pucker into downtown Los Angeles is a 19 - floor hotel with 700 rooms and an otherwise unremarkable exterior . But within the walls of this anatomical structure , nightmarish vista of humanity ’s darkness stretch out . It ’s the Cecil Hotel , an L.A. ethnic touchstone , a haunted abysm , and a symbolisation of opulence riven by urban decay .
" In all my long time as a historical journalist , I have never come across a building where so many document terrible things have happened , " emailedHadley Meares , who also has a podcast calledUnderbelly L.A.“By far , it is the most cursed space I have ever come across . "
It ’s also the setting of one of the creepiest viral videos of the internet epoch , an lift surveillance taping showing the last minutes ofElisa Lam , a Canadian student and former guest of the hotel . A Netflix seriesexplores her disappearance and other mysteries that the hotel spawned .
The Dream and the Nightmare
The Cecil started sprightliness very differently . work up in 1924 , it was intended to be a gem of the business district arena , featuring a marble lobby , alabaster statues and gorgeous varnished - glass windows .
That dreaming very quickly became a incubus .
Just a few year later , the Great Depression begin strangling the nation . immense swaths of L.A. near the hotel degraded into a impoverishment - stricken sphere bonk asSkid Row , where thousands of homeless masses gathered .
" The Cecil opened during the boom time years of the Roaring Twenties , and there were high hope for its achiever , " said Meares , when we speak to her in 2021 . " However , the Malcolm stock market crash [ of 1929 ] and subsequent depression really hurt business district Los Angeles , peculiarly the area where the Cecil was locate . The area break down further downhill after World War II , and the Cecil became known as a cheap household of last resort for bewildered souls , criminals and the underserved aged . "
From the 1940s through the 1960s , guest self-destruction come about with regularity . Some inauspicious people died within their rooms , from poisonous substance , gunshots or razor leaf blade , whileothers flung themselvesfrom the rooftop . One jumpereven landed on – and killed – a pedestrian on the sidewalk below . An precarious woman threw her newborn infant out of the windowpane .
In 1964 , hotel occupant Goldie " The Pigeon Lady of Pershing Square " Osgood , wasbrutally murderedand her case was never solve . The retired telephony operator had earned her lovesome nickname for her habit of eat birds nearby .
The Night Stalker Checks In
Darker still is the hotel ’s link to Richard Ramirez , aserial killerwho lived at the hotel for workweek during his farseeing andsensational execution spreein the mid-1980s . know as the " Night Stalker , " Ramirez was convicted of 13 murders and other offenses that were noted for their extreme brutality and sadistic twists .
Ramirez was known to prowl among Skid Row residents . allot to some sources , after the killings , he ’d discardhis lineage - spatter clothingin the hotel ’s trash bin without anyone assume much placard .
So casual was Ramirez about his deeds that he ’d sometimes lounge around in the home of his victims , partaking of snacksfrom the fridge while drench in their blood . He also heist the homes , steal cash and valuable , and in some instances , even body part .
" Just call up of Richard Ramirez , allegedly bringing eyeballs of his victims back into his filthy room at the Cecil chills me to the bone , " said Meares . That ’s exactly what he didafter shooting and stab Maxine Levenia Zazzara , a 44 - twelvemonth - honest-to-god woman , in 1985 .
After a carnival - like trial in which Ramirez reveled in the public eye , the Night Stalker was sentenced to death . But before he could be execute , he died in 1989from complication of cancer .
Unterweger was , after all , a man who ’d beenpreviously convictedof murder at the age of 23 . His life sentence in Austria was shortened to only 15 twelvemonth , largely because of his writing art and news , which he leverage to convert others of his supposed complete reclamation .
Then , he go extensively , kill woman in other nation , too .
He eventually off at least three prostitutes during his time at the Cecil Hotel . He was extradited to Austria and convicted . But the same Nox he was convicted , he hanged himself in his cell .
All of these gruesome details do as the historical backdrop for 2013 , when the hotel became the setting for what ’s become one of the creepiest unresolved death imaginable .
The Mystery of Elisa Lam
Elisa Lam , a 21 - year - sure-enough student from Vancouver , was reported missing at the beginning of February 2013 . She had been staying at the hotel in a plane section offer youth hostel - same accommodation to extraneous tourists . ( The hotel also had another part with secret rooms for regular guests and a third division with low - cost " single room occupation " and shared bathroom , for long - term residents . )
By the center of the month , edifice occupants had reported illustration of low water imperativeness , as well as discolored and malodorous body of water dripping from the water tap . Maintenance worker opened the hotel ’s water cisterna and found Lam ’s eubstance deep down .
Surveillance video from the elevator , which isstill online , seems to portray a young woman in distress . Lam enters the elevator , push multiple clit , peering in and out of the elevator as if she ’s being pursued , and wildly motion as if she ’s make an reanimate conversation with someone .
Could she have ingested too many recreational drug ? Was she being harassed or stalk by a murderer ? Or was she having a psychotic breakdown ?
To this day , no one knows exactly how Lam ’s naked body thread up in the body of water army tank . The door to the cap was locked . And no one can excuse how the cistern ’s punishing lid was closed behind her .
" To me , the fact the Lam ’s headphone was never retrieve — or at least the police force have never release that it was found — is the most tempting aspect of the font , " said Meares . " Think of what that telephone could severalize us ! "
formally , Lam ’s case is called an accidental drowning , and her bipolar disorder is sometimes cited as a possible cause of her strange behavior . Experts interviewed for the Netflix serieshypothesized , based on a toxicology theme , that she ’d been taking too petty of her medication for her bipolar disorder , experienced a psychotic episode and climbed into the piddle storage tank for aegis .
With all of the strange and awful incidents that materialise there , it ’s easy to wonder : Is the Cecil Hotel some sort of a attractor for immorality that draws out the big in human nature ? Or is it simply that in an region so riddle with suffering and depravity , it was bound to be the prospect of countless acts of violence and despair ?
The Cecil is known – unsurprisingly — for hauntings and paranormal activity . Ghost hunters havescoured its hallsfor clue to supernatural events . And its creepy pastinspired the fifth seasonof American Horror Story .
The Cecil closed in 2017 and reopened in December 2021 as a " supportive housing project " opened to any Los Angeleno with a governance housing voucher . But the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2022 that two - tierce of it was still untenanted . " Even with solid financial backing and the best of intentions , the Cecil labor has struggled to subdue a arrangement beset with a easy - moving bureaucratism and multiple failure point , and to offer a trapping gillyflower that answer a universe with myriad needs,“the composition say .
