September 18, 2026 • 49 mins
The Hotel Cecil in downtown Los Angeles has had no less than 16 unnatural deaths, from suicides to murders and everything in between. Listen in to the history of this decidedly creepy hotel.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
The Hotel Cecil is probably best known as the site
for the very sad death of Elisa Lamb in 2013,
or maybe you know it as a setting in American
Horror Story. It turns out that Elisa was just one
in an unusually long line of deaths that took place
in the Cecil, which seems to have had way more
than its fair share of tragedy since it was built
(00:24):
in 1924. I'll leave it to you to get to
the bottom of what's up with the Hotel Cecil. Welcome
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
(00:44):
Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and Jerry's hanging around
in the sun here, lurking like an unison spirit in
a haunted hotel. And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, can... We do a couple of quick announcements.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Without singing that announcement song.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Did we have an announcement song ever?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Well, not us, but like summer camp.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
You never did that?
Speaker 1 (01:15):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Well, I'm not going to sing it now then.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I kind of want to hear it now.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Was it like announcements, announcements? It's announcements time.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Sort of, almost. Yeah, that's close enough. Trigger warning for
this one. First announcement.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Because there's some grisly stuff in here. I guess that's
all we need to say. And then also, we've been
remiss in that we haven't mentioned the fact that there's
a Stuff You Should Know board game out.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Yeah, it's not grisly at all.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
No, it's very family-friendly, in fact.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
It's one of the highest honors that's ever been bestowed
upon us in Stuff You Should Know, Chuck, because out
of the blue, out of nowhere, about a year and
a half ago, maybe?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Trivial Pursuit. The makers of Trivial Pursuit got in touch
with us and said, we want to do a Stuff
You Should Know Trivial Pursuit game. And they did. It
wasn't a practical joke.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
The fine people at Hasbro, who I got to say,
I mean, we've worked with a lot of outside companies
for various projects. And boy, Hasbro is about as tight
and buttoned up and awesome as any company we've ever
worked with. Right.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
But also like super friendly, super fun, super nice.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
And not in that creepy, everybody's trying to be nice way.
They're all just a genuinely pleasant group to work with.
But yes, they are super buttoned up as well. Very
rare animal.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, they make games. They all seem like they make
games for a living, which would mean that you have
a pretty cool job. And developing the game with them
was fun. And the questions are based on real stuff
you should know, episodes. And it is not just Trivial Pursuit.
It is co-branded, so it is not Do not expect
to get the Trivial Pursuit game with the little pieces
(03:01):
of pie.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
No, no.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Just want to be clear.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
They said, we want to make up a brand new
game for this. Brand new game. And they did. They
made up a game. And this is the Stuff You
Should Know Trivial Pursuit game.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
That's right. And you can get it wherever you get games.
I recommend your local little indie toy gaming store if
they have it. But otherwise, we would love to support.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
You got a weirdo in your town who dresses up
in wizard clothes and goes to work? Go buy your
game there.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
A great Christmas gift, by the way.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah, for sure. Also, why just stop there? It's great
for dads, grads, moms, proms, everything.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I think it's like $ 20, right?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah, it's like really, really reasonably priced, if you ask me. $ 20. $ 20.
You got two 20s in your wallet. You could buy
our book and the game at the same time. So
we did the TV show. We did a book. We
do a podcast. Don't forget our YouTube series.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Sure. You can.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
And now Chuck.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
And now the game.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
It's amazing.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
And now the Hotel Cecil.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yes. On to the show. So I'm glad you did
that little trigger warning because there is some grisly stuff
in here. But there's also, I think, some like fact settings,
some facts straightening that, you know, we should do from
the outset because. One of the things that people who
(04:30):
get into the Elisa Lam story, which we'll talk about
in a little bit, quickly find that there are all
manner of Internet urban legends and myths and conspiracy theories
surrounding it. And none of those seem to be true.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
It's pretty annoying, actually.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, it is very annoying. It's just so Internet-y, too.
You know what I mean? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
I mean, this... This goes on a lot these days,
but it seems like this one may be more so
than even others because the bizarre nature of one part
of this story. And I don't know. I found myself
slightly annoyed.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
I am, too, in the exact same way that I'm
annoyed by people who believe that the couple from The
Conjuring were like, you know, legit in real life. Right.
You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
But at the same time, it goes even further than that.
I think I ran across a couple of articles that
I really think struck home what's genuinely annoying and even
disrespectful about that is that like Elisa Lam died because
she had serious mental illness that had been diagnosed and
she wasn't managing properly with the medications that she was on.
(05:41):
And that happens a lot. And she died because of it.
And so to say that she was, you know, possessed
by evil spirits and Um, or that there were, you know,
ghosts at the Cecil or even that she was murdered
by an unknown suspect. It's really, it really, um, it
really disrespects the reality of the situation, which is, you know,
(06:01):
sad enough as it is. But at the same time, Chuck,
there's one more thing I have to caveat all this with.
It's understandable. The impulse to, to bring in, you know,
restless spirits and, you know, you know, the, It's just
conspiracy theories. It's understandable in this particular situation because of
(06:22):
the setting.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yeah. And I guess, you know, the first part of
this show will be about the setting, which is the
Hotel Cecil in downtown Los Angeles, which is not open
right now. It may be open in the future. I
think they were doing a this thing was open in
the 1920s during the height of the Depression. And it's
a very large hotel, 19 floors, 700 rooms. And in
(06:47):
the 1920s, it was sort of like a big deal
for downtown Los Angeles. It was near a major rail station.
And it was kind of just what L.A. needed. And
it was kind of fancy schmancy for the time. And
over the years, you know, we'll talk a little bit
about the downfall. But at the time of Elisa Lamb's stay,
(07:08):
they had carved out three floors of and built a
separate lobby entrance to try and, uh, in an effort
to rebrand this hotel as something called stay on main, uh,
and that they had three kind of floors that were
a little bit redone cosmetically, uh, a little bit of
a nicer lobby that was, you know, sort of away from, um,
(07:31):
you know, some of the situations that we're going to
detail here in a second. Uh, but they did all
share a common elevator and, um, Elisa Lam was staying
in the Stay on Main section. Stayed on Main?
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
But that's just to point out the fact that the
hotel was going to eventually supposedly undergo a massive renovation
and that it was all sort of put on hold
because of COVID. And I think now it's just being
sat on with some of the long-term tenants that are
protected to stay there.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Yeah, I think there's like 30. But there's, like you said,
700 rooms there.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
But you said it, that the Cecil Hotel, which is
very much down at the heels now, started life in
a much different way where it was meant to be
like a pretty nice hotel designed for middle class travelers
to L.A. And that situation next to the rail station
(08:27):
was a big draw for it. It was definitely a
feather in its cap. And I saw it's in the
Beaux-Arts style. Um, it's not incredibly pretty from the outside,
but the inside lobby is still pretty neat looking. Sure.
Lots of terrazzo tile and, uh, columns and there's fake, um,
Roman statuary and a big clock and like the, at the,
(08:50):
over the check-in desk, it's really pretty and a really like,
you know, 1920s original, um, original style still, although it's
just kind of got this drab air that's kind of
fallen over it over the years.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, and that is in large part because, like you said,
there are a lot of unhoned people there today, a
lot back then. The area called Skid Row of downtown
Los Angeles is kind of right there. I used to
drive through that area sometimes when I lived in L.A.
when we would go downtown to eat sushi. Back then
(09:24):
when I lived there, downtown was not as much of
a destination unless you were going to Staples Center or something,
but it's made a real resurgence since I've left. and
kind of trying to build downtown back up. But Skid
Row is still an issue. And they're, you know, like
you said, that there are people there that work with
unhomed folks that are really trying their best to take
(09:47):
care of them. And the fact that that hotel is
right there, just sort of looming large is a bit
of a thumb in the eye. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
And I get the impression that the area that's now
Skid Row in Los Angeles had, at least since the 1880s,
kind of had an unusual reputation. It wasn't always, you know,
for people down on their luck or anything like that, but,
you know, it was a little more low rent than
other parts of Los Angeles. Like, there was just a
(10:15):
mishmash of all sorts of different people. It seemed like
really alive. And the Cecil was kind of built at
the outskirts of that between what would become Skid Row
and then one of the nicest parts of LA at
the time, Bunker Hill. And everything was hunky-dory for the
Cecil when it first opened in either 1924 or 1927,
(10:36):
depending on who you ask. I could not confirm one
way or the other because both dates have kind of
taken off so much. But when the stock market crashed,
that area that was just kind of colorful and a
little bit low rent that it quickly became Skid Row
as we understand it, beginning around the Great Depression. And
(10:57):
not only did the proximity to Skid Row kind of
like lower the Cecil Star rating, when the tenants started,
the hotel guests started to dry up, they had to
lower their rates and start catering to people of less means.
(11:18):
And so the hotel just kind of stopped taking care
of itself little by little, starting around the Great Depression
and continuing on through World War II.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Yeah. And, you know, it kind of became a last
resort kind of destination for people with addiction problems, people
in the sex working industry. And, you know, it got
that reputation and pretty soon got a reputation for all
kinds of bad things happening there. There have been no
less than 15 or 16 what's classified, I guess, as
(11:50):
an unnatural death at the Cecil. Many people took their
own lives there. I mean, if you read down the
laundry list, it's like quite a few people ingested poison.
Quite a few people jumped or maybe were pushed out windows.
There have been some murders by gun. There have been
murders by strangulation. There have been sexual assaults. This one
(12:14):
sad case of a woman who gave birth to a
baby and was suffering from some sort of mental illness,
evidently thought her baby was born not alive and went
to throw the baby out the window. And it turns
out the baby was alive, then died. She was found
not guilty. I think temporary insanity was the plea there.
(12:39):
And just weird, kind of tragic, awful things happening. over
the years, time and time again at the Hotel Cecil.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah, like another frequently referred to incident was where a
woman named Pauline Otten, she jumped from, I think, like
the ninth or tenth floor to take her own life
and landed on a guy who was a passerby who
happened to just be walking unluckily beneath the Cecil at
(13:09):
that moment on the sidewalk and was struck by Pauline.
And they were both killed. And that doesn't usually happen
very often. That's a pretty remarkable thing. And I know
that the most I could find was, I think, 18 incidents.
But it seems like those are just ones that have
been documented. There seems to be quite a bit more.
(13:32):
There was a Netflix series, I think a four-part series
on this recently. And they interviewed a woman who had
spent 10 years managing the Cecil. Um, and she said that, uh,
her name is Amy Price. She said that under her
10 year tenure, at least 80 people died that she
knows of. And you can kind of imagine like, like,
(13:56):
you know, you could find newspaper write-ups from like the
twenties and thirties and forties when somebody jumps out a
window and definitely when somebody jumps out a window and
lands on a hapless pedestrian, like that's definitely going to
be documented and make news. But if somebody on skid
row overdoses and dies in this hotel, you know, You know,
is that going to be documented? So it's possible that
there are a lot more people who have died at
(14:18):
the Cecil under from unnatural causes over the years than
than just those 17 or 18.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Did you watch all of that documentary?
Speaker 1 (14:29):
No, I haven't seen it actually yet.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
OK.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Have you seen it? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
You know, I feel terrible because the director was is
the great Joe Berlinger, who actually had on Movie Crush.
In one of my favorite episodes where we kind of
just talked about documentary filmmaking, he's a legend. He did
the Paradise Lost series. He did that documentary on Metallica
when they were all in therapy.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Oh, yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
I mean, he's just sort of a legend in the genre.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
I saw he did the Ted Bundy tapes recently.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, he did that. And then he directed the movie
version with, what's his face?
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Zac Efron.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
With who?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I said Ryan Gosling.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Oh, okay. close. Another super handsome hunk. Uh, and that
was a good movie, but this wasn't so great. I
didn't love it. It felt kind of overlong and a
little salacious and like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
That's the impression I had from reading about it.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yeah. So I was disappointed, but Joe is a great
filmmaker and a good guy. So I feel kind of bad.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
I think that's a fair caveat. A great filmmaker and
a good guy can still make a hunk of poop.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah. It wasn't a hunk of poop. It was all right.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Uh, but maybe let's take a break and I'll, email
Joe and tell him I'm sorry ahead of time.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
All right.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
And we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
So, okay. So the Cecil Hotel starts to get a
pretty big, not a great reputation, even around town. I
(16:12):
read an article on kcet.org, which I guess is a
PBS station in SoCal. And they said that local residents
started to refer to the Cecil as the suicide. That
was the name of the hotel for people around there.
And it just, it just kind of like, it just
(16:32):
kept going. Like every time, you know, maybe a couple
of years would pass without some high-profile death in the hotel,
and then it would happen again. And it would just
reaffirm everybody's ideas that that place just wasn't quite right.
There was something wrong with it, almost like it was
a magnet for that kind of tragedy, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
I mean, I think most major cities have had at
least one of these hotels that just sort of is inexpensive,
maybe in the wrong part of town, and has a
reputation sometimes for Lurid activities and checking in and not
checking out. And this was L.A. 's and L.A. for
sure had more than one.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
It did not help their reputation in the 1980s when
Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. the Night Stalker and one of the
more sensational serial killers in American history. He stayed there
for a while and lived there and apparently brought body
parts back to the Cecil Hotel. Said Cecil like I'm British.
(17:36):
Cecil Hotel from some of his victims to ingest there.
And that's certainly like super creepy. Wait, did you say ingest?
I hadn't come across that. Did he eat that victim's eyeballs?
I think so. Wow. He wasn't like, I don't think
he was Dahmer level, but he was known to eat
(17:58):
some body parts. There's a great documentary on his his
case too.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Super disturbing.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah. That's on Netflix as well. I think, um, if
I'm not mistaken, but, um, one thing I hadn't realized
before that I ran across when I was researching some
of his stuff was how he was caught. It's just
absolutely triumphant.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
It was a mob of people in a neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
He was spotted. He saw himself on the front page
of the newspaper and just instinctively started running, tried to
carjack a woman, uh, hit her, was seen hitting her
and an older man basically ran over and helped the woman,
pulled Richard Ramirez out of his car. And the woman
(18:43):
whose car it was, husband came over and started beating him.
And he tried to get away and just an increasingly
large mob chased him and would beat him and he'd
get away some more and they'd chase him down and
catch him again. And they finally pinned him down and
waited for the cops to come. That's how he was caught.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
It's the best. It's so great. A caveat that I'm
not down with mob justice, but a group of people
finding a serial killer on the street and like subduing him.
I'm way OK with that.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
No, I totally am. In this particular instance, like I'm
all fine with that. That kind of justice for sure.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah. And a badge of honor for East L.A. because
the entire city of Los Angeles was I mean, it
was a scary situation there.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Yeah, I can imagine. That's where Cheech Marin was born,
according to that one song of his.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
So the Night Stalker, he was not the only serial
killer that checked in there. He actually inspired just a
few years after he was convicted in, I think, 1989.
I think like in 92, maybe 93, there was another
serial killer named... Jack Unterweger, who was Austrian, who had
(19:55):
already been convicted, I think when he was like 19
or early 20s, of killing a woman by strangling her
with her own bra and went to prison. He was very,
very smart, very charming. He used this to basically get
early parole. He convinced the public that he was actually
reformed and apparently was held up as like a great
(20:17):
example of how, you know, the, the, the prison system
could rehabilitate someone. And it was just a complete false fabrication.
He was basically posed as a true crime journalist. Like
he reinvented himself as that went to LA and other parts.
He went to Europe, traveled through Europe a little bit too,
(20:37):
but also ended up in LA and, to do research
on his true crime novels. Went along on ride-alongs with
the LAPD and ended up using that to scout victims.
He killed three sex workers, and the whole time he
was staying at the Cecil Hotel, and they think probably
as an homage to Richard Ramirez, or at least a
(21:00):
connection to him, you know?
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, so that, I mean, at this point, like, the
reputation for the hotel... It's not the kind of thing
that is going to appear online 15 years ago when
young people like Elisa Lam are searching for an inexpensive
place to stay. And sadly, that's exactly what happened was
(21:22):
a Canadian traveler. She was 20, 21 years old, was
on her way kind of up the West Coast traveling
by herself. Her parents were a little unnerved by her
traveling by herself. So she was asked to check in
every day, which she was doing. Uh, and at the
time it was, uh, you know, they had kind of
dorm style rooms, kind of youth hostel style rooms where
(21:44):
you had bunk beds and a shared bathroom. And so
you could stay there. It was a traveler's hotel. And
if you, uh, you know, I hate to say it,
but if you, if you didn't know much about LA,
you may end up at the hotel Cecil because you
could stay there for like 75 bucks a night or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Yeah. From what I could tell, stay on Maine did
a really good job of making their you know, using
their website to their advantage and making it seem like
this is a really hip happening spot. And I mean,
in some ways they were kind of like just a
little ahead of their time because apparently that area around
Skid Row in downtown LA is like the hippest spot
(22:22):
to live in now again. But at the time it
was still really, really Skid Row-y basically.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah. And it could be it could be, you know,
could be dangerous.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yeah. And I think it still is. But I think
it's just becoming more and more gentrified and it's becoming,
I guess, less dangerous in that sense. But at the
time when Elisa Lam showed up in 2013, it was
you know, it was it was a dangerous place to be.
But this particular spot was just full of, you know,
especially European kids on basically budget holidays.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Staying in L.A., basically in hostels. And I know originally
she was put into a room with a couple other
girls that I think were traveling together, but she was
traveling alone. So it was very hostile, um, and not
hostile with an E. Right. Well, yeah, there's an E,
but it's in a different place than you'd expect. Um,
youth hostily. It was very youth hostily. Like she was
(23:20):
put in a room with other people at first.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah. LA didn't have a lot of that. I remember
there was a youth hostel in Venice that, uh, For
some reason, I always wanted to stay there when I
lived in L.A. I was like, I'm going to go
down and stay in that hostel one night because the
beach was so far. The beach was really far when
you lived on the east side and you kind of
never went over there much unless someone came to town
and wanted to go to the beach.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Oh, that makes sense. Sure.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
So, and, you know, I was broke back then, so
it could have been like a little staycation.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Did you ever do it?
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Nah.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
No.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
It's one of those things you think about late night
and then you wake up the next day and you're like, nah.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah. You blew all your money on Taco Bell instead?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Oh, man. I miss Taco Bell.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Do you? I don't.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
I mean, I didn't eat it that much, but I
haven't had it in years.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
I've had too much, I think, was my problem.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Oh, okay. Was that the deal? By the way, side note,
speaking of weird late night foods, we had a guy
on our front door camera the other day come in
the middle of the night and leave a package. And
we were like, what is this? We went out the
next day and it was a bag full of crystals. Wow.
(24:33):
And I think it was a delivery, like a door
dash or something.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Oh, crystals. I thought you meant like amethysts.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
No, no, no. I mean, tiny square sliders.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
He had the wrong address.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Either that or your daughter has mastered the telephone by now.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
It was really weird. And of course, the first thing
I did was feel terrible that someone's late night munchies
didn't get satisfied.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Did you eat them the next morning? Just as a homage?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Oh, God, no.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
No, no, no. No? You don't like crystals? Or was
it because it was sitting there overnight?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Both. I never was into crystal for some reason.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Man, I like crystals.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
It was the thing. I just was, I don't know why.
I think I was just a Waffle House guy.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
I don't, I'm fine with Waffle House too. The big
problem with crystals though, Chuck, I'll tell you, is they're
fries or Probably the worst fries of any fast food.
They're the most bland. Somehow, if you just bit into
a raw potato, it would be less bland and tasteless
than if you ate a Crystal's Fry.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
I don't know how they do it.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
And if you're from the other places in the country,
White Castle is sort of an analog to Crystal.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Anyway, this is not an episode of the Doughboys. This
is stuff you should know. And back to Elisa Lam,
she was supposed to be there for about, I think,
four days and check out on February 1st and did
not get in touch with her parents like she had
been doing each day. She had been seen shopping for
(26:09):
books at a nearby bookstore and then bought some books.
And this is one of the things in the documentary, like,
you know, they didn't really have any footage of her
with any other people inside the hotel. before her disappearance.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Well, she was also reported to be constantly by herself too,
by people who saw her. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
I mean, she was traveling alone. So that, that makes sense. But, um, she,
she did get handed off. There were two gentlemen that
handed off a kind of a largest, uh, large-ish box
to her.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
On camera in front of the hotel. And of course
the internet sleuths are like, who are these guys? What
was in the box? And apparently in the box were
these books that she got because she had spoken with
the book read, um, seller, um, About like the size
of them. And boy, I don't even know if I
can carry these. And I think had them delivered to
the hotel or whatever. So kind of nothing to see here.
(26:59):
And another example of how annoying this case can be
with people online speculating like wrong stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Can be a little annoying for sure. But yes, so
she was she was alone traveling alone. I think she
started out in San Diego or at least her last
stop had been San Diego. Her next stop was going
to be Santa Cruz. And yeah, her parents have been like, okay,
you need to call us every single day. And she
had been pretty faithfully until that February 1st came and
(27:29):
went with no call. And I believe they pretty much
immediately contacted the hotel and the LAPD and said, hey,
you know, our daughter hasn't checked in. Can you see
what's going on? I don't know if they did it
on February 1st or not, but in pretty short order,
the LAPD determined that She she was just gone. She
wasn't she was nowhere to be found and that there
(27:52):
was some suspiciousness going on for sure.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Yeah, I mean, they did a thorough inspection. They went
to her room. They had found that the hotel had
gathered all her stuff and bagged it and was holding
it in storage, which was regular protocol when someone doesn't
check out and just leave stuff. Nothing shady going on there.
They checked around the hotel in the alleyways and sidewalks.
(28:16):
They checked up on the roof. They didn't find anything.
And things got really strange. And I guess we should
take another ad break here. But things got really strange
when the hotel sent them footage from inside the elevator
of the Cecil Hotel. And we'll get to that right
after this.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
All right, Chuck. So Elisa Lam is now known to
be missing. She left her stuff behind at the Cecil
Hotel and she didn't check out. She didn't call her
parents as she usually did. And she's officially a missing person.
Within a couple of days, I think maybe February 6th,
the police held a press conference and explained what was
(29:12):
going on to the public. And basically asked for everybody's help.
And if anyone had any info, you know, where did
she go? Where is she? How's she doing? Is she OK?
And I guess I don't I didn't see anything about
any get any crazy leads or anything like that. It
doesn't seem to have really kind of captured the public's
(29:35):
interest at first. And I saw there's this guy named
Josh Dean who's written written several articles on the Elisa
Lam disappearance. And I believe one of the ones that
he wrote kind of pinpoints why there wasn't a huge
public interest in the first like week or even two
(29:56):
of her case. It was because Christopher Dorner had gone
on his rampage against the LAPD, basically declared war on
the LAPD and was killed in, I think, the mountains
of San Bernardino in a standoff, like right when Elisa
Lam went missing. So not only was the public's attention
on this, especially in L.A., the LAPD's attention was definitely
(30:20):
on that as well. So Elisa Lam was kind of
like this faint little chirp in this huge maelstrom at
the time.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
They ain't chirping in Maelstrom.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
It's the best I could come up with on short notes.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
It's amazing. Are you kidding me?
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Oh, thanks.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
You just made that up?
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Yeah. Yeah, I did. You like it?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah, but I just have a feeling that next time
I'm in your house, it's going to be like, that's
going to be carved into your desk or something. Right.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
It's on a t-shirt.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Right. That you put, you make Momo wear that t-shirt
every day.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Yeah. And you know, the other big reason was until
this footage actually came out of the elevator in uh, car, then,
you know, that's when, um, that's when the public's attention
really caught hold.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
That changed everything.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yeah. I mean, there's no way around it. It's, it's
a very sort of unsettling. And I remember when this happened, uh,
before any of the facts of the case were kind
of out, I remember looking at this video and it
is very unsettling and it does appear to be very
creepy and that, uh, a young woman gets on an elevator, um,
very kind of casually presses all the center buttons, uh,
(31:28):
on all the floors. I think they determined she was
on the 14th floor and sort of pressed all the
floors on the way down. Elevator doesn't do anything. The
doors don't shut. She moves to the back corner and
sort of standing there. She goes and she looks outside
of the elevator both ways a couple of times in
the hallway and then kind of retreats back quickly. At
(31:52):
one point, she steps out into the hallway and appears
to be gesturing towards somebody or she's at least making
hand gestures to the right down the hallway.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Yeah. And they're unusual hand gestures. They're not like the
normal hand gestures you might make. They're not at all
subtle or casual or almost even like, like, you know,
you might not even realize you're using your hands when
you're talking sometimes. Like these are, these are more gesticulations
than just mere gestures. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah. And you know, there's, there's no doubt. And eventually
she kind of, leaves around to the left and exits
to the left and the door stays open for a
while before it shuts um but there's no getting around
the fact that it having known nothing and knowing that
this person disappeared uh this young woman and then you
see this it seems very suspicious um.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
And creepy i don't think it's creepy i think.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
It looks i don't even think it looks that creepy
it looks to me like That she is trying to
get away from someone and is afraid someone has followed
her or is gesturing at a person who she feels
threatened by. It's what it looks like to me. I
know other people online talk about otherworldly spirits. And she's
like you said earlier, she's conjuring spirits with her hands.
(33:05):
Like I just that never occurred to me. It just
looked like she might be in some kind of peril
and was trying to get away from someone. Right.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
But that's creepy in and of itself, you know.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, I just mean not creepy in, like, a supernatural, like,
what's going on here way.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
No, I think the thing that really, when it really
turns creepy to me is when she turns around and
hides in the corner of the elevator. Like, she's hiding.
And then the second part that's genuinely creepy is when she, like,
leans out and, like, looks both ways and then kind
of jumps back into the elevator. It's just, I mean,
(33:43):
it's really hard not to kind of put yourself in
her shoes. And she's clearly frightened. And to see somebody
frightened like that, it's creepy.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
And you're waiting on someone to enter the elevator, but
that never happens. And with the internet sleuthing, you couldn't
really make out the time code very well. And so
all the people online are like, well, why can't you
make out the time code and the timestamps? Like what
would degrade that and not the rest of it? And
(34:13):
then they think they decoded it and there's almost a
full minute missing in the hotel. Cecil edited out a
portion clearly. And before they send it to the cops and,
and they interviewed the woman and that you were talking
about the manager. And she was like, no, of course
we didn't edit anything out. Like we were horrified by
this disappearance. It just sent him everything we had.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Right. Plus I'm sure also that most of the employees
that stay on main know exactly how to edit video
out before handing things over to the cops. Anyway, it
is LA. That's true. That is a good point. Actually.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
But I don't buy it. I think it was, it
is what it was, which was, uh, a person in
an elevator who had some, uh, was having some mental
issues and, you know, we'll get to that in a second. Um,
and I think, you know, it's sort of like, uh,
the easiest explanation of the video, at least to me,
it seems to be the most accurate.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
All right. Um, that, that's what I buy. That's how
I buy it too. Um, So that video was released
on February 13th, and now all of a sudden the
public is taking notice. She becomes an internet meme almost
overnight with people watching and analyzing that video, like you
were saying. And yet they still can't find her. No
(35:30):
one has any idea where she is. It's been two
weeks now since she went missing. This video is out there.
The entire internet is on the case now. And it
wasn't until a couple days, I think two days after
The video came out, Chuck, that one of the guys,
one of the custodians of the Cecil Hotel of Stay
(35:51):
on Main, I should say, was asked to go check
on the water supply on the roof because the Cecil
Hotel used gravity fed water. They had four 1,000 gallon
tanks on the top of the roof. And when you
open the tap, the water would come pouring down from
(36:13):
those tanks into your room and out the faucet. And
some of the tenants, I don't know if it was
just the hotel or some long-term tenants, but they were
complaining that the water pressure had suddenly gotten really low
and that the water that was coming out had a
strange odor and taste and weird kind of color to it.
(36:34):
And so they dispatched the custodian to the roof Um,
and he went and checked and I think as he
was approaching the, the main water tank, I think tank
number one, he noticed that the hatch was open and, uh,
in very short order made a, the, the grizzly discovery
of Elisa Lamb's body. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
He was, uh, he was kind of like the super,
he was a maintenance guy. His name is Santiago Lopez
and he's in the documentary too. Um, I don't think
he saw the hatch cause the hatch is on top
of the tank. But he went to go and he
said it was a routine thing if there was any
kind of water issue was to climb the ladder to
the tanks and go look and see what was going
on because there's probably a clog or something. And he
(37:16):
saw her body naked about a foot below the water,
just sort of suspended there. And, you know, when they
interviewed this guy in the documentary, it's really sad. You know,
he was sort of at the center of a lot
of this with interviews and He he was speaking through it,
I guess not through a translator, but through subtitles. But
(37:37):
he was clearly, you know, still very upset about this.
And it scarred him to see this woman floating in
the tank. And he knew immediately who it was and
called down to the hotel manager who we've been talking
about and said, you know, she's she's up here in
the tank. And, you know, the cops came. They found
her clothes, which were determined to be the same clothes.
(37:59):
She was wearing in the elevator video kind of at
the bottom of the tank. They had sunk. And, you know,
immediately the new mystery is not what's going on in
this video. Although, you know, that played a part because
they were still trying to figure that out as far
as foul play goes. But was how she made it
in here and and why she made it in there.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, because she she it was like the hatch is
not easy to get. in or out of, they had
to like cut her out of the, they had to
cut a hole in the bottom of the tank so
they could access it, right? They couldn't just pull her
back out of that hatch. So that's kind of weird
in and of itself. She's also nude. That also kind
of added to the mystery of the whole thing. And
(38:43):
then also the, you know, the coroner, when he made
his toxicology report available, he basically said it was, he
wasn't able to make any conclusive statements find any conclusive
results because there wasn't enough blood to take a sample from.
You know, she just kind of permeated the water in
that her blood had. And it wasn't you just couldn't
(39:07):
like take a water sample and be like, oh, yeah,
there's no you know, there's no drugs in here or
anything like that. So all of that combined really kind
of just. just took that mystery, you know, that people
had been primed to start thinking about with that video
and then just blew it through the the roof you
know i mean the the the water being you know
(39:29):
going to other people's taps in the hotel and you
know lisa lamb basically being a part of that water
really kind of solidified her legendary status or the legendary
status of her mystery i think in people's imagination anybody
who comes across that case can't help but like let
the mind wander in that respect Oh.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
For sure. I mean, the idea of drinking water and
bathing in water with a decomposing body. I mean, the
body was in a pretty rough state of decomposition at
that point. They did do, obviously, in the autopsy, they
didn't find any signs of foul play. There were obviously
no obvious wounds. There were no internal wounds. There was
(40:12):
no strangulation. They pretty much said this doesn't look like
foul play at all. Um, the one, one of the
mysteries was how she got up there because you, um,
if you want to go just through the regular staircase
to the rooftop, and this is not a rooftop that you,
you know, it doesn't have like a rooftop hangout area
or whatever, although people, you know, there was plenty of
(40:33):
graffiti and beer bottles and drug needles. And so people
would make their way up there. But, uh, if you
go through the regular door, it's one of the, um,
alarm doors, which would trigger downstairs and all throughout the lobby. Um,
that never came on. and you have to have a
key to disable it, but there is a fire escape, uh,
entry with a ladder basically for the last, like for
(40:55):
the last story, it's a little precarious, but she could
have just simply gone out the window to the fire
escape and climbed up the ladder and then up the
ladder to the tanks. It's not, you know, it's a little, um,
it would be a little bit of a scary trip
up that ladder, I think. But, uh, considering what happened, she, she,
clearly was, uh, was not in a good place mentally.
(41:18):
So I think that's completely believable.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
That journalist, Josh Dean, um, went in, I think, 2015
to see the CISO himself. He had, uh, gotten obsessed
with the, the, um, case. So he went and kind
of investigated it in person. And, um, he quickly found
that open window was still open, uh, and the fire
escape was easily accessible. And, um, in the, uh, I
(41:43):
think one of his articles is called American Horror Story,
which is a reference to what I think the hotel
season of American Horror Story was based on or inspired
by Elisa Lam's disappearance. But there's a picture that he
took of that ladder leading from the fire escape on
the 15th or 14th floor up to the roof. And
(42:06):
all you see is up, like you just see the
ladder and then above it is sky. But after reading
about it, your imagination just thinks of like the 15
stories behind you. Like as you're, you know, as you're
looking up this ladder, it's one of the most unsettling
pictures I've ever seen. If you read the text, you know,
that surround it. But he said by his judgment, an
(42:31):
average person could easily make it up that ladder, especially
if you don't look down. He said, if you're carrying
a body or another person, you could not do it.
He said, it just would be too difficult.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
And, you know, it's one of those straight up vertical
ladders on the side of the building.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Yeah. But if you were in a manic state, as
a lot of people believe Elisa Lam was, you could
probably make it up that ladder pretty quickly. You wouldn't
even necessarily consider looking down and all of a sudden
you'd be on the roof. And after you were on
the roof, it would be a fairly easy proposition to
get into one of those tanks, especially I think she
weighed about one hundred and fifteen pounds and was about
(43:06):
five feet, four inches. So it was possible for her
to get into one of those tanks through that hatch.
But either she was too scared to come out conceivably,
or she couldn't get out when she wanted to get
out and tired of treading water because the water would
have been about eight feet deep and drowned after a while.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
Yeah, I mean, they did. I think the police dogs
did pick up her scent near that window. So that
seems to be what happened. And you know, this is
one of those cases where the more I read, like
all I could feel was despair about this poor woman
having what looked to be some sort of medication related
(43:51):
manic episode, maybe scared, maybe thinking someone was following her
and trying to get away and, and going at great lengths,
going to great lengths to maybe hide somewhere like inside
of a water tank. I don't know, like, why her
clothes were off or why her clothes ended up in
the tank. I'm not saying any of this makes sense,
(44:11):
but it is something that could happen. And all I
can think about is what an awful place that she
must've been for something like this to have happened.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yeah. And I mean, to kind of back up the, um, the,
the mental break, um, theory, which is what I buy. That's,
that's where I put my stock. Um, She remember I
said she was originally put in a room with a
couple other girls she didn't know at the stay on Maine.
They complained about her behaving strangely. So she was moved
(44:44):
to her own private room. Apparently, she went to a
taping of the Conan O'Brien show and was escorted out
because she was behaving strangely. And then detectives also found
she was on four different medications for bipolar one disorder
and depression. And the LAPD, based on the prescription dates
(45:10):
on the bottles and then the number of pills that
were left and the instructions on the bottles, the LAPD
were able to determine that she hadn't been following the
dosage recommendations or taking her pills or medication. So if
you put all of that together and then also that–
people taking their clothes off as part of a psychotic
(45:31):
episode happens. It's been documented. You like, there's no, there's
no pieces missing on the table. Like she could have
gone out on that fire escape, gone up the ladder.
Like there's nothing that is, well, yeah, but then there's
this really big thing that remains unexplained. Like it explains
absolutely everything. And then suddenly it kind of makes all
the other stuff like government mind control or ghosts or
(45:55):
whatever seem just kind of gross, you know?
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Totally agree. I believe her parents brought a lawsuit against
the hotel that was eventually dismissed, if I'm not mistaken.
And it just remains a very, very sad situation and
a sad case. And it is very annoying when you
get online and everyone thinks that their spirit's being conjured
and all this wacky stuff. It's just not the case.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Not the case indeed. You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (46:25):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Well, that's it for the Cecil hotel and the Lisa
lamb RIP. Uh, and since I said RIP, that means
it's time for a listener mail.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Uh, I'm going to call this follow up to Y2K.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Oh yes.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Uh, and this is something that we actually had in
our notes that we, I guess just kind of failed
to bring up.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, you had it in your
notes as well. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
The, the 2038 problem. Um, We got a lot of
emails about this, and we're not going to fully probably
explain to everyone's satisfaction how it works. But, hey, guys,
just got done listening to the Y2K podcast, which brought
back an interesting range of memories of living through that time.
In case you weren't aware, there's something called the Unix
(47:13):
Y2K problem that still exists but is slowly being fixed
by smart people behind the scenes.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
Thank goodness.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
The majority of computers in the world run Unix-based operating systems.
not Windows or Mac OS. And unless these systems are
patched at 3.14 on January 19th, 2038, their clocks will
roll over to think it's midnight, January 1st, 1970.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
The cause is basically the same in the early versions
of the OS. Only had so much memory allocated to
time representations, but more modern versions now have this fixed
and hence computers aren't susceptible once they're updated or upgraded.
Although not all systems can be easily Updated. And that
is from a bunch of people, but specifically from PhD
(48:00):
Alan Chalker.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
That's great. Thanks, Alan, to everybody who wrote in. I
was like, oh, man, I meant to include that. But
apparently Unix represents time as the number of seconds from
the epoch date, which is some date in 1970. And
then eventually it's going to have more seconds than it
can represent in the number of digits. So it'll just
roll back over like he was saying. Which is pretty neat.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Come on, Unix.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
Pretty cool. But also I'm glad to hear that there
are smart people working on that because we got 17 years. Man,
you guys take it easy. Take a weekend, you know? Sure.
Go sit in your house and social distance from everybody.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
That's right. We also got a lot of emails just
from people that, some people whose parents helped rewrite code
or were heading up projects rewriting code and It was
pretty cool. We got a lot of emails about that
when you struck a chord.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
Yeah, it was a good idea, Chuck. Well, if you
want to get in touch with us like Alan and
everybody else did, you can send us an email.
The Hotel Cecil is probably best known as the site
for the very sad death of Elisa Lamb in 2013,
or maybe you know it as a setting in American
Horror Story. It turns out that Elisa was just one
in an unusually long line of deaths that took place
in the Cecil, which seems to have had way more
than its fair share of tragedy since it was built
(00:24):
in 1924. I'll leave it to you to get to
the bottom of what's up with the Hotel Cecil. Welcome
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
(00:44):
Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and Jerry's hanging around
in the sun here, lurking like an unison spirit in
a haunted hotel. And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, can... We do a couple of quick announcements.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Without singing that announcement song.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Did we have an announcement song ever?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Well, not us, but like summer camp.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
You never did that?
Speaker 1 (01:15):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Well, I'm not going to sing it now then.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
I kind of want to hear it now.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Was it like announcements, announcements? It's announcements time.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Sort of, almost. Yeah, that's close enough. Trigger warning for
this one. First announcement.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Because there's some grisly stuff in here. I guess that's
all we need to say. And then also, we've been
remiss in that we haven't mentioned the fact that there's
a Stuff You Should Know board game out.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Yeah, it's not grisly at all.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
No, it's very family-friendly, in fact.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
It's one of the highest honors that's ever been bestowed
upon us in Stuff You Should Know, Chuck, because out
of the blue, out of nowhere, about a year and
a half ago, maybe?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Trivial Pursuit. The makers of Trivial Pursuit got in touch
with us and said, we want to do a Stuff
You Should Know Trivial Pursuit game. And they did. It
wasn't a practical joke.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
The fine people at Hasbro, who I got to say,
I mean, we've worked with a lot of outside companies
for various projects. And boy, Hasbro is about as tight
and buttoned up and awesome as any company we've ever
worked with. Right.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
But also like super friendly, super fun, super nice.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
And not in that creepy, everybody's trying to be nice way.
They're all just a genuinely pleasant group to work with.
But yes, they are super buttoned up as well. Very
rare animal.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, they make games. They all seem like they make
games for a living, which would mean that you have
a pretty cool job. And developing the game with them
was fun. And the questions are based on real stuff
you should know, episodes. And it is not just Trivial Pursuit.
It is co-branded, so it is not Do not expect
to get the Trivial Pursuit game with the little pieces
(03:01):
of pie.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
No, no.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Just want to be clear.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
They said, we want to make up a brand new
game for this. Brand new game. And they did. They
made up a game. And this is the Stuff You
Should Know Trivial Pursuit game.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
That's right. And you can get it wherever you get games.
I recommend your local little indie toy gaming store if
they have it. But otherwise, we would love to support.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
You got a weirdo in your town who dresses up
in wizard clothes and goes to work? Go buy your
game there.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
A great Christmas gift, by the way.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Yeah, for sure. Also, why just stop there? It's great
for dads, grads, moms, proms, everything.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I think it's like $ 20, right?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah, it's like really, really reasonably priced, if you ask me. $ 20. $ 20.
You got two 20s in your wallet. You could buy
our book and the game at the same time. So
we did the TV show. We did a book. We
do a podcast. Don't forget our YouTube series.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Sure. You can.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
And now Chuck.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
And now the game.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
It's amazing.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
And now the Hotel Cecil.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yes. On to the show. So I'm glad you did
that little trigger warning because there is some grisly stuff
in here. But there's also, I think, some like fact settings,
some facts straightening that, you know, we should do from
the outset because. One of the things that people who
(04:30):
get into the Elisa Lam story, which we'll talk about
in a little bit, quickly find that there are all
manner of Internet urban legends and myths and conspiracy theories
surrounding it. And none of those seem to be true.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
It's pretty annoying, actually.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, it is very annoying. It's just so Internet-y, too.
You know what I mean? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
I mean, this... This goes on a lot these days,
but it seems like this one may be more so
than even others because the bizarre nature of one part
of this story. And I don't know. I found myself
slightly annoyed.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
I am, too, in the exact same way that I'm
annoyed by people who believe that the couple from The
Conjuring were like, you know, legit in real life. Right.
You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
But at the same time, it goes even further than that.
I think I ran across a couple of articles that
I really think struck home what's genuinely annoying and even
disrespectful about that is that like Elisa Lam died because
she had serious mental illness that had been diagnosed and
she wasn't managing properly with the medications that she was on.
(05:41):
And that happens a lot. And she died because of it.
And so to say that she was, you know, possessed
by evil spirits and Um, or that there were, you know,
ghosts at the Cecil or even that she was murdered
by an unknown suspect. It's really, it really, um, it
really disrespects the reality of the situation, which is, you know,
(06:01):
sad enough as it is. But at the same time, Chuck,
there's one more thing I have to caveat all this with.
It's understandable. The impulse to, to bring in, you know,
restless spirits and, you know, you know, the, It's just
conspiracy theories. It's understandable in this particular situation because of
(06:22):
the setting.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yeah. And I guess, you know, the first part of
this show will be about the setting, which is the
Hotel Cecil in downtown Los Angeles, which is not open
right now. It may be open in the future. I
think they were doing a this thing was open in
the 1920s during the height of the Depression. And it's
a very large hotel, 19 floors, 700 rooms. And in
(06:47):
the 1920s, it was sort of like a big deal
for downtown Los Angeles. It was near a major rail station.
And it was kind of just what L.A. needed. And
it was kind of fancy schmancy for the time. And
over the years, you know, we'll talk a little bit
about the downfall. But at the time of Elisa Lamb's stay,
(07:08):
they had carved out three floors of and built a
separate lobby entrance to try and, uh, in an effort
to rebrand this hotel as something called stay on main, uh,
and that they had three kind of floors that were
a little bit redone cosmetically, uh, a little bit of
a nicer lobby that was, you know, sort of away from, um,
(07:31):
you know, some of the situations that we're going to
detail here in a second. Uh, but they did all
share a common elevator and, um, Elisa Lam was staying
in the Stay on Main section. Stayed on Main?
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
But that's just to point out the fact that the
hotel was going to eventually supposedly undergo a massive renovation
and that it was all sort of put on hold
because of COVID. And I think now it's just being
sat on with some of the long-term tenants that are
protected to stay there.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Yeah, I think there's like 30. But there's, like you said,
700 rooms there.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
But you said it, that the Cecil Hotel, which is
very much down at the heels now, started life in
a much different way where it was meant to be
like a pretty nice hotel designed for middle class travelers
to L.A. And that situation next to the rail station
(08:27):
was a big draw for it. It was definitely a
feather in its cap. And I saw it's in the
Beaux-Arts style. Um, it's not incredibly pretty from the outside,
but the inside lobby is still pretty neat looking. Sure.
Lots of terrazzo tile and, uh, columns and there's fake, um,
Roman statuary and a big clock and like the, at the,
(08:50):
over the check-in desk, it's really pretty and a really like,
you know, 1920s original, um, original style still, although it's
just kind of got this drab air that's kind of
fallen over it over the years.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, and that is in large part because, like you said,
there are a lot of unhoned people there today, a
lot back then. The area called Skid Row of downtown
Los Angeles is kind of right there. I used to
drive through that area sometimes when I lived in L.A.
when we would go downtown to eat sushi. Back then
(09:24):
when I lived there, downtown was not as much of
a destination unless you were going to Staples Center or something,
but it's made a real resurgence since I've left. and
kind of trying to build downtown back up. But Skid
Row is still an issue. And they're, you know, like
you said, that there are people there that work with
unhomed folks that are really trying their best to take
(09:47):
care of them. And the fact that that hotel is
right there, just sort of looming large is a bit
of a thumb in the eye. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
And I get the impression that the area that's now
Skid Row in Los Angeles had, at least since the 1880s,
kind of had an unusual reputation. It wasn't always, you know,
for people down on their luck or anything like that, but,
you know, it was a little more low rent than
other parts of Los Angeles. Like, there was just a
(10:15):
mishmash of all sorts of different people. It seemed like
really alive. And the Cecil was kind of built at
the outskirts of that between what would become Skid Row
and then one of the nicest parts of LA at
the time, Bunker Hill. And everything was hunky-dory for the
Cecil when it first opened in either 1924 or 1927,
(10:36):
depending on who you ask. I could not confirm one
way or the other because both dates have kind of
taken off so much. But when the stock market crashed,
that area that was just kind of colorful and a
little bit low rent that it quickly became Skid Row
as we understand it, beginning around the Great Depression. And
(10:57):
not only did the proximity to Skid Row kind of
like lower the Cecil Star rating, when the tenants started,
the hotel guests started to dry up, they had to
lower their rates and start catering to people of less means.
(11:18):
And so the hotel just kind of stopped taking care
of itself little by little, starting around the Great Depression
and continuing on through World War II.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Yeah. And, you know, it kind of became a last
resort kind of destination for people with addiction problems, people
in the sex working industry. And, you know, it got
that reputation and pretty soon got a reputation for all
kinds of bad things happening there. There have been no
less than 15 or 16 what's classified, I guess, as
(11:50):
an unnatural death at the Cecil. Many people took their
own lives there. I mean, if you read down the
laundry list, it's like quite a few people ingested poison.
Quite a few people jumped or maybe were pushed out windows.
There have been some murders by gun. There have been
murders by strangulation. There have been sexual assaults. This one
(12:14):
sad case of a woman who gave birth to a
baby and was suffering from some sort of mental illness,
evidently thought her baby was born not alive and went
to throw the baby out the window. And it turns
out the baby was alive, then died. She was found
not guilty. I think temporary insanity was the plea there.
(12:39):
And just weird, kind of tragic, awful things happening. over
the years, time and time again at the Hotel Cecil.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah, like another frequently referred to incident was where a
woman named Pauline Otten, she jumped from, I think, like
the ninth or tenth floor to take her own life
and landed on a guy who was a passerby who
happened to just be walking unluckily beneath the Cecil at
(13:09):
that moment on the sidewalk and was struck by Pauline.
And they were both killed. And that doesn't usually happen
very often. That's a pretty remarkable thing. And I know
that the most I could find was, I think, 18 incidents.
But it seems like those are just ones that have
been documented. There seems to be quite a bit more.
(13:32):
There was a Netflix series, I think a four-part series
on this recently. And they interviewed a woman who had
spent 10 years managing the Cecil. Um, and she said that, uh,
her name is Amy Price. She said that under her
10 year tenure, at least 80 people died that she
knows of. And you can kind of imagine like, like,
(13:56):
you know, you could find newspaper write-ups from like the
twenties and thirties and forties when somebody jumps out a
window and definitely when somebody jumps out a window and
lands on a hapless pedestrian, like that's definitely going to
be documented and make news. But if somebody on skid
row overdoses and dies in this hotel, you know, You know,
is that going to be documented? So it's possible that
there are a lot more people who have died at
(14:18):
the Cecil under from unnatural causes over the years than
than just those 17 or 18.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Did you watch all of that documentary?
Speaker 1 (14:29):
No, I haven't seen it actually yet.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
OK.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Have you seen it? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
You know, I feel terrible because the director was is
the great Joe Berlinger, who actually had on Movie Crush.
In one of my favorite episodes where we kind of
just talked about documentary filmmaking, he's a legend. He did
the Paradise Lost series. He did that documentary on Metallica
when they were all in therapy.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Oh, yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
I mean, he's just sort of a legend in the genre.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
I saw he did the Ted Bundy tapes recently.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, he did that. And then he directed the movie
version with, what's his face?
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Zac Efron.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
With who?
Speaker 1 (15:08):
I said Ryan Gosling.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Oh, okay. close. Another super handsome hunk. Uh, and that
was a good movie, but this wasn't so great. I
didn't love it. It felt kind of overlong and a
little salacious and like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
That's the impression I had from reading about it.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yeah. So I was disappointed, but Joe is a great
filmmaker and a good guy. So I feel kind of bad.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
I think that's a fair caveat. A great filmmaker and
a good guy can still make a hunk of poop.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Yeah. It wasn't a hunk of poop. It was all right.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Uh, but maybe let's take a break and I'll, email
Joe and tell him I'm sorry ahead of time.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
All right.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
And we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
So, okay. So the Cecil Hotel starts to get a
pretty big, not a great reputation, even around town. I
(16:12):
read an article on kcet.org, which I guess is a
PBS station in SoCal. And they said that local residents
started to refer to the Cecil as the suicide. That
was the name of the hotel for people around there.
And it just, it just kind of like, it just
(16:32):
kept going. Like every time, you know, maybe a couple
of years would pass without some high-profile death in the hotel,
and then it would happen again. And it would just
reaffirm everybody's ideas that that place just wasn't quite right.
There was something wrong with it, almost like it was
a magnet for that kind of tragedy, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
I mean, I think most major cities have had at
least one of these hotels that just sort of is inexpensive,
maybe in the wrong part of town, and has a
reputation sometimes for Lurid activities and checking in and not
checking out. And this was L.A. 's and L.A. for
sure had more than one.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
It did not help their reputation in the 1980s when
Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. the Night Stalker and one of the
more sensational serial killers in American history. He stayed there
for a while and lived there and apparently brought body
parts back to the Cecil Hotel. Said Cecil like I'm British.
(17:36):
Cecil Hotel from some of his victims to ingest there.
And that's certainly like super creepy. Wait, did you say ingest?
I hadn't come across that. Did he eat that victim's eyeballs?
I think so. Wow. He wasn't like, I don't think
he was Dahmer level, but he was known to eat
(17:58):
some body parts. There's a great documentary on his his
case too.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Super disturbing.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah. That's on Netflix as well. I think, um, if
I'm not mistaken, but, um, one thing I hadn't realized
before that I ran across when I was researching some
of his stuff was how he was caught. It's just
absolutely triumphant.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
It was a mob of people in a neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
He was spotted. He saw himself on the front page
of the newspaper and just instinctively started running, tried to
carjack a woman, uh, hit her, was seen hitting her
and an older man basically ran over and helped the woman,
pulled Richard Ramirez out of his car. And the woman
(18:43):
whose car it was, husband came over and started beating him.
And he tried to get away and just an increasingly
large mob chased him and would beat him and he'd
get away some more and they'd chase him down and
catch him again. And they finally pinned him down and
waited for the cops to come. That's how he was caught.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
It's the best. It's so great. A caveat that I'm
not down with mob justice, but a group of people
finding a serial killer on the street and like subduing him.
I'm way OK with that.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
No, I totally am. In this particular instance, like I'm
all fine with that. That kind of justice for sure.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah. And a badge of honor for East L.A. because
the entire city of Los Angeles was I mean, it
was a scary situation there.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Yeah, I can imagine. That's where Cheech Marin was born,
according to that one song of his.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
So the Night Stalker, he was not the only serial
killer that checked in there. He actually inspired just a
few years after he was convicted in, I think, 1989.
I think like in 92, maybe 93, there was another
serial killer named... Jack Unterweger, who was Austrian, who had
(19:55):
already been convicted, I think when he was like 19
or early 20s, of killing a woman by strangling her
with her own bra and went to prison. He was very,
very smart, very charming. He used this to basically get
early parole. He convinced the public that he was actually
reformed and apparently was held up as like a great
(20:17):
example of how, you know, the, the, the prison system
could rehabilitate someone. And it was just a complete false fabrication.
He was basically posed as a true crime journalist. Like
he reinvented himself as that went to LA and other parts.
He went to Europe, traveled through Europe a little bit too,
(20:37):
but also ended up in LA and, to do research
on his true crime novels. Went along on ride-alongs with
the LAPD and ended up using that to scout victims.
He killed three sex workers, and the whole time he
was staying at the Cecil Hotel, and they think probably
as an homage to Richard Ramirez, or at least a
(21:00):
connection to him, you know?
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, so that, I mean, at this point, like, the
reputation for the hotel... It's not the kind of thing
that is going to appear online 15 years ago when
young people like Elisa Lam are searching for an inexpensive
place to stay. And sadly, that's exactly what happened was
(21:22):
a Canadian traveler. She was 20, 21 years old, was
on her way kind of up the West Coast traveling
by herself. Her parents were a little unnerved by her
traveling by herself. So she was asked to check in
every day, which she was doing. Uh, and at the
time it was, uh, you know, they had kind of
dorm style rooms, kind of youth hostel style rooms where
(21:44):
you had bunk beds and a shared bathroom. And so
you could stay there. It was a traveler's hotel. And
if you, uh, you know, I hate to say it,
but if you, if you didn't know much about LA,
you may end up at the hotel Cecil because you
could stay there for like 75 bucks a night or
something like that.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Yeah. From what I could tell, stay on Maine did
a really good job of making their you know, using
their website to their advantage and making it seem like
this is a really hip happening spot. And I mean,
in some ways they were kind of like just a
little ahead of their time because apparently that area around
Skid Row in downtown LA is like the hippest spot
(22:22):
to live in now again. But at the time it
was still really, really Skid Row-y basically.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah. And it could be it could be, you know,
could be dangerous.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yeah. And I think it still is. But I think
it's just becoming more and more gentrified and it's becoming,
I guess, less dangerous in that sense. But at the
time when Elisa Lam showed up in 2013, it was
you know, it was it was a dangerous place to be.
But this particular spot was just full of, you know,
especially European kids on basically budget holidays.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Staying in L.A., basically in hostels. And I know originally
she was put into a room with a couple other
girls that I think were traveling together, but she was
traveling alone. So it was very hostile, um, and not
hostile with an E. Right. Well, yeah, there's an E,
but it's in a different place than you'd expect. Um,
youth hostily. It was very youth hostily. Like she was
(23:20):
put in a room with other people at first.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah. LA didn't have a lot of that. I remember
there was a youth hostel in Venice that, uh, For
some reason, I always wanted to stay there when I
lived in L.A. I was like, I'm going to go
down and stay in that hostel one night because the
beach was so far. The beach was really far when
you lived on the east side and you kind of
never went over there much unless someone came to town
and wanted to go to the beach.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Oh, that makes sense. Sure.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
So, and, you know, I was broke back then, so
it could have been like a little staycation.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Did you ever do it?
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Nah.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
No.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
It's one of those things you think about late night
and then you wake up the next day and you're like, nah.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah. You blew all your money on Taco Bell instead?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Oh, man. I miss Taco Bell.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Do you? I don't.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
I mean, I didn't eat it that much, but I
haven't had it in years.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
I've had too much, I think, was my problem.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Oh, okay. Was that the deal? By the way, side note,
speaking of weird late night foods, we had a guy
on our front door camera the other day come in
the middle of the night and leave a package. And
we were like, what is this? We went out the
next day and it was a bag full of crystals. Wow.
(24:33):
And I think it was a delivery, like a door
dash or something.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Oh, crystals. I thought you meant like amethysts.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
No, no, no. I mean, tiny square sliders.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
He had the wrong address.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Either that or your daughter has mastered the telephone by now.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
It was really weird. And of course, the first thing
I did was feel terrible that someone's late night munchies
didn't get satisfied.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Did you eat them the next morning? Just as a homage?
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Oh, God, no.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
No, no, no. No? You don't like crystals? Or was
it because it was sitting there overnight?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Both. I never was into crystal for some reason.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Man, I like crystals.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
It was the thing. I just was, I don't know why.
I think I was just a Waffle House guy.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
I don't, I'm fine with Waffle House too. The big
problem with crystals though, Chuck, I'll tell you, is they're
fries or Probably the worst fries of any fast food.
They're the most bland. Somehow, if you just bit into
a raw potato, it would be less bland and tasteless
than if you ate a Crystal's Fry.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
I don't know how they do it.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
And if you're from the other places in the country,
White Castle is sort of an analog to Crystal.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Anyway, this is not an episode of the Doughboys. This
is stuff you should know. And back to Elisa Lam,
she was supposed to be there for about, I think,
four days and check out on February 1st and did
not get in touch with her parents like she had
been doing each day. She had been seen shopping for
(26:09):
books at a nearby bookstore and then bought some books.
And this is one of the things in the documentary, like,
you know, they didn't really have any footage of her
with any other people inside the hotel. before her disappearance.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Well, she was also reported to be constantly by herself too,
by people who saw her. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
I mean, she was traveling alone. So that, that makes sense. But, um, she,
she did get handed off. There were two gentlemen that
handed off a kind of a largest, uh, large-ish box
to her.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
On camera in front of the hotel. And of course
the internet sleuths are like, who are these guys? What
was in the box? And apparently in the box were
these books that she got because she had spoken with
the book read, um, seller, um, About like the size
of them. And boy, I don't even know if I
can carry these. And I think had them delivered to
the hotel or whatever. So kind of nothing to see here.
(26:59):
And another example of how annoying this case can be
with people online speculating like wrong stuff.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Can be a little annoying for sure. But yes, so
she was she was alone traveling alone. I think she
started out in San Diego or at least her last
stop had been San Diego. Her next stop was going
to be Santa Cruz. And yeah, her parents have been like, okay,
you need to call us every single day. And she
had been pretty faithfully until that February 1st came and
(27:29):
went with no call. And I believe they pretty much
immediately contacted the hotel and the LAPD and said, hey,
you know, our daughter hasn't checked in. Can you see
what's going on? I don't know if they did it
on February 1st or not, but in pretty short order,
the LAPD determined that She she was just gone. She
wasn't she was nowhere to be found and that there
(27:52):
was some suspiciousness going on for sure.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Yeah, I mean, they did a thorough inspection. They went
to her room. They had found that the hotel had
gathered all her stuff and bagged it and was holding
it in storage, which was regular protocol when someone doesn't
check out and just leave stuff. Nothing shady going on there.
They checked around the hotel in the alleyways and sidewalks.
(28:16):
They checked up on the roof. They didn't find anything.
And things got really strange. And I guess we should
take another ad break here. But things got really strange
when the hotel sent them footage from inside the elevator
of the Cecil Hotel. And we'll get to that right
after this.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
All right, Chuck. So Elisa Lam is now known to
be missing. She left her stuff behind at the Cecil
Hotel and she didn't check out. She didn't call her
parents as she usually did. And she's officially a missing person.
Within a couple of days, I think maybe February 6th,
the police held a press conference and explained what was
(29:12):
going on to the public. And basically asked for everybody's help.
And if anyone had any info, you know, where did
she go? Where is she? How's she doing? Is she OK?
And I guess I don't I didn't see anything about
any get any crazy leads or anything like that. It
doesn't seem to have really kind of captured the public's
(29:35):
interest at first. And I saw there's this guy named
Josh Dean who's written written several articles on the Elisa
Lam disappearance. And I believe one of the ones that
he wrote kind of pinpoints why there wasn't a huge
public interest in the first like week or even two
(29:56):
of her case. It was because Christopher Dorner had gone
on his rampage against the LAPD, basically declared war on
the LAPD and was killed in, I think, the mountains
of San Bernardino in a standoff, like right when Elisa
Lam went missing. So not only was the public's attention
on this, especially in L.A., the LAPD's attention was definitely
(30:20):
on that as well. So Elisa Lam was kind of
like this faint little chirp in this huge maelstrom at
the time.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
They ain't chirping in Maelstrom.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
It's the best I could come up with on short notes.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
It's amazing. Are you kidding me?
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Oh, thanks.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
You just made that up?
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Yeah. Yeah, I did. You like it?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Yeah, but I just have a feeling that next time
I'm in your house, it's going to be like, that's
going to be carved into your desk or something. Right.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
It's on a t-shirt.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Right. That you put, you make Momo wear that t-shirt
every day.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Yeah. And you know, the other big reason was until
this footage actually came out of the elevator in uh, car, then,
you know, that's when, um, that's when the public's attention
really caught hold.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
That changed everything.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yeah. I mean, there's no way around it. It's, it's
a very sort of unsettling. And I remember when this happened, uh,
before any of the facts of the case were kind
of out, I remember looking at this video and it
is very unsettling and it does appear to be very
creepy and that, uh, a young woman gets on an elevator, um,
very kind of casually presses all the center buttons, uh,
(31:28):
on all the floors. I think they determined she was
on the 14th floor and sort of pressed all the
floors on the way down. Elevator doesn't do anything. The
doors don't shut. She moves to the back corner and
sort of standing there. She goes and she looks outside
of the elevator both ways a couple of times in
the hallway and then kind of retreats back quickly. At
(31:52):
one point, she steps out into the hallway and appears
to be gesturing towards somebody or she's at least making
hand gestures to the right down the hallway.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Yeah. And they're unusual hand gestures. They're not like the
normal hand gestures you might make. They're not at all
subtle or casual or almost even like, like, you know,
you might not even realize you're using your hands when
you're talking sometimes. Like these are, these are more gesticulations
than just mere gestures. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah. And you know, there's, there's no doubt. And eventually
she kind of, leaves around to the left and exits
to the left and the door stays open for a
while before it shuts um but there's no getting around
the fact that it having known nothing and knowing that
this person disappeared uh this young woman and then you
see this it seems very suspicious um.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
And creepy i don't think it's creepy i think.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
It looks i don't even think it looks that creepy
it looks to me like That she is trying to
get away from someone and is afraid someone has followed
her or is gesturing at a person who she feels
threatened by. It's what it looks like to me. I
know other people online talk about otherworldly spirits. And she's
like you said earlier, she's conjuring spirits with her hands.
(33:05):
Like I just that never occurred to me. It just
looked like she might be in some kind of peril
and was trying to get away from someone. Right.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
But that's creepy in and of itself, you know.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, I just mean not creepy in, like, a supernatural, like,
what's going on here way.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
No, I think the thing that really, when it really
turns creepy to me is when she turns around and
hides in the corner of the elevator. Like, she's hiding.
And then the second part that's genuinely creepy is when she, like,
leans out and, like, looks both ways and then kind
of jumps back into the elevator. It's just, I mean,
(33:43):
it's really hard not to kind of put yourself in
her shoes. And she's clearly frightened. And to see somebody
frightened like that, it's creepy.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
And you're waiting on someone to enter the elevator, but
that never happens. And with the internet sleuthing, you couldn't
really make out the time code very well. And so
all the people online are like, well, why can't you
make out the time code and the timestamps? Like what
would degrade that and not the rest of it? And
(34:13):
then they think they decoded it and there's almost a
full minute missing in the hotel. Cecil edited out a
portion clearly. And before they send it to the cops and,
and they interviewed the woman and that you were talking
about the manager. And she was like, no, of course
we didn't edit anything out. Like we were horrified by
this disappearance. It just sent him everything we had.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Right. Plus I'm sure also that most of the employees
that stay on main know exactly how to edit video
out before handing things over to the cops. Anyway, it
is LA. That's true. That is a good point. Actually.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
But I don't buy it. I think it was, it
is what it was, which was, uh, a person in
an elevator who had some, uh, was having some mental
issues and, you know, we'll get to that in a second. Um,
and I think, you know, it's sort of like, uh,
the easiest explanation of the video, at least to me,
it seems to be the most accurate.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
All right. Um, that, that's what I buy. That's how
I buy it too. Um, So that video was released
on February 13th, and now all of a sudden the
public is taking notice. She becomes an internet meme almost
overnight with people watching and analyzing that video, like you
were saying. And yet they still can't find her. No
(35:30):
one has any idea where she is. It's been two
weeks now since she went missing. This video is out there.
The entire internet is on the case now. And it
wasn't until a couple days, I think two days after
The video came out, Chuck, that one of the guys,
one of the custodians of the Cecil Hotel of Stay
(35:51):
on Main, I should say, was asked to go check
on the water supply on the roof because the Cecil
Hotel used gravity fed water. They had four 1,000 gallon
tanks on the top of the roof. And when you
open the tap, the water would come pouring down from
(36:13):
those tanks into your room and out the faucet. And
some of the tenants, I don't know if it was
just the hotel or some long-term tenants, but they were
complaining that the water pressure had suddenly gotten really low
and that the water that was coming out had a
strange odor and taste and weird kind of color to it.
(36:34):
And so they dispatched the custodian to the roof Um,
and he went and checked and I think as he
was approaching the, the main water tank, I think tank
number one, he noticed that the hatch was open and, uh,
in very short order made a, the, the grizzly discovery
of Elisa Lamb's body. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
He was, uh, he was kind of like the super,
he was a maintenance guy. His name is Santiago Lopez
and he's in the documentary too. Um, I don't think
he saw the hatch cause the hatch is on top
of the tank. But he went to go and he
said it was a routine thing if there was any
kind of water issue was to climb the ladder to
the tanks and go look and see what was going
on because there's probably a clog or something. And he
(37:16):
saw her body naked about a foot below the water,
just sort of suspended there. And, you know, when they
interviewed this guy in the documentary, it's really sad. You know,
he was sort of at the center of a lot
of this with interviews and He he was speaking through it,
I guess not through a translator, but through subtitles. But
(37:37):
he was clearly, you know, still very upset about this.
And it scarred him to see this woman floating in
the tank. And he knew immediately who it was and
called down to the hotel manager who we've been talking
about and said, you know, she's she's up here in
the tank. And, you know, the cops came. They found
her clothes, which were determined to be the same clothes.
(37:59):
She was wearing in the elevator video kind of at
the bottom of the tank. They had sunk. And, you know,
immediately the new mystery is not what's going on in
this video. Although, you know, that played a part because
they were still trying to figure that out as far
as foul play goes. But was how she made it
in here and and why she made it in there.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, because she she it was like the hatch is
not easy to get. in or out of, they had
to like cut her out of the, they had to
cut a hole in the bottom of the tank so
they could access it, right? They couldn't just pull her
back out of that hatch. So that's kind of weird
in and of itself. She's also nude. That also kind
of added to the mystery of the whole thing. And
(38:43):
then also the, you know, the coroner, when he made
his toxicology report available, he basically said it was, he
wasn't able to make any conclusive statements find any conclusive
results because there wasn't enough blood to take a sample from.
You know, she just kind of permeated the water in
that her blood had. And it wasn't you just couldn't
(39:07):
like take a water sample and be like, oh, yeah,
there's no you know, there's no drugs in here or
anything like that. So all of that combined really kind
of just. just took that mystery, you know, that people
had been primed to start thinking about with that video
and then just blew it through the the roof you
know i mean the the the water being you know
(39:29):
going to other people's taps in the hotel and you
know lisa lamb basically being a part of that water
really kind of solidified her legendary status or the legendary
status of her mystery i think in people's imagination anybody
who comes across that case can't help but like let
the mind wander in that respect Oh.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
For sure. I mean, the idea of drinking water and
bathing in water with a decomposing body. I mean, the
body was in a pretty rough state of decomposition at
that point. They did do, obviously, in the autopsy, they
didn't find any signs of foul play. There were obviously
no obvious wounds. There were no internal wounds. There was
(40:12):
no strangulation. They pretty much said this doesn't look like
foul play at all. Um, the one, one of the
mysteries was how she got up there because you, um,
if you want to go just through the regular staircase
to the rooftop, and this is not a rooftop that you,
you know, it doesn't have like a rooftop hangout area
or whatever, although people, you know, there was plenty of
(40:33):
graffiti and beer bottles and drug needles. And so people
would make their way up there. But, uh, if you
go through the regular door, it's one of the, um,
alarm doors, which would trigger downstairs and all throughout the lobby. Um,
that never came on. and you have to have a
key to disable it, but there is a fire escape, uh,
entry with a ladder basically for the last, like for
(40:55):
the last story, it's a little precarious, but she could
have just simply gone out the window to the fire
escape and climbed up the ladder and then up the
ladder to the tanks. It's not, you know, it's a little, um,
it would be a little bit of a scary trip
up that ladder, I think. But, uh, considering what happened, she, she,
clearly was, uh, was not in a good place mentally.
(41:18):
So I think that's completely believable.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
That journalist, Josh Dean, um, went in, I think, 2015
to see the CISO himself. He had, uh, gotten obsessed
with the, the, um, case. So he went and kind
of investigated it in person. And, um, he quickly found
that open window was still open, uh, and the fire
escape was easily accessible. And, um, in the, uh, I
(41:43):
think one of his articles is called American Horror Story,
which is a reference to what I think the hotel
season of American Horror Story was based on or inspired
by Elisa Lam's disappearance. But there's a picture that he
took of that ladder leading from the fire escape on
the 15th or 14th floor up to the roof. And
(42:06):
all you see is up, like you just see the
ladder and then above it is sky. But after reading
about it, your imagination just thinks of like the 15
stories behind you. Like as you're, you know, as you're
looking up this ladder, it's one of the most unsettling
pictures I've ever seen. If you read the text, you know,
that surround it. But he said by his judgment, an
(42:31):
average person could easily make it up that ladder, especially
if you don't look down. He said, if you're carrying
a body or another person, you could not do it.
He said, it just would be too difficult.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
And, you know, it's one of those straight up vertical
ladders on the side of the building.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Yeah. But if you were in a manic state, as
a lot of people believe Elisa Lam was, you could
probably make it up that ladder pretty quickly. You wouldn't
even necessarily consider looking down and all of a sudden
you'd be on the roof. And after you were on
the roof, it would be a fairly easy proposition to
get into one of those tanks, especially I think she
weighed about one hundred and fifteen pounds and was about
(43:06):
five feet, four inches. So it was possible for her
to get into one of those tanks through that hatch.
But either she was too scared to come out conceivably,
or she couldn't get out when she wanted to get
out and tired of treading water because the water would
have been about eight feet deep and drowned after a while.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
Yeah, I mean, they did. I think the police dogs
did pick up her scent near that window. So that
seems to be what happened. And you know, this is
one of those cases where the more I read, like
all I could feel was despair about this poor woman
having what looked to be some sort of medication related
(43:51):
manic episode, maybe scared, maybe thinking someone was following her
and trying to get away and, and going at great lengths,
going to great lengths to maybe hide somewhere like inside
of a water tank. I don't know, like, why her
clothes were off or why her clothes ended up in
the tank. I'm not saying any of this makes sense,
(44:11):
but it is something that could happen. And all I
can think about is what an awful place that she
must've been for something like this to have happened.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yeah. And I mean, to kind of back up the, um, the,
the mental break, um, theory, which is what I buy. That's,
that's where I put my stock. Um, She remember I
said she was originally put in a room with a
couple other girls she didn't know at the stay on Maine.
They complained about her behaving strangely. So she was moved
(44:44):
to her own private room. Apparently, she went to a
taping of the Conan O'Brien show and was escorted out
because she was behaving strangely. And then detectives also found
she was on four different medications for bipolar one disorder
and depression. And the LAPD, based on the prescription dates
(45:10):
on the bottles and then the number of pills that
were left and the instructions on the bottles, the LAPD
were able to determine that she hadn't been following the
dosage recommendations or taking her pills or medication. So if
you put all of that together and then also that–
people taking their clothes off as part of a psychotic
(45:31):
episode happens. It's been documented. You like, there's no, there's
no pieces missing on the table. Like she could have
gone out on that fire escape, gone up the ladder.
Like there's nothing that is, well, yeah, but then there's
this really big thing that remains unexplained. Like it explains
absolutely everything. And then suddenly it kind of makes all
the other stuff like government mind control or ghosts or
(45:55):
whatever seem just kind of gross, you know?
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Totally agree. I believe her parents brought a lawsuit against
the hotel that was eventually dismissed, if I'm not mistaken.
And it just remains a very, very sad situation and
a sad case. And it is very annoying when you
get online and everyone thinks that their spirit's being conjured
and all this wacky stuff. It's just not the case.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Not the case indeed. You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (46:25):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Well, that's it for the Cecil hotel and the Lisa
lamb RIP. Uh, and since I said RIP, that means
it's time for a listener mail.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
Uh, I'm going to call this follow up to Y2K.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Oh yes.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Uh, and this is something that we actually had in
our notes that we, I guess just kind of failed
to bring up.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, you had it in your
notes as well. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
The, the 2038 problem. Um, We got a lot of
emails about this, and we're not going to fully probably
explain to everyone's satisfaction how it works. But, hey, guys,
just got done listening to the Y2K podcast, which brought
back an interesting range of memories of living through that time.
In case you weren't aware, there's something called the Unix
(47:13):
Y2K problem that still exists but is slowly being fixed
by smart people behind the scenes.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
Thank goodness.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
The majority of computers in the world run Unix-based operating systems.
not Windows or Mac OS. And unless these systems are
patched at 3.14 on January 19th, 2038, their clocks will
roll over to think it's midnight, January 1st, 1970.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
The cause is basically the same in the early versions
of the OS. Only had so much memory allocated to
time representations, but more modern versions now have this fixed
and hence computers aren't susceptible once they're updated or upgraded.
Although not all systems can be easily Updated. And that
is from a bunch of people, but specifically from PhD
(48:00):
Alan Chalker.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
That's great. Thanks, Alan, to everybody who wrote in. I
was like, oh, man, I meant to include that. But
apparently Unix represents time as the number of seconds from
the epoch date, which is some date in 1970. And
then eventually it's going to have more seconds than it
can represent in the number of digits. So it'll just
roll back over like he was saying. Which is pretty neat.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Come on, Unix.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
Pretty cool. But also I'm glad to hear that there
are smart people working on that because we got 17 years. Man,
you guys take it easy. Take a weekend, you know? Sure.
Go sit in your house and social distance from everybody.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
That's right. We also got a lot of emails just
from people that, some people whose parents helped rewrite code
or were heading up projects rewriting code and It was
pretty cool. We got a lot of emails about that
when you struck a chord.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
Yeah, it was a good idea, Chuck. Well, if you
want to get in touch with us like Alan and
everybody else did, you can send us an email.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.