35
Speaker
I remember watching that documentary we were watching and still to this, I'm still thinking about her parents and how worried they are.
01:09:44
Speaker
like this is the worst nightmare worst nightmare like coming from Canada to LA they know something's wrong I don't know their face is really haunting me yeah I saw so also like just doing all this research I saw so many pictures of Elisa with her friends and family like at her high school graduation and just like all these different just pictures of her like having a normal ass life yeah and you know the next place she was gonna go on this trip was Santa Cruz and
01:10:14
Speaker
Her, not only was her trip cut short, but her life was cut short also probably by some piece of trash, man.
01:10:21
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:22
Speaker
Like, I also feel like maybe they weren't trying to kill her, but maybe she tried to fight or something and it happened.
01:10:32
Speaker
Her body being naked, I think, contributes to that.
01:10:35
Speaker
And, like, the fact that her clothes had sand on it, like, maybe she fell on the roof.
01:10:39
Speaker
which is why like those sand particles from the roof were on her clothes.
01:10:45
Speaker
I also was thinking maybe she did go to the roof herself just to like take pictures of a cool view and like someone was up there.
01:10:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's also likely.
01:10:54
Speaker
Okay.
01:10:55
Speaker
Also, I was thinking when you were reading the blog post, how the blog post probably like
01:11:02
Speaker
made it easy for people to be like, oh, well, she was suffering from mental illness.
01:11:06
Speaker
Look, she was depressed.
01:11:07
Speaker
Look, she's been suicidal.
01:11:08
Speaker
And I'm just like, dude, so many people experience suicidal ideation, do not plan to, do not act on it, first of all.
01:11:17
Speaker
Just because someone is depressed doesn't mean that you can, like, make the jump that they would, like, do something wild like that.
01:11:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:11:24
Speaker
Like, this was not, yeah.
01:11:26
Speaker
It's also, like, if that was what she was trying to do, like,
01:11:31
Speaker
Jumping from the building is much easier than doing all this complicated thing of taking your clothes off and then climbing into this water tank that's really hard to access, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:11:43
Speaker
How would you even know that it was there?
01:11:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:47
Speaker
You wouldn't unless you went to the roof.
01:11:48
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:49
Speaker
Or like you worked there.
01:11:49
Speaker
Or that there was a way to get into it.
01:11:51
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:11:52
Speaker
How would you even know how to get to the roof?
01:11:55
Speaker
How the fuck?
01:11:56
Speaker
Just so many things.
01:11:56
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:58
Speaker
I mean, maybe you might make the connection that you could go...
01:12:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:02
Speaker
Up the stairs to get to the roof.
01:12:03
Speaker
But you had to get off on the 15th floor?
01:12:05
Speaker
There was no stairs?
01:12:07
Speaker
You had to get off at the 15th floor and then walk upstairs.
01:12:11
Speaker
And then there was like multiple ladders that you would have to climb to get to the top of the water tank as well.
01:12:17
Speaker
I just don't see her wandering like that since she was already feeling really wary about having, like being there.
01:12:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:23
Speaker
And they never uncovered her phone, right?
01:12:25
Speaker
Just gone.
01:12:26
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:12:28
Speaker
Okay, well.
01:12:29
Speaker
One last thing that's just kind of creepy is that her Tumblr continued to post things until December of that year, which is really weird, but also there's, like, a way to schedule posts on Tumblr, so she probably just, like,
01:12:47
Speaker
was reblogging stuff and scheduling them for later, which is why posts kept coming up until December of 2013.
01:12:52
Speaker
Yeah, that is still pretty haunting.
01:12:57
Speaker
That would wig me out.
01:12:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:12:58
Speaker
To be like a friend or family member and still see that things are posting.
01:13:02
Speaker
Especially if it's some dark shit.
01:13:05
Speaker
It was pictures of fashionable people wearing...
01:13:09
Speaker
cool clothes.
01:13:10
Speaker
Okay.
01:13:10
Speaker
So.
Elisa's Tumblr Activity Post-Death
01:13:11
Speaker
Not some dark shit.
01:13:12
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:13
Speaker
Before we jump in, I want to mention that like I was going through a bunch of YouTube comments because I think there's, there's always some fun stuff in there and I don't know that this is fun, but someone said that they stayed in Hotel Cecil or stay on Main.
01:13:29
Speaker
This is shortly after Elisa Lam's body was found.
01:13:33
Speaker
And there was a woman who was staying in the hotel.
01:13:35
Speaker
I think she was like a longer term person who stayed there.
01:13:39
Speaker
And she whispered in the elevator to the guy who was staying there, it had to be someone from inside the hotel.
01:13:45
Speaker
Oh my God.
01:13:46
Speaker
It just had to be.
01:13:47
Speaker
Because she probably knows what the hotel's like.
01:13:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:52
Speaker
But like, unprompted, no one was talking about this shit.
01:13:55
Speaker
She's just like, had to get it off her chest, I guess.
01:13:58
Speaker
Another thing that is suspicious is she, that kind of links to the fact that she was probably experiencing a manic episode, but it's also weird, is that she was initially staying in like, a shared room in the Cecil with two other people, and she was moved to a private room because she
01:14:17
Speaker
They complained that she was exhibiting odd behavior, but her roommates were never interviewed in the investigation, which seems weird.
01:14:27
Speaker
Like, why would you not interview, like, the people that she was staying with?
01:14:31
Speaker
Right.
01:14:32
Speaker
Like, the last people who saw her.
01:14:33
Speaker
Yeah.
Sinister Events at Cecil Hotel
01:14:34
Speaker
Yeah, and then she was moved to the 14th floor, which is a notorious floor, as you mentioned.
01:14:39
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:14:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's all weird.
01:14:42
Speaker
So the last theory is that the hotel is cursed, right?
01:14:46
Speaker
Yep.
01:14:48
Speaker
And you know, a lot of fucked up shit happens at this hotel, which I'm going to go into.
01:14:55
Speaker
There's been an inordinate amount of deaths at Cecil Hotel.
01:15:01
Speaker
The first documented one happened in November of 1931, which is just a few years after the hotel opened.
01:15:09
Speaker
Manhattan Beach resident W.K.
01:15:10
Speaker
Norton, 46, was found dead in his room after ingesting poison capsules.
01:15:16
Speaker
A week prior, he had checked into the Cecil under the name James Willis, so I don't think he wanted to be identified.
01:15:23
Speaker
That's like the first noted story of suicide in this hotel.
01:15:27
Speaker
When was that?
01:15:29
Speaker
This was in 1931.
01:15:30
Speaker
1931.
01:15:31
Speaker
So it was like four years after they did their grand opening.
01:15:35
Speaker
And this is like shortly after the Great Depression started.
01:15:39
Speaker
So it's like suggested that people started coming to Hotel Cecil because of its like...
01:15:45
Speaker
proximity to
01:15:47
Speaker
what's still to this day Skid Row.
01:15:50
Speaker
They said there was up to like 10,000 people who were just kind of living there on the streets or marginally housed with nowhere really to go and who were down on their luck and like lost a lot of shit.
01:16:04
Speaker
In September 1932, a year later, a maid found Benjamin Doddage, a 25-year-old dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
01:16:14
Speaker
Then again in 1934, a
01:16:17
Speaker
There was a Army Medical Corps Sergeant who was found dead in his room named Louis.
01:16:24
Speaker
He had slashed his own throat.
01:16:27
Speaker
With a razor.
01:16:28
Speaker
So very violent.
01:16:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:31
Speaker
In 1937, Grace Magro fell from a ninth-story window.
01:16:35
Speaker
Her fall was broken by telephone wires, which were wrapped around her body.
01:16:40
Speaker
She later died at a now-demolished hospital, and the police were unable to determine whether or not her death was a result of an accident or from suicide.
01:16:50
Speaker
That was...
01:16:52
Speaker
Not solved.
01:16:53
Speaker
A year later in January, a marine fireman, Roy, 35, jumped from Cecil's top floor and he was found on the skylight of a neighboring building.
01:17:04
Speaker
He had been staying at the Cecil for several weeks.
01:17:09
Speaker
In 1939, two years after that, Navy officer Irwin was found dead in his room after ingesting poison.
01:17:16
Speaker
Yikes.
01:17:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:18
Speaker
A year after that, a woman named Dorothy, 45, ingested poison while staying at the hotel and was reported...
01:17:26
Speaker
by the LA Times to be near death.
01:17:29
Speaker
No other reports were published about her condition, so we don't know if she survived that or not.
01:17:33
Speaker
Four years later, Dorothy, 19 years old, was sharing a room at the Cecil with a shoe salesman, Ben, who was 38.
01:17:40
Speaker
She was pregnant and apparently didn't know, or at least that's what they said, and went into labor.
01:17:47
Speaker
She went to the bathroom where she gave birth to a baby boy.
01:17:50
Speaker
Oh my God.
01:17:51
Speaker
Thinking the baby was dead, Purcell threw him out the window.
01:17:54
Speaker
Oh my God.
01:17:55
Speaker
Where he landed on the roof of an adjacent building.
01:18:02
Speaker
What the fuck?
01:18:03
Speaker
What the fuck?
01:18:04
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sorry.
01:18:05
Speaker
That was a shocking story that I just read.
01:18:07
Speaker
Like it was a laundry list.
01:18:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:18:09
Speaker
I'm sorry.
01:18:10
Speaker
It's okay.
01:18:14
Speaker
And then later in 1947, this is three years after that incident, Robert Smith, 35, died after jumping out of one of Cecil's seventh floor windows.
01:18:25
Speaker
So the jumping out the windows thing is...
01:18:28
Speaker
happening a lot.
01:18:29
Speaker
Yes.
01:18:31
Speaker
Which you would think that they would like start putting bars on there.
01:18:36
Speaker
Bars or something.
01:18:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:18:38
Speaker
But no.
01:18:39
Speaker
This is the 40s, I guess.
01:18:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:18:41
Speaker
And then on October 22nd, 1954, which is a few years after, San Francisco stationary firm employee Helen, 55, jumped from the window of her seventh floor room and landed on top of the Cecil's marquee.
01:18:56
Speaker
One week prior, she had registered at the hotel under the name Margaret Brown.
01:19:00
Speaker
On February 11, 1962, Julia, 50 years old, jumped from the window of an eighth-floor room and landed on a second-story interior light well.
01:19:10
Speaker
Among her possessions were a bus ticket from St.
01:19:12
Speaker
Louis, 59 cents and change, and an Illinois bank book showing a balance of $1,800, which...
01:19:19
Speaker
Seems like a lot for the time.
01:19:21
Speaker
Yeah, seems like a solid amount to have sitting in your bank account.
01:19:26
Speaker
And then again in 1962, a few months later, Pauline, 27, jumped from the window of her ninth floor room after an argument with her estranged husband, Dewey.
01:19:35
Speaker
The police said that Dewey had left the room prior to Otten's suicide.
01:19:38
Speaker
So...
01:19:41
Speaker
They questioned him and thought that he was connected and he had left before that had happened and so they cleared him.
01:19:47
Speaker
But what's wild, I mean, that's wild enough, but there were no witnesses.
01:19:52
Speaker
So there was nobody who could confirm or deny that.
01:19:55
Speaker
And to top that all off, when she jumped from the building, she landed on...
01:20:01
Speaker
a man, George Giannani, who was 65 years old and killed both of them instantly.
01:20:06
Speaker
Oh, I remember this from that documentary we were watching, how they were trying to figure out how this man was connected to her.
01:20:14
Speaker
That was the cheesiest shit.
01:20:16
Speaker
I really regret paying $5 to watch this.
01:20:19
Speaker
Yeah, we paid $5 to get a series about the Hotel Cecil.
01:20:25
Speaker
It was so cheesy.
01:20:26
Speaker
There was a lot of really dramatic reenactments.
01:20:29
Speaker
But that story really got me.
01:20:31
Speaker
I was like, oh my god, this poor man just went on a walk and just died.
01:20:36
Speaker
Somebody fell on him.
01:20:37
Speaker
Because someone fell on him.
01:20:38
Speaker
That's horrific.
01:20:41
Speaker
Horrific.
01:20:42
Speaker
So...
01:20:44
Speaker
Like clearly cursed land.
01:20:46
Speaker
Cursed land.
01:20:47
Speaker
Nobody even, you can't even walk around the Hotel Cecil.
01:20:50
Speaker
Somebody might fall out of the building and kill you.
01:20:52
Speaker
Yeah.
01:20:53
Speaker
Who thinks about that?
01:20:54
Speaker
Who can plan for that?
01:20:56
Speaker
No one.
01:20:56
Speaker
Nobody.
01:20:56
Speaker
No one can plan for that.
01:20:57
Speaker
Definitely George couldn't.
01:20:59
Speaker
No.
01:21:00
Speaker
And then two years later in 1964, a hotel worker discovered Pigeon Goldie Osgood, a retired telephone operator, dead in her room.
01:21:09
Speaker
This one was more noted, like there's more information on this because she was a really beloved and known person living in Hotel Cecil.
01:21:17
Speaker
Like everybody knew, everyone knew her and she liked to like, she was called Pigeon Goldie because she liked to feed the pigeons.
01:21:23
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:21:24
Speaker
And so they started noticing that she was like nowhere to be found.
01:21:28
Speaker
So they were wondering where she was.
01:21:29
Speaker
So they went to her room and they found that she, okay, well trigger warning, sexual assault.
01:21:35
Speaker
She had been raped, stabbed, and beaten in her room.
01:21:39
Speaker
And her room was ransacked.
01:21:40
Speaker
Oh my God.
01:21:41
Speaker
Yeah, horrifying.
01:21:43
Speaker
Rip pigeon goldie.
01:21:44
Speaker
And then they said that near her body was the Los Angeles Dodgers cap she always used to wear and a paper sack full of birdseed.
01:21:52
Speaker
Very sad.
01:21:52
Speaker
Very sad.
01:21:54
Speaker
Hours after her murder, Jock B. Erlinger, 29, was seen walking through Pershing Square, the area where Osgood fed birds in bloodstained clothing, and he was later arrested and charged for her murder.
01:22:07
Speaker
But then he was later cleared of the crime, and the murder still remains unsolved.
01:22:11
Speaker
Wow.
01:22:12
Speaker
How?
01:22:13
Speaker
How?
01:22:13
Speaker
Why?
01:22:15
Speaker
Some corrupt shit happening there.
01:22:17
Speaker
Some corrupt shit happening.
01:22:20
Speaker
The LAPD is involved in so much corrupt shit.
01:22:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:22:25
Speaker
So much.
01:22:25
Speaker
The fact that it was even a thing that tons of mostly sex workers were, like when their bodies were found, it was like, how was it classified?
01:22:38
Speaker
No person involved?
01:22:40
Speaker
Mostly they did this for people who were experiencing homelessness or doing sex work.
01:22:46
Speaker
who had been killed, their cases, like, were marked no person involved or no human involved or something.
01:22:52
Speaker
Some bullshit like that.
01:22:54
Speaker
Gross.
01:22:54
Speaker
Gross.
01:22:56
Speaker
In 1975, which is nine years later, a still unidentified woman jumped from the 12th floor window onto the Cecil's second floor roof.
01:23:03
Speaker
She had registered at the hotel on December 16th, four days before the suicide happened.
01:23:09
Speaker
In addition to suicides, as we mentioned earlier, other kinds of violence and disturbing stuff happens all the time.
01:23:17
Speaker
In 1947, Elizabeth Short, who would later be known as the Black Dahlia, was rumored to have been spotted drinking at the Cecil Bar days before she was found dead and mutilated.
01:23:32
Speaker
And it's still technically an unsolved murder, right?
01:23:34
Speaker
Yes, it's technically an unsolved murder, even though there's a lot of evidence that a specific person...
01:23:43
Speaker
killed her so people think that that's kind of eerie that she was there and then right after she went and visited the hotel she was found in this really horrific way and i read somewhere online people were trying to make the connection between elisa and elizabeth short because i guess their timeline or the the sequence of events
01:24:02
Speaker
that where they went to go visit like a bar and then was found in like a really shocking, horrific way.
01:24:10
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:11
Speaker
We're pretty like similar, but you know, this happened so far apart from each other.
01:24:17
Speaker
I think that this is more in line with the folks who are like the hotel's cursed.
01:24:21
Speaker
Yes.
01:24:22
Speaker
There's patterns happening here, hauntings, possessions.
01:24:26
Speaker
I feel like that was part of like all of that.
01:24:28
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:24:29
Speaker
And then as we talked about in the 1980s, it was the residence of serial killer Richard Ramirez who had been seen, spotted, walking around the hotel naked with bloody clothes and throwing them in the back, in the trash can.
01:24:45
Speaker
And nobody called anybody or said anything because I guess that strange occurrence.
01:24:50
Speaker
It wasn't super out of the norm.
01:24:52
Speaker
People just wanted to mind their business.
01:24:54
Speaker
They also know that the police...
01:24:57
Speaker
They didn't trust the police.
01:24:58
Speaker
They didn't call the police.
01:24:59
Speaker
No one wanted to be the person to call the police.
01:25:01
Speaker
Another serial killer, Austrian Jack Unterweger, stayed at the Cecil in 1991.
01:25:08
Speaker
Because he was a true crime writer and he's obsessed with Richard Ramirez and... What the fuck?
01:25:19
Speaker
He was obsessed with Richard Ramirez and he wanted to stay there to like channel him, I guess.
01:25:26
Speaker
And ended up serial killing during his stay there.
01:25:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:30
Speaker
And then fast forward to Elisa Lam in 2013.
01:25:35
Speaker
Deaths didn't stop there after that.
01:25:37
Speaker
On June 13, 2015, the body of a 28-year-old was found outside the hotel, and people believed that he had jumped from the hotel like so many others have done before, though a spokesperson for the county coroner informed LA Times that the cause of death has not been determined.
01:25:57
Speaker
Oh.
Cultural Impact and Haunting Influence
01:25:59
Speaker
So that's the like documented list of horrific things that have happened in this hotel.
01:26:05
Speaker
If any of that is sounding familiar to you, it's probably because after Lisa Lamb's death, Ryan Murphy decided to make American Horror Story Hotel, which is largely based on the events that occurred at the Cecil Hotel.
01:26:24
Speaker
And the hotel in American Horror Story Hotel is
01:26:27
Speaker
supposed to be the Cecil Hotel.
01:26:29
Speaker
Oh I gotta watch that again.
01:26:31
Speaker
Because I feel like I probably missed some things after like now I feel like I know too much about this fucking hotel.
01:26:37
Speaker
Yep.
01:26:37
Speaker
Yep.
01:26:37
Speaker
I'm like please don't come at me.
01:26:40
Speaker
Don't come at me.
01:26:41
Speaker
Burn some incense.
01:26:44
Speaker
This is dark.
01:26:46
Speaker
It's a great.
01:26:46
Speaker
It's one of the best seasons of American Horror Story.
01:26:49
Speaker
So I
01:26:49
Speaker
If you haven't watched it, you should.
01:26:51
Speaker
It has Lady Gaga in it, too.
01:26:55
Speaker
She's great in it, honestly.
01:26:57
Speaker
She's great in it.
01:26:57
Speaker
She's a vampire.
01:26:58
Speaker
It's a pretty hot season, too.
01:27:00
Speaker
Yeah, everyone's beautiful.
01:27:02
Speaker
It is a really great season.
01:27:03
Speaker
And it was just, like, beautifully shot.
01:27:05
Speaker
The colors.
01:27:07
Speaker
Oh, my gosh.
01:27:08
Speaker
Just everything.
01:27:09
Speaker
And the aesthetic, the fashion.
01:27:13
Speaker
Everything.
01:27:14
Speaker
It was, like, beautiful and grotesque at the same time.
01:27:17
Speaker
Yep.
01:27:18
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:27:19
Speaker
So would recommend.
01:27:22
Speaker
So we're going to get into the ghosty stuff.
01:27:28
Speaker
um so as we mentioned earlier elisa was in two rooms and the second room that she was placed in was on the 14th floor which is notorious for its like haunting stories it's also where both uh richard ramirez aka the night stalker and jack unten wigger stayed richard being the four room 1419 and jack being in 1402 in these rooms um
01:27:52
Speaker
People reported feeling watched.
01:27:55
Speaker
They felt like this heaviness and a sense of dread.
01:27:58
Speaker
I listened to a podcast, Holly Weird Paranormal, which was actually pretty, like, I was like, all right, I'm about it.
01:28:06
Speaker
Holly Weird.
01:28:09
Speaker
And they described in room 1419, people who stay in the rooms have said that doors open and close on their own.
01:28:16
Speaker
One person even said that he woke up to a feeling that someone was choking him.
01:28:20
Speaker
Ew.
01:28:20
Speaker
Ew.
01:28:21
Speaker
And then in 1402, people have reported having trouble breathing and sweating.
01:28:27
Speaker
Apparently that's a common thing that happens in there.
01:28:30
Speaker
I don't know who these people are, and I don't know if they know about the stories before going in there.
01:28:37
Speaker
Either way, creepy stuff.
01:28:39
Speaker
Yep.
01:28:40
Speaker
I would never stay there.
01:28:41
Speaker
No, absolutely not.
01:28:42
Speaker
Just for so many reasons.
01:28:44
Speaker
So many reasons.
01:28:44
Speaker
For reasons I can't even count.
01:28:46
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:46
Speaker
I saw reviews online like, ooh, I want to stay in this hotel.
01:28:49
Speaker
Like, do you have a death wish, Susan?
01:28:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:51
Speaker
That is outrageous.
01:28:52
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:53
Speaker
Did you not read?
01:28:56
Speaker
Oh, my gosh.
01:28:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:57
Speaker
Like, Elisa did not know the history of this hotel based on...
01:29:02
Speaker
Just basically on her blog, I don't think she knew because I think she would have written about it if she did.
01:29:08
Speaker
But yeah.
01:29:09
Speaker
And I could see how people would get lured into it because it's like, you know, a historic hotel.
01:29:14
Speaker
And also apparently the lobby is actually really beautiful.
01:29:17
Speaker
It's also been marked as like a historical landmark in LA.
01:29:21
Speaker
So it can't be like taken down because of that.
01:29:26
Speaker
Why is it marked as a historic landmark?
01:29:28
Speaker
Unsure.
01:29:28
Speaker
There's definitely a lot of history associated with it.
01:29:32
Speaker
Some historic stuff has happened in this place.
01:29:34
Speaker
In this podcast, they also said this is where the mediums come in.
01:29:39
Speaker
The mediums and the ghost hunters came in with EVP.
01:29:44
Speaker
Electronic voice phenomenon.
01:29:46
Speaker
And some statements they said they pulled out of there were someone says, we were taken.
01:29:54
Speaker
They said that there was a young female-ish sounding voice that says up, down, and peace, which I guess the mediums were saying that they thought that maybe it was Elisa saying that like they took me up and I've like been brought down and I want to be in peace, like leave me alone.
01:30:15
Speaker
Like, like, please stop trying to talk to me.
01:30:17
Speaker
I just want to be in peace was the interpretation of that.
01:30:21
Speaker
There's also a male voice that comes on that's very dark and angry.
01:30:27
Speaker
They said that it said, get out.
01:30:30
Speaker
There's another voice that said, don't turn on the light.
01:30:32
Speaker
There's another voice that said, leave.
01:30:34
Speaker
And there was another one that said, get the fuck out.
01:30:37
Speaker
And these are all happening in the rooms, like 1419 and 402 specifically on that floor.
01:30:43
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:30:44
Speaker
There was also a ghost photo in 2013 that was featured on CBS.
01:30:49
Speaker
Woo!
01:30:50
Speaker
Yeah, apparently there was some kid walking down the street and he wanted to see the Cecil.
01:30:57
Speaker
And he looked up and noticed a figure of what looked like a man trying to get ready to jump off the ledge.
01:31:03
Speaker
But he said that it didn't really look like a full figure.
01:31:06
Speaker
He said that it looked kind of transparent and weird, like vaguely a person.
01:31:12
Speaker
And he took the photo, and it really does look like a person that's about to jump out.
01:31:19
Speaker
Whoa.
01:31:21
Speaker
I don't know.
01:31:21
Speaker
Very creepy.
01:31:22
Speaker
It does look like that.
01:31:24
Speaker
And then they featured on CBS.
01:31:26
Speaker
They were like, 10-year-old takes a photo of a ghost at the Cecil Hotel.
01:31:30
Speaker
So that was... Maybe we'll put it on our Instagram.
01:31:34
Speaker
You could take a look at this ghosty photo.
01:31:38
Speaker
I also was looking up some YouTube videos and sifting through the comments because there's always some good stuff people are leaving in the comments about...
01:31:50
Speaker
staying at places.
01:31:52
Speaker
Someone says,
01:32:06
Speaker
a strange entrance into our room.
01:32:08
Speaker
In the middle of the night, three very loud thuds on our door startled both of us.
01:32:13
Speaker
I opened the door and no one was behind it.
01:32:15
Speaker
I went back thinking maybe it was coming from another room.
01:32:19
Speaker
Another hour later, the same thing happened.
01:32:20
Speaker
I walked down the hallways looking to see if it was some kids messing with us.
01:32:24
Speaker
There was nothing and the halls were silent.
01:32:26
Speaker
It also carried a horrible smell.
01:32:28
Speaker
My girlfriend was in tears by the end of the night.
Creepy Guest Experiences
01:32:31
Speaker
is one one review another review says i unknowingly stayed at the cecil hotel or now known as stay on maine three years ago the room was extremely small and incredibly creepy i had the worst sleep of my life and ended up having a massive panic attack because something felt unsafe and weird about the place i had not believed in ghosts or haunted places but this place freaked me out so bad that i now that i now believe there are places with bad energy i
01:32:57
Speaker
My girlfriend and I found a new hotel before the sun came up.
01:33:00
Speaker
It was an awful feeling that stuck with me for the rest of our vacation.
01:33:04
Speaker
When we got home from the vacation, I researched it and I found out all the horrible things that happened there.
01:33:09
Speaker
Even now when I see the interior pictures, I get creeped out.
01:33:13
Speaker
Damn.
01:33:14
Speaker
This is why you need to look up places before you stay there.
01:33:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:33:20
Speaker
Please.
01:33:20
Speaker
Now that we know how fraught hotels are in general, you gotta look that shit up.
01:33:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:33:25
Speaker
You know the hotels aren't gonna put that out there.
01:33:28
Speaker
No.
01:33:28
Speaker
You gotta dig.
01:33:29
Speaker
Or maybe stay in an Airbnb.
01:33:31
Speaker
Maybe stay in an Airbnb.
01:33:33
Speaker
Not that bad stuff doesn't happen in Airbnbs, but maybe less likely than hotels.
01:33:37
Speaker
Oh my gosh, in my head bad stuff happens everywhere.
01:33:39
Speaker
Yeah.
01:33:39
Speaker
And it does.
01:33:40
Speaker
Violence is lurking around every corner in my brain.
01:33:44
Speaker
Which is why we're here doing this thing.
Renovation and Future Concerns
01:33:49
Speaker
Dodger Dave said, I lived at the Cecil Hotel for eight years.
01:33:52
Speaker
Who's Dodger Dave?
01:33:53
Speaker
Some guy on the internet named Dodger Dave.
01:33:56
Speaker
That's the username.
01:34:01
Speaker
In room 714, I remember coming home, locking the door with a chain and falling asleep, then suddenly being woken up by the door flying open or a sudden gust of wind busting the window open.
01:34:12
Speaker
I paid it no mind telling myself, Jesus loves me.
01:34:14
Speaker
Jesus loves me over and over.
01:34:17
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
01:34:18
Speaker
That's what Dr. Dave says.
01:34:19
Speaker
He was just like, I just lived with it.
01:34:20
Speaker
It was weird.
01:34:21
Speaker
Didn't know what to do about it.
01:34:22
Speaker
Yep.
01:34:22
Speaker
Yep.
01:34:24
Speaker
And then lastly, or not lastly, but another one I found was by Jude.
01:34:33
Speaker
Jude says,
01:34:58
Speaker
Opened the door to tell him to leave and he was gone.
01:35:01
Speaker
Disappeared.
01:35:02
Speaker
I'm so glad that I brushed my teeth with bottled water because it was the weekend prior to the death in the water tank.
01:35:09
Speaker
Never knew the history.
01:35:11
Speaker
Yikes, Jude.
01:35:12
Speaker
I don't know if you're just fucking with me, Jude, but that really creeped me out.
01:35:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's a lot of creepy shit.
01:35:17
Speaker
That's some creepy shit.
01:35:18
Speaker
Faucet turning on?
01:35:19
Speaker
I hate that.
01:35:20
Speaker
The faucet?
01:35:21
Speaker
Yeah.
01:35:22
Speaker
Ew.
01:35:23
Speaker
The faucet turning on while her body was still in the tank.
01:35:27
Speaker
Ew.
01:35:28
Speaker
Ew.
01:35:28
Speaker
Maybe she was trying to be like, find me.
01:35:31
Speaker
Oh my god, Akshi.
01:35:33
Speaker
That's what my ghost would do.
01:35:39
Speaker
Your hypothetical sad ghost.
01:35:42
Speaker
Oh no.
01:35:43
Speaker
Knock on wood.
01:35:45
Speaker
Knock on some serious wood.
01:35:46
Speaker
What the hell?
01:35:48
Speaker
Knocked.
01:35:49
Speaker
Is this wood?
01:35:50
Speaker
I don't know.
01:35:51
Speaker
I don't think it is.
01:35:53
Speaker
Some wood in here.
01:35:55
Speaker
Um, yeah.
01:35:56
Speaker
Well, you should know now that the stay on main is no longer open.
01:35:59
Speaker
You can't stay there.
01:36:00
Speaker
Thank goodness.
01:36:02
Speaker
Because it's currently undergoing a hundred million dollar renovation and being turned into fifteen hundred dollar a month micro apartments.
01:36:08
Speaker
Okay, so whoever the fuck is gonna live there is gonna experience some bullshit.
01:36:13
Speaker
Poor, poor future them.
01:36:15
Speaker
I just feel like they just need to take it down, make it into a park or something.
01:36:19
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know.
01:36:20
Speaker
The whole land is fucked, is what you're talking about.
01:36:22
Speaker
Yeah, they need to do some serious cleansing in that whole area.
01:36:26
Speaker
It's just not good.
01:36:27
Speaker
It's just all bad.
01:36:28
Speaker
Why don't they make it affordable housing for the folks that... Don't have housing?
01:36:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:36:33
Speaker
That's a great...
01:36:34
Speaker
That is a great question.
01:36:37
Speaker
Honestly... Who asked for micro apartments?
01:36:39
Speaker
No one asked for that.
01:36:40
Speaker
No one.
01:36:41
Speaker
Nobody asked for micro apartments.
01:36:43
Speaker
I stayed in one for a year last year.
01:36:45
Speaker
Last year, yeah.
01:36:46
Speaker
And it was doable for that year, but it really is a glorified dorm room, and absolutely I would not be paying $1,500 a month to stay in one.
01:36:54
Speaker
Yeah, especially on cursed land.
01:36:57
Speaker
It's just...
01:36:59
Speaker
That is bad news.
01:37:00
Speaker
There are probably going to be college students moving from far away not knowing.
01:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's going to be like 10 years from now.
01:37:08
Speaker
It's going to be like all of these haunted things about that apartment building.
01:37:12
Speaker
The developers are just like, let's just gentrify it.
01:37:15
Speaker
It'll all go away.
01:37:16
Speaker
Yeah, probably will make it worse, to be honest.
01:37:19
Speaker
God.
01:37:21
Speaker
Oh, no.
01:37:21
Speaker
Anyway, that's the Cecil Hotel.
01:37:25
Speaker
That is Elisa Lam.
01:37:28
Speaker
Probably some of you are curious to know more about these cases from the Hotel Cecil, and I know that we are too, so we're going to do a little series where we cover more cases from the Hotel Cecil.
01:37:45
Speaker
But in the meantime, if you're curious to see that video of the elevator, you can look that up.
01:37:52
Speaker
You can look up the elevator game.
01:37:55
Speaker
You can also look up Elisa's old blog and Tumblr, which are still up.
01:38:00
Speaker
We'll put the links in the sources.
01:38:05
Speaker
Yeah, but like, rip to Elisa.com.
01:38:07
Speaker
We just realized she would be around our age now if she was still alive.
01:38:13
Speaker
And, you know, sending all of our love to her family and her friends, who this probably fucked with a lot and still fucks with.
01:38:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:38:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:38:24
Speaker
When I was looking into this, I was just thinking about how much it would suck to have a family member or a loved one die in such a horrific way.
01:38:32
Speaker
And then their life just being defined by like the worst thing that's ever happened to them.
01:38:36
Speaker
Mm hmm.
01:38:38
Speaker
And you can't escape it either.
01:38:41
Speaker
I don't know.
01:38:43
Speaker
What did they do when news came on?
01:38:46
Speaker
Yeah.
01:38:47
Speaker
Well, that's what our story was today.
01:38:52
Speaker
And thanks for listening.
01:38:53
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for listening.
01:38:55
Speaker
That was a lot.
01:38:56
Speaker
Yeah, that was a lot.
01:38:58
Speaker
Take care of yourselves.
01:39:01
Speaker
Watch something funny or listen to something funny.
01:39:05
Speaker
also join us on instagram oh yeah follow us at unpacking the eerie and unpacking the eerie on facebook if you have comments email us at unpacking the eerie at gmail.com and please write and review us on the only place that you can do that which is apple podcasts wish there were other places that you could do that but unfortunately be like meow 69 yeah be like meow 69 we love them
01:39:34
Speaker
Yeah.
01:39:35
Speaker
Okay.
01:39:36
Speaker
Bye.
01:39:37
Speaker
Till next time.
01:39:38
Speaker
Till next time.
01:39:40
Speaker
Beep-a-doop-bop.
01:39:46
Speaker
If you happen to be listening to this on the day of, we're having an Instagram live tonight on October 30th at 6pm Pacific Standard Time and on our follow weekend.
01:39:58
Speaker
We'd love for you to join us.
01:39:59
Speaker
You can join at our Instagram at unpackingtheerie and it'll be saved on our page for folks to see after the fact.
01:40:07
Speaker
Either way, thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time.