The remains of Canadian traveler Elisa Lam (born Lam Ho-yi; Chinese: 藍可兒) were found in a large cistern on top of the Stay on Main hotel in Downtown Los Angeles on February 19, 2013. Her parents reported her missing on February 8; she was last seen alive on January 31. A hotel maintenance staff member who was looking into reports of floods and poor water pressure found her dead.
The Los Angeles Police Department published security camera footage showing Lam acting strangely in a hotel elevator on the day she was last seen alive, which sparked more interest in her disappearance on February 13.
The video gained widespread popularity. Although the results of an autopsy conducted on February 21 could not definitively determine how Lam died, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office later declared the death to be an accident in which bipolar illness was a major contributing cause.
After the event, Stay on Main guests sued the hotel, and Lam’s parents filed a second lawsuit later that year. The second lawsuit was dropped in 2015. Early online attention drew attention to what were seen to be peculiar parallels between Lam’s demise and the horror movie Dark Water from 2002. Since then, the case has been discussed in a number of creative works and has been mentioned in global popular culture.
Context
Lam, a Hong Kong-born woman whose parents immigrated, attended the University of British Columbia, however, in early 2013 she was not officially enrolled.
Lam started a Blogspot site called Ether Fields in the middle of 2010. She shared life stories and images of stylishly dressed models online throughout the course of the following two years, mostly focusing on her battle with mental illness.
In a blog entry from January 2012, Lam bemoaned having to abandon numerous classes because of a “relapse” that had occurred at the beginning of the current term, which left her feeling “so utterly directionless and lost.”
Drawing on a quote from author Chuck Palahniuk, she captioned her piece “You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life”. That quotation served as the blog’s epigraph for her.
Lam was concerned that having so many withdrawals on her record would make it appear suspicious and that she wouldn’t be able to finish her coursework and go to graduate school.
Lam stated she will be switching from her blog to “Nouvelle-Nouveau,” a Tumblr site, a little over two years after she had begun posting. The majority of its material was made up of quotations, fashion images, and a few entries written by Lam herself. The epigraph featured a phrase by Palahniuk.
Lam had been diagnosed with depression and bipolar illness. For her mental health problems, she had been prescribed a number of drugs, including venlafaxine, lamotrigine, quetiapine, Dexedrine Spansule, and Wellbutrin.
Lam had no history of suicide thoughts or attempts, according to her family, who supposedly kept her mental condition a secret; nevertheless, one account stated that she had once vanished for a short while. Lam had a history of skipping her bipolar medicine; as a result, she experienced hallucinations on many occasions, which would sometimes send her running under her bed. She was sent to the hospital during one of these episodes.
Lam went to California by herself, using intercity buses and Amtrak. She went to the San Diego Zoo, where she shared pictures on social media. She landed in Los Angeles on January 26.
Two days later, she was staying at the Cecil Hotel, which is close to Skid Row in Downtown. Lam was given a shared room on the fifth floor of the hotel at first, but after two days, her neighbors complained about what the hotel’s counsel would later characterize as “certain odd behavior,” and Lam was given a room of her own.
Amy Price, who was managing the Cecil Hotel and Stay on Main when Lam vanished, claimed that Lam would write letters to her roommates telling them to “go home” and “go away,” lock the door to the room, and need a password to enter. Lam had gone to a live Conan taping in Burbank a few days before to her disappearance, but because of her disruptive conduct, security had her taken from the property.
Absence
Up to the day she vanished, Lam kept in regular communication with her parents in British Columbia while on the road. Her parents phoned the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) on January 31, 2013, the day she was supposed to check out of the Cecil and head to Santa Cruz, but they never heard from her. Her family then went to Los Angeles to assist in the search.
When hotel employees spotted Lam that day, they stated she was alone herself. The only person who remembered seeing her that day was Katie Orphan, manager of The Last Bookstore, who worked outside the hotel.
Orphan told CNN that “she was outgoing, very lively, very friendly” as she accepted gifts to give to her family. “[She was] talking about what book she was getting and whether or not what she was getting would be too heavy for her to carry around as she traveled,” Orphan said.
To the degree that they could under the law, police searched the motel. Dogs were used to search Lam’s room and the whole building, including the rooftop, but they were unable to find her smell. Sgt. Rudy Lopez subsequently stated, “But we didn’t search every room; we could only do that if we had probable cause” to think criminal activity had taken place. A week after Lam was last seen on February 6, the LAPD determined that more assistance was required. She appeared on fliers that were shown online and throughout the area. It used the media to raise public awareness of the case.
Lift footage
Following a further week without hearing from Lam, the LAPD on February 13 made public a video of her last known sighting, which was captured on January 31 by a security camera in one of Cecil’s elevators. Lam is the only one in the video who performs odd motions and gestures for around 2.5 minutes.
At one moment, the elevator’s doors are still open as she exits the vehicle after seemingly pressing every button on the panel and glances into the corridor. She goes back, and the doors close later, but they don’t close this time.
Because of Lam’s peculiar behavior, the video attracted attention to the case on a global scale and has been thoroughly examined and studied. It was extensively republished, especially on Youku, a Chinese video-sharing platform, where in its first ten days, it had 3 million views and 40,000 comments. It was unnerving for many of the pundits to witness.
Here is the real footage of the lift 👇
A number of explanations surfaced to justify her behavior. Lam was attempting to maneuver the elevator vehicle in order to get away from someone who was chasing her, to start with. Although no drugs were found in her system, others speculated that she may be under the influence of ecstasy or another party drug. The notion that she was experiencing a psychotic episode also surfaced when her bipolar diagnosis was made public.
Some viewers contended that someone had altered the footage before it was released. They said that in addition to the timestamp being obscured, portions had been sped up and about a minute of film had been cut out. This may have been done to conceal the name of someone who would have been on the video otherwise, whether or not they were connected to the disappearance.
Finding of a Body
Low water pressure started to bother hotel guests during Lam’s disappearance. Later on, some people complained that their water tasted strange and was black in color. A hotel maintenance worker named Santiago Lopez discovered Lam’s body early on February 19 in one of four 1,000-gallon (3,785 L) tanks on the roof that supplied water to the cafeteria, guest rooms, and kitchen.
He could see Lam face-up in the water through the open hatch. Because the maintenance door of the tank was too tiny to fit the equipment needed to retrieve Lam’s body, the tank had to be emptied and cut open.
Bipolar disorder was found to have had a key role in the unintentional drowning that was reported by the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office on February 21. According to the whole coroner’s report, which was made public in June, Lam was discovered dead and covered with a “sand-like particulate”; clothes that like the ones she wore in the elevator footage were floating in the water. She was also found to have her room key and watch.
Lam’s corpse was swollen and somewhat deteriorated. The majority of it was greenish, with some skin separation and noticeable marbling on the abdomen. Suicide, physical harm, or sexual abuse were not present. Tests for toxicology revealed residues that matched prescription medicine discovered in her possessions along with over-the-counter medications including ibuprofen and Sinutab.
There was extremely little alcohol (about 0.02 g%) and no other recreational substances. However, the number of prescription pharmaceuticals in her system suggested that she was either undermedicating or had just stopped taking her meds, according to specialists and investigators.
Other problems
Although Lam’s cause of death had been established by the inquiry, it had not previously provided an explanation for how she had entered the tank. All staff members have the passcodes and keys to unlock the closed doors and stairs leading to the hotel’s roof, and any attempt to force them would allegedly have set off an alert.
She may have gotten past those security measures by using the hotel’s fire escape; her smell trail vanished close to a window that led to it. Following Lam’s passing, a video was uploaded on the Internet which demonstrated that two of the water tanks’ lids were open and that it was simple to access the hotel’s roof using the fire escape.
Others questioned whether she could have entered the tank on her own, aside from the obvious question of how she got onto the roof. Hotel staff had to climb a ladder to view the water in all four of the tanks, which were 4-by-8-foot (1.2 by 2.4 m) cylinders supported by concrete blocks.
There was no fixed access to the tanks. Heavy lids that would be hard to change from the inside safeguarded them. The question of how she may have closed the lid from within was resolved when the hotel employee who discovered the corpse stated that it was open at the time.
Shortly after Lam went missing, police dogs scoured the hotel, even up on the top, but they were unable to locate her.
The lack of them on the toxicology screen does not deter proponents of the theory that the elevator video proves she was under the influence of illegal drugs; instead, they suggest that they may have malfunctioned during the time her body broke down in the tank or that she may have taken uncommon combinations of these drugs that a standard screen would miss.
The number of pills left in her prescription bottle and the extremely low level of prescription medicines in her system indicated that she may have been undermedicating or had just stopped taking her medication for bipolar illness, which might have resulted in a psychotic episode.
The insufficient data raised doubts about the autopsy report and its findings as well. For example, it doesn’t specify whether or if the fingernail and rape kits were processed or what the results were. In addition, it documents subcutaneous blood collecting in Lam’s anal region, which some observers [who?] speculated was indicative of sexual assault; a pathologist pointed out that this may also have been caused by bloating during the body’s natural breakdown, and her rectum was prolapsed. Pathologists working for the coroner had mixed feelings regarding their determination that Lam’s death was an accident.
Her Tumblr site was updated following her passing, most likely as a result of Tumblr’s Queue feature, which enables entries to go live automatically while a user is gone. Neither her body nor her hotel room contained her phone. It’s unclear if the ongoing changes to her blog were made possible by her phone being stolen, by a hacker, or by the Queue; moreover, it’s unclear if they had anything to do with her passing.
Court Cases
The hotel was accused by Lam’s parents of failing to “inspect and seek out hazards in the hotel that presented an unreasonable risk of danger to (Lam) and other hotel guests” in a September 2013 wrongful death lawsuit. The parents also sought funeral expenses and an undisclosed amount of damages.
The hotel maintained that it was not liable for failing to prevent Lam’s entry into the water tanks since it could not have reasonably been expected that Lam would do so and because it was still unclear how Lam got there. 2015 saw the lawsuit being dropped.
Within popular culture
There have been comparisons drawn between Lam’s dying circumstances and the narrative of the 2005 horror movie Dark Water. A mother and daughter move into a dilapidated apartment building in that movie, which is an American remake of a previous Japanese film of the same name based on a short story by Koji Suzuki from 1996.
They ultimately find the remains of a girl who had been reported missing from the building a year earlier in the building’s rooftop water tank thanks to a broken elevator and tainted water flowing from the faucets.
Several artistic endeavors have drawn inspiration from the Lam case. The ABC series Castle had an episode titled “Watershed” in May 2013. The show followed a mystery author and a New York police detective as they investigated murders.
A security footage of the lady recorded in an elevator is among the evidence that the two investigators in “Watershed” used to follow leads on the death of a young woman discovered dead in the rooftop water tank of the “Cedric Hotel” in Manhattan. In the end, it is discovered that she had been investigating a different hotel guest while pretending to be a sex worker.
The plot of How to Get Away with Murder, another ABC sitcom, was comparable. The first season, which aired in 2014, revealed through a sequence of flashbacks that a sorority girl who had gone missing at the beginning of the season had been murdered and that her corpse had been placed in the water tank on the sorority house’s roof. In a similar vein, her corpse is not found until a maintenance man is summoned to the residence to fix a problem with the water pressure.
Filmmakers in Hong Kong, where Lam’s family was originally from, were also influenced by the case. In 2014, Nick Cheung made his directorial debut with the horror movie Hungry Ghost Ritual, which included a sequence where a ghost terrorizes a young lady in an elevator. The scenario is staged to resemble a security camera video, much like the footage of Lam in the elevator of the Stay on Main.
A year after Lam’s death, filmmaker Liu Hao said in mainland China that he would be creating a film based on it; for research purposes, he traveled to Los Angeles and spent several days at the Cecil. Actress Gao Yuanyuan reportedly expressed interest in portraying Lam in Chinese media.
Less than a year after Lam’s passing, in March 2014, brothers Brandon and Philip Murphy sold a horror film called The Bringing, which utilizes the inquiry into it as the basis for the steadily unraveling sanity of a fictitious investigating detective. They received a lot of flak for acting in this manner so soon after the tragedy.
The film was initially supposed to be directed by Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, but in August it was revealed that Sony Pictures’ Jeremy Lovering would take over as director once production got underway.
The 2014 music video for “Ancient Mars” by Vancouver pop duo The Zolas is a stylized depiction of Lam’s last day, with a young lady strolling about Los Angeles and appreciating the little things in life. Zach Gray was a musician who attended UBC around the same time as Lam and had a friend who knew her.
“It bugged me how tidily people explained away her disappearance with drugs or mental illness,” Gray said. “Though it’s mostly fiction, we wanted people to see it and feel like she was a real girl and a familiar girl and not just a police report.” Later that year, Lam’s narrative served as inspiration for “Disappearing Syndrome,” a song written by the American post-hardcore band Hail the Sun.
Guitarist for the group Aric Garcia stated, “It’s such a chilling and eerie case,” in a Reddit Ask Me Anything.
The media conjectured in 2015 that Lam’s passing served as inspiration for the fifth season of American Horror Story. Creator Ryan Murphy announced in late April that the upcoming season will take place in a hotel in contemporary Los Angeles.
According to him, he was motivated by a security footage of a young lady who “got into an elevator at a downtown hotel… [and] was never seen again.” Although he did not mention her by name, it was assumed that he was referring to Lam.
The tracks “Window Sash Weights” and “Stranger Than Paradise” from Sun Kil Moon’s 2017 album Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood” particularly mention the incident and advocate for the theory that it was a hoax.
In an interview, Mark Kozelek, one of the band members, stated, “I’ve concluded that nobody died in the water tank.” The girl’s face is pixelated, making it impossible to recognize her in the elevator.”
BuzzFeed Unsolved investigated the case in March 2016 and had hosts Ryan and Brent stay at the hotel to see sites related to the mystery.
The story of the 2018 horror movie Followed features Lam’s case and the elevator footage, but the body is discovered in a hotel’s basement. In the movie, her actions in the elevator were described as part of “the Korean elevator game,” in which guests who die at the hotel are called to life by hitting buttons in a specific order.
2018 saw the release of the track “Elisa Lam” by the industrial rock group SKYND, which was inspired by Lam’s situation. The elevator security footage is replicated in the song video.
In February 2019, the game YIIK: A Postmodern RPG was launched. The game’s narrative began with the disappearance of Semi Pak, who was identical to Lam in appearance. Many people thought this was disgusting and denounced it.
A two-hour episode titled “Ghost Adventures,” which debuted on Discovery+ on January 4, 2021, looked into Lam’s death.
A four-episode docuseries called Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel was announced by Netflix on January 13, 2021. The show delves into Lam’s death and debuted on February 10, 2021.
In the short story “Un lugar soleado para gente sombría” (part of Mariana Enríquez’s 2024 homonymous collection published in Spanish by Anagrama), the death of Lam is mentioned in passing as a plot device.
The story tells of a journalist who is assigned by her editor to write an article about a cult that regularly holds séances by the hotel’s water tank in an attempt to communicate with Lam’s ghost and reveal the circumstances surrounding her death.
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