The Cecil Hotel:
600 Deaths, One Elevator,
and Elisa Lam
The Cecil Hotel opened in 1927 at 640 South Main Street in downtown Los Angeles, during a period when that neighborhood was respectable enough that a hotel of its size and ambition made sense there. It had 700 rooms, a grand lobby, a restaurant. It was built to last.
It lasted. What changed was everything around it. By the 1950s, Skid Row had migrated to the blocks surrounding the hotel. By the 1960s, the Cecil had transformed into something different — a place where people came not because they were passing through Los Angeles, but because they had nowhere else to go. The rooms were cheap. The management asked few questions. The hotel became a waystation for the desperate, the addicted, the mentally ill, the fugitive.
In the decades that followed, people died there with a frequency that is almost without parallel in American hospitality history. The estimates vary, but the number most often cited — based on police reports, news archives, and the hotel's own records — is somewhere above six hundred deaths since its opening. Suicides, primarily. But also murders, overdoses, accidents, and at least two cases of guests being killed by other guests.
The Guests Nobody Mentions
In 1985, Richard Ramirez — the serial killer known as the Night Stalker — was staying at the Cecil while committing the murders that would eventually lead to his arrest. He was a paying guest. He would return to the hotel after attacks, and other guests reported seeing him in the elevator covered in blood. Management, if they noticed, said nothing. Ramirez was arrested the following year. The hotel's register from that period was never made public.
In 1991, Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer who had convinced European intellectuals that his prison writing proved his rehabilitation, arrived in Los Angeles as a journalist covering crime. He stayed at the Cecil. While there, he killed three women. He was convicted in Austria in 1994 and hanged himself in his cell the night of the verdict.
Two serial killers. The same hotel. Different decades. The Cecil did not advertise this.
Elisa Lam
On January 31, 2013, a 21-year-old Canadian student named Elisa Lam checked into the Cecil Hotel. She was traveling solo through California — she had already visited San Diego and Santa Cruz, and was planning to continue to Santa Cruz. She was in good spirits. Her Tumblr blog, which she maintained regularly, showed someone who was engaged with the world, curious, writing about her experiences with the energy of someone who was enjoying being alive.
She was reported missing on February 1st, 2013, by her parents when she stopped responding to their daily calls.
On February 19, 2013, hotel guests complained about low water pressure and discolored water coming from the taps. A maintenance worker climbed to the roof to check the water tanks. He found Elisa Lam's body inside one of the tanks. She had been there for approximately two weeks. The tank was sealed. The roof required a key card to access. The hatch to the tank was too heavy for an average person to close from the inside.
"The coroner ruled it accidental drowning. They noted her bipolar disorder and found trace amounts of medication in her system. That's the official explanation. What nobody in the official explanation has ever adequately addressed is the elevator footage."
— True crime journalist, 2021The Elevator Footage
Los Angeles Police released security camera footage from the Cecil's elevator as part of their investigation, hoping someone might recognize Elisa or provide information about her last known movements. The footage is from the last confirmed sighting of her alive.
In the footage, Elisa enters the elevator and presses multiple floor buttons. The doors don't close. She looks out into the hallway, then retreats back into the elevator. She moves to the corner, peers around the door frame as if checking whether someone is there. She steps out into the hallway, looks in both directions, returns. She appears to be talking or mouthing words. Her hands make gestures that some have described as hiding, some as playing, some as attempting to communicate with someone not visible on camera.
The elevator doors, which should have closed automatically, remain open the entire time she is in and around the elevator. They close only after she walks away down the hallway, out of frame. She was not seen on camera again.
What people who watch the footage find most disturbing is not the behavior itself — which could be explained by a psychiatric episode, by fear, by any number of things — but the elevator doors. They stayed open far longer than they should have. The elevator appeared to be responding as if it had been called to that floor and was waiting for someone to board. The LAPD confirmed that no mechanical fault was found with the elevator.
The coroner ruled the death accidental. The roof access, the sealed hatch, the mechanical questions — none of it was ever explained to the satisfaction of anyone who looked closely at the case. The investigation is officially closed. The questions are not.
The Cecil was renovated and rebranded as The Ace Hotel in 2021. The lobby is beautiful now. The rooms are tasteful. The history is not mentioned in the brochure. But the building is the same building. The elevator is the same elevator. And the rooftop, which you can access with a key card, still has the water tanks — one of which was drained and sealed, and one of which still operates, still supplying the building's water.