Cecil Hotel (Stay on Main)

Elisa Lam's body was found in a rooftop water tank at the Cecil in February 2013 after guests complained the water tasted wrong, and the elevator footage of her last moments has been dissected online ever since. That's one of at least eighty deaths tied to the Cecil, plus the fact that it was the home base of both Richard Ramirez and fellow serial killer Jack Unterweger, who picked the Cecil on purpose because Ramirez had stayed there.

In February 2013, maintenance workers at the Cecil Hotel climbed onto the roof to check the water tanks because guests had been complaining the water tasted strange and came out black. They found Elisa Lam's body inside one of the four tanks. She was 21, a Canadian college student from Vancouver, and the last time anyone had seen her alive was on a hotel elevator camera recording that would end up viewed millions of times. The footage shows her pressing every floor button, stepping out, stepping back in, hiding in the corner, gesturing at something in the hallway that isn't visible on camera. She's there for about four minutes. Then she's gone.

The LAPD ruled her death an accidental drowning. The case is still one of the most picked-over unsolved-feeling cases on the internet, because nobody has ever satisfactorily explained how a 98-pound woman climbed a locked roof, opened a heavy tank lid, and drowned herself inside without alerting anyone. Her diagnosed bipolar disorder is the official answer. A lot of people aren't satisfied with it.

The Cecil opened in December 1924, built by William Banks Hanner for around a million dollars as a Beaux Arts hotel with a marble lobby, stained-glass windows, and 700 rooms meant to attract the downtown business crowd. It looked the part for exactly five years. The Great Depression hit, downtown L.A. collapsed, and the neighborhood around the hotel became Skid Row. The Cecil never recovered. For the next ninety years it ran as a cheap transient hotel serving whoever had the cash for a night.

The death count is staggering. Wikipedia's list of incidents at the Cecil runs to dozens of entries: suicides, murders, overdoses, falls. The first documented suicide was Percy Ormond Cook in January 1927, who shot himself in the head over a marriage he couldn't save. In 1962, a woman named Pauline Otton jumped from the ninth floor and killed a pedestrian on her way down. In 1964, retired telephone operator "Pigeon Goldie" Osgood was raped, stabbed, and strangled in her room. Her killer was never caught. She was the one who fed the pigeons in Pershing Square every day.

Then the Cecil started attracting killers on purpose. Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, lived on the top floor during his 1985 murder spree. He paid $14 a night and reportedly came back to the hotel covered in blood on more than one occasion. In 1991, Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger stayed at the Cecil during a five-week visit to Los Angeles and strangled three women (Shannon Exley, Irene Rodriguez, and Peggy Booth) in his hotel room. Unterweger later claimed he picked the Cecil because Ramirez had stayed there.

That's two serial killers using the same hotel as a base. It's not a coincidence. The Cecil was cheap, anonymous, and nobody at the front desk was asking hard questions.

The hotel closed to the public in 2017 and was supposed to reopen as affordable housing, though the project has been repeatedly delayed. As of the last public reporting, the building is in a strange limbo: partially renovated, partially being used for supportive housing, partially still the Cecil people have been writing about for a century.

The ghost stories almost feel beside the point. Guests in the old days reported a man in a suit walking hallways, footsteps on floors that were closed off, lights flickering in the elevator Elisa Lam used. There's a story about Goldie Osgood's room that staff preferred not to rent. There's an often-repeated claim that the Black Dahlia drank at the Cecil bar the night before her murder in 1947, though historians who've looked at it carefully say there's no evidence for the connection.

At a certain point the accumulation of real documented deaths starts to feel heavier than the ghost stories. The Cecil didn't need to be haunted. It had enough real tragedy packed into its walls that the supernatural almost feels like a coping mechanism.