The Mysterious Death of Elisa Lam

This tragic and disturbing case has come to my attention, see: http://vigilantcitizen.com/vigilantreport/mysterious-case-elisa-lam/. Elisa Lam was a young student from Vancouver, Canada who in February 2013 decided to stay in the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles; there she died in mysterious circumstances. Apparently nobody knows for sure why she was in the city of Los Angeles in the first place, which seems very peculiar. This hotel was built in 1927 for the purposes of upmarket business accommodation, but after the decline of the "Downtown" area it became a budget hotel with many long-term residents. It has developed a dark reputation though because of the unusually high number of murders and suicides that have taken place there. It's also been the home of two serial killers, which is a massive statistical aberration. The hotel nevertheless sports a very glossy house website which gives no hint of its gruesome history, see: http://www.thececilhotel.com/. Elisa Lam was reported missing on the first of February and the hotel was searched thoroughly by police using sniffer dogs. Her body was found three weeks later in a water tank on the hotel roof; a maintenance man made the discovery after guests complained of plumbing malfunctions. It's nauseating to think that people were drinking and showering in the water surrounding her body for all that time. The coroner ruled that she died by drowning and her death is being treated as "suspicious", but that it was probably suicide; although she has no record of depression or mental illness. However it's quite a mystery how she had ended up in the tank because there is no opening big enough to admit a human body and the lid of the tank is extremely difficult to remove. Firemen recovering the body had to saw the tank open and drain it first. It's also a twelve foot climb just to get onto the top of the tank, that is even if you can open the roof doorway which is locked and alarmed.

Elisa was last seen on a CCTV recording made in the hotel lift; it makes my skin crawl to watch it because her behaviour is very unnerving, even unearthly. The four-minute video has since been posted to YouTube, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6G0P93mRhs. At first all is normal; we see her enter the lift at an average pace and press the button for the destination floor. She then stands in the far corner and waits for the door to shut. After a few seconds she moves forward, briefly sticks her head out and then swiftly retracts it, as if she's hiding from somebody outside, or playing "Peekaboo!", although nothing in her initial actions suggests that. After that she steps out of the lift altogether and moves her feet very deliberately, as if unsure of her footing, and she stands outside in the corridor for a few moments. After that she reenters the lift and presses several of the other buttons, as people sometimes do if they think a lift is not working. Then, most eerily of all, she exists the lift again and seems to be trying to communicate with someone... or something... out in the corridor. However nobody is visible in the camera frame at any time apart from Elisa. Her hand gestures are not those of somebody talking normally; I don't know what to make of what she's doing at this point. She looks almost as if she's performing some kind of grotesque dance. She then stands still for a moment and walks off down the left hand passageway. Eventually the lift doors shut and the rest of the video just shows the doors opening and closing a few times, presumably on the floors Elisa pressed for. She was never seen alive again.

The time stamp is almost illegible on the footage for some reason and this video claims the speed of the playback has been tampered with and clips have been edited out; why? See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YO4QbaNDjI. Whatever happened to this poor young woman, was it connected to the hotel's macabre repute? There's a theory in paranormal research that events leave behind an energetic scar or aftershock at the location they happen. Places where there are lots of suffering, pain, fear and death often end up being renowned as the most supernaturally active. Battlefields and murder scenes are good examples, but the absolute top of the list are hospitals; this I can well believe from my own experience, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/hospital-ghosts.html. Was Elisa the victim of some demonic spirit that is occupying the place? This is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's classic horror movie The Shining, which tells the story of a hotel caretaker in a remote mountain location who is driven insane by the malevolent spiritual entities which inhabit the building, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cb3ik6zP2I. Or perhaps this was a ritual sacrifice of some kind, or a government mind control operation. This could explain the way the hotel was twice used as a safe-house for serial killers; Neil Sanders has reported how there is a link between serial killers and psychological warfare projects, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/programme-20-podcast-neil-sanders.html. The link at the top describes some strange coincidences and associations connected with this event. Whatever the answer to this puzzle, the Cecil Hotel has claimed yet another life; and I would definitely not recommend booking a room there under any circumstances.