F__k That - The Cecil Hotel

Promo for Tragedy With A View

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Picture this. You're standing at the peak of a mountain,
watching the sunrise paint the world in shades of gold.
That feeling pure magic, the kind that makes every grueling
step worth it. But what happens when that adventure takes
a turn for the worse, when the trail isn't what
you expected, and the great outdoors shows just how wild

(00:21):
it can be. That's where Tragedy with a View comes in.
I'm your host, Kayla, and in this podcast, I tell
the stories of adventures gone wrong in some of the
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that catch even the most seasoned explorers off guard, to
true crime trails that unfold where tranquility meets terror. We

(00:43):
dive into these close calls with disaster that reminds us
just how small we really are. But don't worry, it's
not all doom and gloom. Every story comes with a perspective,
a chance to reflect on the fragility and wonder of life.
After all, what is life without close calls with disaster. So,
if you're the kind of person who loves a good

(01:04):
adventure and doesn't shy away from a little chaos along
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Speaker 2 (01:30):
Dark Cast Network Indie Pods with a Dark Side. Hello,

(01:59):
and welcome back to Fuck That. Sorry for the week off. Well,
technically I'm a bi weekly podcast, although I have been
trying to produce episodes weekly, but I did get really
sick for a week. I thought I might have had
the bubonic plague for a second there, So I missed
you all as much as I'm sure that you all

(02:21):
have missed me. One quick thing before I jump into
the episode. There are a lot of episodes that are
backlogged and archived. I think there's about ten right now,
and I have one full length bonus episode currently, as
well as one more that I'm recording after this, and
then two more that I'm going to be doing in February.

(02:44):
So if you're looking for that kind of bonus content,
Patreon f That Pod. So a couple of weeks ago,
I posted a poll on Instagram. If you don't follow
me on social media. Check out my handles there. In
my show notes, I do a lot of interactive Q
and a's there to get listener feedback. So I asked

(03:04):
people what kind of cases they wanted to hear, and
I had a decent amount of people say that they
wanted to hear more cases that involved the paranormal in
some way. This is a true crime podcast, and I'm
not sure how receptive most of my audience would be
to that. I would be totally down to do that,
So I figured I'd meet somewhere in the middle and

(03:26):
kind of soft launch into a paranormal episode. So this
week I'm going to be covering the very checkered history
of the Cecil Hotel, where there's going to be a
lot of crimes that take place here. But I'm also
going to bring in the superstition surrounding the Cecil Hotel.
And if I get some solid feedback and people like

(03:47):
paranormal cases, then maybe I'll pepper some in more frequently.
All Right, here we go, Shit's about to get real weird.
This week. We're checking into the Cecil Hotel, a place
where normal checks out the moment you check in Born
in the Glitz, and glam of the nineteen twenties. Located
in the heart of skid Row, this hotel quickly turned

(04:10):
into the VIP Lounge for the strange and sinister. The
Cecil Hotel, labeled Hotel Suicide by its guests, opened its
doors during the formal opening, which took place on December
twentieth of nineteen twenty four. The hotel initially saw success,
and it remained a five star destination until the Great Depression.

(04:32):
Hotelier William banks Hammer wanted to seize the need for
mid priced quality hotels in downtown, which was a very
ideal location at the time, and his ambition materialized as
a fourteen story building. They skipped the thirteenth floor because
they were superstitious, ambitiously named after London's high end Cecil Hotel,

(04:55):
located along River Thames. On the day of its opening,
opening nine was advertised in the Los Angeles Times. Three
hundred rooms were offered for a dollar fifty a night,
and these rooms offered communal showers and baths. Two hundred
rooms were offered that had a private toilet for two
dollars a night, and two hundred rooms for two dollars

(05:16):
and fifty cents got you a private toilet and bath,
and this was something that people really wanted. It was downtown,
it was convenient, it was near train stations, close to restaurants, theaters, hospitals,
and they offered discounted rates for long term rentals. So
initially the Cecil Hotel was really successful. The client tell

(05:41):
of the hotel was a really solid mix of both
middle class tourists as well as permanent residents. Not long
after the seemingly promising hotel opening, tragedy struck. In January
of nineteen twenty seven, Percy Ormond Cook, a former real
estate dealer, ended his life at the Cecil Hotel. Amidst

(06:03):
personal turmoil and quite frankly financial wastefulness. He somehow managed
to piss forty thousand dollars down the drain at that
time trying to forget his wife and son that he
was estranged from. Unfortunately, spending all of that money did
not help, and he ended up ending his own life.

(06:25):
Percy's suicide, which was through a self inflicted gunshot wound,
really reflected the hollowness of wealth without happiness, which is
a very common theme for a lot of the tragedies
that take place at this hotel, particularly after the Great Depression.
But more importantly, this signaled a tragic and potentially the

(06:48):
first recorded death of its kind at the Cecil Hotel.
Percy's death in an ambulance en route to the hospital
was the start of the first somber chapter to the
hotel's very dark history. Dorothy Richardson, a thirty three year
old from San Francisco, roamed the quarters of the Cecil

(07:08):
Hotel for days, completely unnoticed until her distress became public.
Collapsing in the hotel, Dorothy was rushed to the hospital
after a failed attempt to take her own life following
her husband's strange death. She thankfully managed to survive. I'm
going to pivot now to what Los Angeles was like

(07:30):
at this time. Quite frankly, Los Angeles was riding high
on a wave of economic prosperity. The city was booming
with new buildings, a growing film industry, and a very
bullish stock market. In nineteen twenty eight, the city's towering
City Hall was completed, and that stood as a testament

(07:51):
to the growth and development and optimism of the future
of Los Angeles. And amidst this backdrop, the season Hotel
was also thriving, and it was basking in Los Angeles
Golden era. But all good things must come to an end,
and all of this was about to come crashing down,

(08:13):
and the Roaring Twenties would end up becoming a nightmare,
kind of like the twenties that were in today. On
October twenty fourth, nineteen twenty nine, a day that has
gone down in history as Black Thursday, nearly seventeen million
shares of stocks were sold at bargain bottom of the

(08:35):
barrel pricing, which decimated a majority of investors. Each week
that followed brought the US economy from bad to worse
to even worse, and the US was flung into the
Great Depression. By nineteen thirty three, almost seven thousand banks

(08:55):
went under, industrial production decreased by almost fifty percent, and
unemployment reached twenty five percent. But whatever forces we're at
play here, we're like, nah, nah nah, the Great Depression
isn't enough. Fuck the United States right now. We are
also going to throw a bunch of dust at them.

(09:17):
And now I'm going to talk about the dust Bowl
of the nineteen thirties. This was a period of severe
dust storms that nearly destroyed completely agriculture in both the
United States and Canadian prairies. This was a really sad
event because it caused a lot of human displacement as
families had to leave their farms that they spent years

(09:39):
of their lives working on and traveled to other areas
of the United States to look for work. According to
sources I've linked in the show notes, the dust Bowl
Migration of the nineteen thirties was the largest migration in
American history, with over three hundred thousand displaced Americans moving
to California. It goes without saying that these were obviously

(10:02):
very trying times in the United States, given both the
Great Depression and the dust Bowl, but this was a
huge turning point for skid Row, one of which it
would never recover from. And while I think most, if
not all, of you are familiar with skid Row, for
those of you that aren't, it covers about fifty blocks

(10:24):
east of downtown LA. Unfortunately, today it is known to
have a really large homeless population, and unfortunately there's also
a lot of violence that goes along with that. But
this is really what facilitated the turn for skid Row.

(11:00):
After three hundred thousand Americans moved to California. Following the
dust Bowl, the homeless population on skid Row grew to
over ten thousand individuals, and unfortunately, this meant that crime
grew as well. Incidences of theft and pick pocketing grew,
and many restaurants ended up converting into soup kitchens. While

(11:24):
the Depression was over with by nineteen forty, skid Row
is still suffering from the tragedy left in its wake. Today.
The Cecil Hotel went from a five star destination to
the equivalent of spending a night at the Stanley Hotel.
For those of you that haven't seen The Shining that
is where that reference is from, highly recommend you watch it.

(11:47):
It's a Stanley Kubrick film. The hotel was quickly neglected
in terms of care, betting, furnishings weren't replaced when needed,
lighting would break and it just would not get repaired.
But that wasn't as detrimental to the downfall of the
Cecil Hotel as the shift in its guests were following

(12:08):
the Great Depression. The guests that began to check into
the hotel weren't checking in for a place to stay.
They were checking in to do whatever the fuck they want,
and ninety nine percent of the time those were illegal things.
Guests often checked in to cheat on their spouses, buy, sell,
and use drugs, and solicit sex workers. This culmination of

(12:33):
occurrences led to bad circumstances and an uptick in police
getting dispatched to the hotel on almost a daily basis,
and it wasn't long until the alleged curse of the
Cecil Hotel began. A forty four year old man named
Frank Everett Lindsay spent the night at the Cecil Hotel

(12:55):
on September ninth of nineteen thirty. Frank was arrested in
October for second degree kidnapping of an eleven year old
named Pearl Grant. Frank was also a suspect in the
murder of his wife. On January twenty first, nineteen thirty one,
a nineteen year old man named Boyd Hanson struck Cecil

(13:17):
resident Roy Smith outside of the hotel. Roy unfortunately passed
away after the incident. In another incident, Lewis Methousand struck
and killed a thirty year old resident of the hotel
named Virginia Tallman. November nineteenth, nineteen thirty one, was the
day where hotel suicide saw its first death by suicide

(13:40):
since the nineteen twenties. Forty six year old W. K.
Norton was discovered by a cleaning lady who had only
been working at the hotel for a few months prior
to this. After knocking on the door and getting no response,
she assumed the room was empty and she let herself in.
But when she let herself in and she found WK

(14:01):
deceased on the bed. WK had checked into the hotel
under the alias of James Wilie, but investigators were able
to determine his true identity from the bank checks in
his pocket. Additionally, poison capsules were found in his pockets,
which allowed investigators to determine how he took his own life.

(14:23):
Authority has got in contact with his wife and she
had informed them that he was suffering from mental health
challenges due to the economy. What is absolutely wild to
me is that somebody could just casually obtain poison capsules
at this point in time. But I guess it's not
that crazy, seeing as how doctors prescribed cocaine back in

(14:47):
the day. What a time to be alive, I guess.
A fifty three year old man and former Army medical
sergeant named Lewis D. Borden committed suicide in Lie of
nineteen thirty four. He cut his throat with a razor
blade and left behind a note that he was suffering
from medical issues. In nineteen thirty seven, a twenty five

(15:10):
year old named Grace Magro died after jumping from her
room onto the telephone pole wires below. She was staying
with twenty six year old MW. Madison, a sailor, who
stated that he was asleep when Grace jumped and that
he had no explanation to what could have prompted her
to jump. No charges were ever brought against him. The

(15:32):
following year, Roy Thompson, a thirty five year old Marine
corpse firefighter, jumped from his room, which was Room fourteen
thirty one, and landed on the skylight of the building
next door. In January of nineteen forty, forty five year
old Dorothy Steiger ingested poisoned during her stay at the hotel.
She died the following day. Obviously, the hotel had seen

(15:56):
a lot of tragedy, and the nose dive that the
hotel was taking in quality finances and guests facilitated a
change in ownership in nineteen forty one, when the Albert
group took over the hotel. The shift in ownership brought
in hope that maybe this could be a new era
for the hotel. The Albert family were very experienced in

(16:19):
the hotel industry, and they had owned several successful chains
across the western United States. The group gave the hotel
a facelift and made some other improvements, but that could
not stop the hotel from continuing on to be the
nightmarish healthscape that it was destined to be. To make
matters worse, in an effort to attract more clientele, they

(16:42):
began advertising insanely low rates of a dollar daily, which
was a cheaper rate than opening night over a decade ago,
and then they offered six dollars for an entire week.
This is a classic example of you get what you
pay for, because all this maneuver did was further perpetuate

(17:03):
the very guests that they were trying to avoid. Just
a quick heads up before I get to the first
guess that I'm going to talk about. This is going
to involve the murder of a newborn child. So listen
to this with care. September of nineteen forty four, Dorothy
Jean Purcell, a pregnant nineteen year old, woke up at
night with severe pain. She was staying with her thirty

(17:27):
eight year old lover, which is just I won't get
into that, but that's gross. She went into the bathroom
and gave birth to a baby boy that she claimed
she was not aware that she was pregnant with, and
then she further claimed that she thought was a stillborn.
So because Dorothy allegedly thought that this newborn was a stillborn,

(17:50):
she decided to toss her newborn child out of the
window instead of calling nine to one one, and autopsy
determined that the newborn boy had had air in his
lungs at the time of his death, and she was
subsequently charged with murder. Dorothy was then acquitted when psychologists
testified that Dorothy was temporarily insane at the time she

(18:12):
killed her son. Elizabeth Betty Shore, the woman who became
known as the victim in the Black Dahlia murder that
occurred on January fifteenth of nineteen forty seven, was seen
by police officer Merrill McBride having a drink at the
Cecil Hotel bar on January fourteenth, one day prior to
the murder. In November of nineteen forty seven, thirty five

(18:36):
year old Robert Smith died after he either fell or
jumped from a window on the seventh floor. In February

(18:59):
of nineteen fifty, a man named Ed Bauman lost his
arm in an elevator accident at the hotel. On October
twenty second of nineteen fifty four, a woman who was
staying in Room seven oh four under the name Margaret Brown,
jumped from the window in her room to her death.
On February eleventh of nineteen sixty two, fifty year old

(19:21):
Julia Moore jumped to her death from the window in
her eighth floor room and landed on an interior lightwell
on the second floor. On October twelfth of nineteen sixty two,
twenty seven year old Pauline aught In, who was staying
at the hotel with her husband Dewey, got into a
heated argument with him. Later that evening, Dewey told Pauline

(19:44):
that he was leaving for good, and he stormed out
of their shared hotel room. Pauline then wrote a suicide
note and jumped out of the window in her ninth
room floor. Pauline landed on a sixty five year old
pedestrian named George Giannini, and both of them were killed instantly.
Sixty five year old Delbert Lawrence jumped to his death

(20:05):
from the fourteenth floor on April twelfth of nineteen sixty three.
On June fourth of nineteen sixty four, an employee of
the hotel found a long term resident, sixty nine year
old Pigeon Osgood, murdered in her room. Her murder, along
with a previous murder in a hotel nearby, were linked,
but remain unsolved today. Two unidentified women in their early

(20:30):
twenties jumped to their deaths from a window on the
twelfth floor on December twentieth of nineteen seventy five. On
December second, nineteen seventy six, twenty six year old Jeffrey
Paley fired over a dozen shots from his twenty two
caliber rifle from the roof of the Cecil Hotel into
a local bank building. He was apprehended at the hotel.

(20:54):
On September one of nineteen ninety two, police discovered an
unidentified man in the behind the hotel. Police were unable
to determine if the man had jumped, fell or was
pushed to his death. On June fifteenth of twenty fifteen,
police were called due to a body on the street

(21:14):
outside of the hotel. The twenty eight year old unidentified
man had fallen to his death, but it was unclear
whether it was suicide or murder. While there were numerous
numerous incidences of the darkness that was seen at the
Cecil Hotel, there were a select few cases that really

(21:36):
drew the most attention to this Healscape. Ricardo Ramirez, the
serial killer who was known as the night Stalker, who
was known to take the lives of thirteen victims between
April of nineteen eighty four to August of nineteen eighty five,
but he had also attempted several murders, committed many sexual

(21:59):
assaults and burglaries. Stayed at the Cecil Hotel on the
top floor when he committed a lot of these crimes.
There is a rumor that he was seen in the
hotel after committing one of the murders, covered in blood,
but this has not been officially confirmed, so I'm just

(22:20):
going to deem that a rumor. While Ramirez was ultimately
caught and subsequently died in prison, the fourteenth floor remained
a plagued location of the hotel, with strange occurrences following
the serial killer's stay. Even more bizarrely, the fourteenth floor
became a location that believers in the occult would frequent

(22:44):
to drink and revel in the floor's dark history. Like Ramirez,
Austrian serial killer Johann Unterweger who murdered individuals in Austria,
West Germany, the United States, and Czechoslovakia, Unterweger stayed at
the Cecil Hotel. When Uterweger left Vienna and arrived in

(23:07):
Los Angeles, he intentionally went straight to the hotel for
his stay because of its reputation and its former guest,
Richard Ramirez. Another benefit for Interwegar was that the hotel
was located in the heart of skid Row, which was
the most ideal location to solicit a sex worker. Similar

(23:28):
to Ramirez, Unterwegar also had a very bizarre following after
he was apprehended, which drew many to the hotel to
experience the place where these fucking pieces of shit stayed.
Prior to Unterwegar and Ramirez, there were a lot of
rumors that surrounded the hotel and the decades prior. There

(23:50):
were so many crimes, tragedies, suicides, and deaths that had
plagued the hotel for decades, so it's obvious that many
people thought that there was something more behind that. People
thought there was a darker entity and a paranormal aspect

(24:10):
to the hotel, which is what facilitated all of these
really sad and tragic circumstances. This was further propelled with
Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterwegger. There was a case in

(24:42):
twenty thirteen that I really think, for whatever reason, people
really clung onto anything but the actuality. So I think
that this incident in twenty thirteen really fueled these parent
normal speculations for the hotel. As I had mentioned before,

(25:05):
for quite some time, the hotel had not only a
bad reputation, but a spooky one as well. Many believed,
based on all of the dark events that surrounded the
Cecil Hotel, that perhaps there were more sinister reasons behind
all of the darkness that occurred inside of the hotel's walls.
This theory was further solidified in twenty thirteen following the

(25:29):
death of Elisa Lamb. I think that this is likely
the most well known death in the Cecil Hotel. Unfortunately,
but Alisa was a very bright, intelligent student at the
University of British Columbia who decided to take a break
to travel and was last seen on January thirty first,

(25:52):
and she was then reported missing by her parents on
February first. On February thirteenth, secure footage emerged of Alisa
in the hotel elevator, and the video went viral due
to the very strange behavior that she was exhibiting in
the footage. In the video, it almost looks as though

(26:13):
Alisa enters the elevator pushes several buttons. She then pops
her head out suddenly to look to the left and
to the right. She then goes to hide in the
corner of the elevator. At one point, she stands just
outside of the door and does weird motions with her
hands for several seconds, and then she's gone. On February nineteenth,

(26:36):
a maintenance worker found Elisa deceased in one of the
four one thousand gallon tanks on the roof that provided
water to the rooms, a kitchen, and a coffee shop.
Many rumors and theories emerged following the release of the video,
and even more so after Elisa was found, but her

(26:57):
parents had made it abundantly clear that Elisa struggled with
bipolar disorder and depression. Not only that, but Alisa was
known to not take her medications and this had previously
caused her to have hallucinations, which resulted in a hospitalization
for one of her episodes. Nonetheless, this is a very

(27:18):
sad and strange death that fueled the paranormal rumors. Over
the years, ownership of the Cecil Hotel was passed around
like a hot potato. Nobody wanted to be responsible for
that healthscape. Way back in nineteen eighty eight, street Wise
Investments LLC purchased the hotel from Universal Foreclosure Services, which

(27:42):
goes to show you how well it was doing financially.
And throughout skid row. There were several programs that were
enacted over the decades to try to mitigate crime, but
none of them worked, and it's really because they didn't
focus on the issue at hand. What I mean by
that is the programs that they enacted were programs like, hey,

(28:03):
where can we place things that are really inconvenient to
homeless people so that they aren't able to sleep. Let's
put things on benches so that those that are displaced
cannot sleep on the benches. Hey, let's ticket homeless people
for loitering. So they get ticketed for loitering and they
don't even have income. So really the programs that they

(28:25):
enacted were meant to punish the people that were already
homeless and didn't have anything, rather than an actual attempt
to mitigate crime. The Cecil Hotel underwent a transformation in
twenty eighteen with a revamp, and three years later it
introduced a fresh new persona as stay on main, though

(28:46):
it shared amenities and routined its original online presence. Fast
forward to twenty fourteen, a New York hotelier scooped it
up for thirty million dollars, and soon after a development
firm clinched a ninety nine year lease with a commitment
to preserve its significant architecture but overhauling the dated interiors.

(29:08):
Plans stalled due to the pandemic. While in twenty seventeen
it gained status as a historic monument, by twenty twenty one,
the Cecil Hotel had pivoted to providing affordable housing. In
twenty twenty two, the south side of the Cecil Hotel
which had long sported a painted room rate advertisement, was

(29:31):
controversially whitewashed. This act, which erased the visible history dating
back to at least nineteen twenty seven, sparked speculation and concern.
Questions arose about who was responsible for the removal of
the signage, now protected as a historic landmark. Reports surfaced
of a commissioned mural by artist Matthew Garcia and future

(29:55):
plans for the frames, a billboard project by Simon barn Development,
hinting at a new visual era for the Cecil. But
as of today, that's the story of the Cecil Hotel.
It's not just a place to lay your head, It's
where some left their souls instead. The Cecil isn't just

(30:15):
a building. It's a symbol of Los Angele's dark history
and a collection of tales that remind us of its legacy,
a patchwork of Los Angeles highs, lows, and darkness. If
you liked what you heard today, please like, review, subscribe.
You can catch all of my archived episodes, bonus episodes,

(30:38):
early access to episodes on Patreon f that Pod. Catch
me on all social media as well at f that Pod,
except for Instagram, which is F that Underscore Pod and
the website is f thopod dot com.