Elisa Lam

I thought for a long time about whether to include this story.

Elisa Lam’s death became one of the most discussed cases of the internet age. A short, grainy security video of her final hours was watched by millions of people. It inspired endless theories — about ghosts, curses, demons, conspiracies and murderers. It turned a twenty-one-year-old woman’s worst moments into a viral horror clip.

I’ve decided to include her because her story is, in its way, about how we tell stories like the ones in this book — and what that can cost the real people at the center of them. I’m going to tell it plainly and carefully, and I hope you’ll read it that way.

Elisa

Elisa Lam was born in 1991 to a family of Hong Kong immigrants in Vancouver, Canada. She was a student at the University of British Columbia. She was funny, thoughtful and curious, and she kept a blog where she wrote about fashion, books, her life, and her struggles. She wrote openly about living with depression and bipolar disorder, for which she was being treated with several medications.

In January 2013, she set off on a solo trip she called her “West Coast Tour,” traveling by train and bus to San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and other places, posting updates for friends and family online and calling her parents every day.

On January 26, she checked into the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

The Cecil

The Cecil Hotel opened in 1927, during the boom years of the 1920s, as a grand hotel for business travelers. But within a few years, the Great Depression hit, and the neighborhood around it — what would later be called Skid Row — began a long decline. By the late twentieth century, the Cecil had become a cheap residential hotel, home to people living on the margins.

It had a dark reputation. Over the decades, a number of people had died there, by suicide, overdose, violence and accident. The serial killer Richard Ramirez, known as the “Night Stalker,” was reported to have stayed there in the mid-1980s during his crime spree. Another serial killer, the Austrian Jack Unterweger, stayed there in 1991. Some of the hotel’s later owners had rebranded part of it as a budget hostel for young travelers, called Stay on Main, partly to escape that reputation.

Elisa didn’t know much about any of that. She was looking for an inexpensive place to stay in a city she’d always wanted to see.

The Last Days

At first, Elisa shared a room in the hostel section of the hotel with other travelers. After a couple of days, her roommates complained to the hotel about her behavior, and she was moved to a room of her own.

She visited a downtown bookstore, where staff remembered her as outgoing and friendly. She bought books and records as gifts for her family. On January 31, she was due to check out. She didn’t call her parents that day.

Her family called the Los Angeles police. Officers searched the hotel, including the roof, with dogs. They didn’t find her.

The Video

On February 13, hoping someone would recognize her, the Los Angeles Police Department released a short clip of security footage from one of the Cecil’s elevators, recorded around the time Elisa was last seen.

In the video, Elisa steps into the elevator and presses several buttons. The doors don’t close. She leans out into the hallway, looking left and right, as if someone might be there. She steps back in, presses herself into the corner, then steps out again. She makes strange, sweeping gestures with her hands in the hallway, outside the camera’s view. The doors close, and the elevator leaves without her.

The footage was deeply disturbing to watch, and it spread across the internet within hours. Millions of people watched it, analyzed it frame by frame, and offered theories. Some believed she was hiding from someone. Some believed she was possessed. Some believed the video had been altered. People claimed to see figures in the hallway. They pointed out that the time stamp seemed to be obscured. They noted every strange connection they could find.

The Discovery

On February 19, nearly three weeks after Elisa disappeared, guests at the Cecil Hotel complained about low water pressure, and said the tap water tasted strange and looked discolored. A maintenance worker climbed up to the hotel’s roof to check the large water tanks there.

He found Elisa’s body inside one of the tanks.

The news provoked a new wave of speculation. How had she gotten onto the roof, which was supposed to be locked and alarmed? How had she climbed into the tank, which was tall, and then closed its lid? Who could have done this?

The Answer

In June 2013, the Los Angeles County coroner released its findings. Elisa Lam’s death was ruled an accidental drowning. The coroner listed bipolar disorder as a significant contributing factor. There was no evidence of foul play. The toxicology report suggested that she may not have been taking all of her prescribed medications in the days before her death.

Investigators concluded that Elisa had most likely been experiencing a severe psychiatric episode during her final days. It may have caused her to feel frightened, confused, or pursued; to behave as she did in the elevator; and to climb onto the roof and into the water tank, perhaps seeking to hide. Hotel staff later said the roof could be reached by a fire escape, and that the lids of the tanks did not seal shut.

Her family did not challenge those findings.

What the Internet Did

I think the most frightening part of Elisa Lam’s story isn’t anything that happened in the Cecil Hotel. It’s what happened afterward.

In the hunt for a more exciting explanation, internet sleuths accused innocent people of murder. One of them, a musician from Mexico who had stayed at the Cecil a year earlier and had recorded songs with dark themes, was falsely accused of killing her by people online. He was harassed so relentlessly that he later described the experience as devastating. Some theorists harassed the hotel’s staff. Others mocked or picked apart Elisa’s blog posts about her mental illness, as if they were clues in a game.

A young woman with a serious illness died alone, frightened, far from home. Her family lost their daughter. And millions of strangers turned it into entertainment.

If there is a lesson in this book about the line between a good story and a real person, Elisa Lam’s case is it.