[history/mystery] This may be a short one, but the recent case of Elisa Lam is bizarre enough that I think it's worth sharing.
I've been thinking about this one for months, so this can be my New Year's Eve present to myself or something.
I'm going to try to explain this one as respectfully as I can, because 1) this is still super-recent, like, her family is still alive and trying to sue the relevant parties over this
and 2) it's still very much unsolved and I don't want to make assumptions about something so current and sensitive.
LOTS OF TRIGGER WARNINGS: I will mention mental health, bipolar disorder, mixing medications, manic episodes, being drugged, recent serial killers, water-quality horror, and the fact that this was in 2013.
I will also be posting a video that is safe-for-work, but is known to make people feel uncomfortable or creep them out.
I swear I'll go back to spooky ghosty mysteries after this one.
omg yes this story creeps me out probably more than any other mystery
especially the video DO NOT WATCH IT AT 4AM WHILE WAITING FOR AMBIEN TO KICK IN
YES ESPECIALLY THAT, DON'T DO THAT
but i obsessed over this case for a long time right after it happened
and i even found her tumblr
yeah I saw her tumblr too. very eerie.
I have been thinking about this one for a couple of months now, not gonna lie.
she was just so normal, so much like us
So for everyone who doesn't know, I'm going to tell the story first, and then I'm going to go through and explain why it's so... bizarre.
but yes carry on
This story has been internet-sleuthed into infinity, so expect any google searches to be full of a million different theories and people going IT WAS A MURDER OBVIOUSLY!!1! in the YouTube comments.
But here's how it went down:
Elisa Lam was a 21-year-old Canadian college student.
/sits in here
She left home in January of 2013 to go on a trip to Southern California, and visited several cities in-between. She did social networking like we all do, and posted pictures and updates along the way.
She was travelling alone, getting around mostly by train and buses, but she would call home to check in with her parents every single day.
At the end of January, she checked into the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, where she stayed for five days.
But on the day she was supposed to check out, her parents never got a call from her, and they started to worry.
After failing to get in contact with her, they called the Los Angeles police. They searched the hotel and started a missing person search, but didn't come up with anything.
A week after her disappearance, they released a picture in the hopes that someone might recognize her and call in about her whereabouts.
Two weeks after her disappearance, the police released a video they had of her last known sighting, again hoping that someone could get them more information.
But the video itself gained a ton of media and internet attention, because it was taken from an elevator's security camera, and showed Elisa Lam acting... very strangely.
She got in, pushed a bunch of the buttons, moved around like she was hiding, talking to someone (no one was there), jumping in and out of the elevator, all while on the same floor.
I'll link the video in a little bit, but just trust me for now--it's really bizarre.
The video went viral and the disappearance of Elisa got a ton of attention, but she was still unaccounted for.
Now... While this was going on, guests at the hotel started complaining to management about low water pressure in their rooms.
Some of them also complained about the water being oddly discolored, and smelling/tasting unusual.
Almost twenty days after Elisa's disappearance, an employee went up to the roof to check the water tanks.
He was horrified to open one of them and find Elisa's body, floating face-up a foot below the surface of the water.
The police were called, the tank was drained, the tank was cut open, and the body was removed and immediately sent away for autopsy.
The official autopsy report released by the LAPD concluded that the cause of death was drowning; there were no signs of struggle, violence, or self-harm found on or in the body.
So the logical theories are that she either committed suicide, was murdered, or somehow got into the tank and drowned on accident.
Which, really, this story is creepy and weird enough on its own, right?
Here's all the ways it gets weirder.
To give this full context, let's start with the video.
Again, nothing outright horrible happens in this video, but be warned that it can be really creepy to watch, especially when you know that this was the way she was acting shortly before she died:
Elisa Lam Video Before Found in Water Tank | Elisa L...
This video has been analyzed over and over again, and everyone has a different interpretation of what she's doing when...
She steps into the elevator, pushes a ton of the buttons, steps back into the corner, and seems to wait.
When the door doesn't close, she pokes her head out and starts looking in both directions down the hallway. Then she backs into the elevator and into a corner again, and looks like she's trying to hide.
Then she steps into the doorway again, steps out, steps mechanically to the side, steps backwards, and then steps out into the hallway.
She disappears for a moment before coming back into the elevator, hand on her head for a second.
She pushes more elevator buttons again, stands, puts her hands over her ears, and then goes back out into the hallway.
Perhaps the weirdest part is here, where she seems to gesture strangely and bow a little; to me, it looks like she's having a conversation with someone, or like she's inviting someone in.
Finally, after several minutes of this, she walks away from the elevator, and the elevator doors finally close.
yeah the hang gesture part is what really gets to me
like she's talking to someone
She seems to be moving very deliberately, too, which is bizarre.
and then her foot twists really weirdly at the end
also
the fact that the elevator door stays open so long
yeah I've never seen an levator door stay open that long
Yeah, LET'S UNPACK THIS THING.
I feel really bad for the Cecil Hotel, which actually has a history of really terrible things happening in it.
Richard Ramirez, a famous serial killer from the 80s, lived on the top floor of the Cecil for some time during his killing spree.
Oh gosh I remember hearing about this case.
It's rumored that he disposed of evidence in the dumpsters right out back. To make things worse, a copycat killer named Jack Unterweger also stayed at the Cecil after that.
A couple of other horrible murders have taken place there; it's rumored that the victim of the famous Black Dahlia stopped at the Cecil shortly before she died, but that may have been disproved.
*Black Dahlia Murder, excuse me
The Cecil has actually since tried to rebrand and changed their name to "Stay On Main", to discourage rumors of the hotel being Hella Haunted.
also all the horrendously underpaid background Munchkin actors in wizard of oz were housed there
I did not know that!
like three to a bed, and had wild parties 24/7
The manager has expressed that the rumors and horror reputation are hugely disrespectful to the tenants and visitors to the hotel, many of which are low-income, elderly, or disabled...
Buuut it's still a hot-spot for paranormal investigators and ghost-hunting parties.
yeah it was on mysteries at the hotel or whatever it's called on travel channel
I could probably do a whole darn plurk about this hotel.
I remember watching this video not long ago
SO... With that kind of background, it's not hard for anyone who believes in the paranormal to suggest that she was possessed or somehow being influenced by a negative otherworldly force.
People have theorized demons, a haunted elevator, the ghosts of murder victims coming back for revenge, etc.
And hey, the hand movements sure could look like some... incantation or magical gesturing, through that lens.
But that's obviously not all there is to this story, so let's look at the backstory of Elisa Lam herself.
It took a while for this information to surface, but now it's common knowledge that she had been previously diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression.
Accounts of the severity of these disorders vary. Her parents have said that she's never had any suicidal episodes, students who went to school with her have said she's had manic episodes in the past...
She's reportedly been in therapy, and there may have been one instance of her disappearing in the past, long before her trip.
She blogged about her disorder on her tumblr, which I've seen snippets of--and to me it seems like the kind of thing any normal person with depression blogs about.
So, some people theorize that her behavior in the elevator was actually her having a manic episode, possibly hallucinating because of her bipolar disorder.
This could account for her intentional-looking behavior, as well as her seeming to think there's someone (or something) there.
She was reportedly on four separate medications to treat her condition. I don't know much about the drugs and how they interact with each other (Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Seroquel, and Effexor), but...
It probably isn't a stretch to say that something could have gone wrong between any of those medications to trigger or exacerbate her behavior.
Wellbutrin, I do know, is Not Good for anyone with a history of epilepsy, as it lowers the seizure threshold. That may have nothing to do with this, but she could have been having a partial seizure.
I have no idea though.
If she was bipolar, she didn't have epilepsy. Those two conditions are mutually exclusive iirc.
really? I've never heard that.
Yeah, once you get into medication and mental health, it gets confusing and a bunch of debatable possibilities open up.
Yeah. In fact seizure induction can be used to treat bipolar.
I was on lamictal for years for seizures and it just made me really dizzy, but I don't remember its interactions
I cannot for the life of me remember if this is the right medication--I think it was Ambien? I read one account saying she may have taken that as well...
Which is normally used as a sleep aid, but can sometimes cause people to do crazy things that they have no memory of later.
(I really hope that's the right one.)
I used to have vivid hallucinations on that, and I was also taking lamictal and an antidepressant
My girlfriend's aunt once drove to the thrift store, bought I set of lepard print towels, drove into a telephone pole, and woke up with zero memory of what had happened.
(Fun Fact: we inherited those leopard print towels because she said they were so ugly she never would have bought them.)
i never left my bedroom fortunately, but i did see a dance club under my sheets and start talking to this girl i hallucinated next to me
SO, that's a theory.
oh wait, no, there was the time i went into my mom's bedroom wearing rainboots and carrying a kleenex box cover
but...even if she was reacting badly to the drugs, how would she get to the water tanks
yeah that's the big part
Oh Yuff, you're going to love this.
:')
It's definitely a strange situation.
it gets weirder
right here
There are some other theories surrounding her behavior in the elevator, and also the elevator itself... Some people have theorized she was on party drugs like ecstasy.
Some people theorize foul play, that she was slipped some kind of a drug cocktail, or that her weird behavior was because she was running and hiding from someone pursuing her.
i can't remember if there was ever a toxicology report?
There was! Kind of!
It'll all come around. :>
THE ELEVATOR DOORS BOTHERED ME FOR A LONG TIME, because anyone who's been around elevators know that they should have closed and gone to every floor she pushed.
Unless she pushed the button that held the doors open
the open door button doesn't last that long
not unless your holding it down
I used to work in a library and we pushed that button so we could finagle the carts in without it closing on us
They didn't move like they were stuck open, and many elevators have alarms that sound after they're open for too long.
It had a kind of lock thing
yeah and once you push another floor button it deactivates, at least in my experience
so she would have had to push it last
Yeah, the biggest theory is that she did push the hold elevator button, and that she somehow managed to keep it open that way.
She hit the override, or however it worked.
but really someone would need to go to the hotel and test it out
to really tell
I think someone has gone to investigate and has proven that it would be possible to do... Even if it would have had to have been kind of a lucky shot on her part.
There's also a theory floating around that she was playing something called the "Elevator game", which is like an urban legend saying that if you push all the buttons, the elevator opens into another dimension.
But that's getting kind of far out there as far as theories go.
As someone with bipolar disorder who's on a seroquel/effexor combo... 
I've never heard this legend
honestly I only thought it happened with police call boxes
With all this, I should also mention that the owner of a nearby bookstore mentioned talking with her earlier on the day she disappeared.
Elisa was described as "Outgoing, very lively, very friendly,"
She was just looking for gifts for her family, and didn't seem all that strange about any of it.
However, during her stay, Elisa also had her room changed by the management, because the strangers she was staying with in her previous hostel-style room were bothered by certain "odd behavior" of hers.
I cannot find this "odd behavior" detailed anywhere, but she was moved to her own room elsewhere in the hotel anyway, a couple days into her stay.
So, let's assume she was having some kind of episode and/or was under the influence of some drug, prescribed or otherwise.
She got into the elevator, acted strange, and then walked down the hallway.
For her to get up to the roof, where the water tanks were located, she would have had to have gone through several locked doors.
Only hotel managers and employees have keys and passcodes to those doors, and attempts to force those doors would have triggered an alarm.
(Which they tested--those alarms were still working, and all the doors were still locked.)
They eventually figured out that she could have climbed out one of the unlocked windows at the end of the halls and out onto one of three fire escapes, which she could have used to get up there.
liking this for later wow
Which, if she really was under the effects of Ambien or something, sure, maybe she could have thought it was a perfectly sane idea at the time to climb all the way up.
But the real twist is the water tanks.
Apparently pushing the door hold button once in that elevator holds the door for almost two full minutes.
Per this article: American Horror Story: The Cecil Hotel — Matter — Medium
OH GOOD, some elevator answers.
So firstly, the water tanks are 4-by-8 foot cylinders, and propped up on concrete blocks. There's no fixed access into the tanks.
The employee investigating had to go and get a ladder to climb up and take a look inside of them. There was nothing around the tanks to suggest she could have used them to climb up into it.
I don't even think there was any way she could have climbed up another structure and then dropped up on top of it.
And secondly, even if she did somehow climb up on top of the water tank, the water tanks are protected by heavy lids.
They've difficult to remove from the outside.
The lid was found closed.
So she would have had to have climbed up, moved the lid herself enough to get into the tank, and then somehow closed the lid again from the inside, swimming in eight-foot-deep water.
re: the mental health thing, sometimes people on stuff like PCP get almost superhuman strength. Perhaps that happens with regular organic psychosis.
Another strange detail is that her body was found completely naked. Her clothes and other belongings were floating next to her in the tank.
Her cell phone was not with her or in her room, and has yet to be found.
Her tumblr, which you can see here, continued updating even after her death. It could have easily been tumblr's queue function posting without her...
...but it has also been theorized that it was something more sinister than that.
yeah as if none of the rest of it is weird enough by the time I get to the tank I'm always just like
I've got to go snag some lunch but I'll get to the autopsy report and toxicology in a hot minute.
yeah the queue continued into February but then awhile later there were more posts
....see what gets me is if it was a suicide
yassssss
I never read any of that
oh god this is so bizarre and I've been sucked into this story
there's like a dozen different ways she could have done that much more easily
yeah
I've always thought there was another person involved just because of all the things she would have had to do to get herself inside that tank
yeah
and her clothes being in there make me think someone threw them in after her, and maybe took her cell phone to hide a conversation they had or something
that she just somehow found a way to keep the elevator door open, somehow figured out where the water tanks were, somehow found a way up to them, somehow climbed up there without noticing
somehow climbed into the tank without a ladder
somehow opened the lid
That's too many SOMEHOWS
maybe the person was an employee
or a former employee yeah
there are so many maybes and as soon as you start thinking "oh maybe that's the answer" something else pops up and is like YEAH WELL HERES WHY IT ISNT
yup
For sure. I think one of the reasons people have stayed so fascinated in this case is that every main theory is just believable enough to have been what happened...
But those same theories are also equally unbelievable enough that people are still drawn to finding some other reasoning that somehow makes more sense.
Unfortunately, the autopsy didn't help clarify much.
Like I mentioned, they found no signs of a struggle, but the body had also been floating in water for almost three weeks.
It was moderately decomposed, bloated, and "greenish".
drowning victims get nasty
like they don't even look human anymore
Yessir they do. They didn't find any evidence that it was a suicide, but people argue that the bad state of the body would have made it harder to tell for certain.
They did toxicology tests on her blood "where a sufficient quantity was available".
Traces of her prescription medications were found, as well as some nonprescription drugs like ibuprofen, but no alcohol or recreational drugs were found.
And again, people argue that she could have been under the influence of something that broke down over the three-week period she was dead, and/or was otherwise untraceable by the time of the tests.
Yeah there are drugs that filter out of the system very quickly
Additionally, had a rape and fingernail kit done, but the results of those tests were never released. There's some conflicting opinions about whether or not those tests actually happened.
But still, someone had to get her up there and inside the tank. Even if she could have opened it from the poster, once in water the leverage
It may have been because there was nothing to find, or something else.
to lift and move heavy things would have been gone. You can be as strong as u want but without leverage she'd just be pushing herself into
the water
Even the guys doing the autopsy seemed to have trouble making up their minds about the cause of death.
Looking at the paperwork, it was initially marked off as "accidental", but three days later the box for "undetermined" was checked off instead.
Several days after that, it was scratched out, initialed, dated, and marked as an error, and the official answer went back to "accidental".
So... Three years later, we still have a lot of theories, but no solid conclusion about how Elisa Lam died.
sᴛᴏʀʏᴛɪᴍᴇ →
was
it an accidental imbalance of medications that led to vivid hallucinations and a unusual feats of human strength? Was it a planned suicide, or a horrible set of coincidences?
sᴛᴏʀʏᴛɪᴍᴇ →
was
it actually a murder? Someone taking advantage of her situation, or something that had been planned all along?
okay one problem I have with the whole "the drugs could've left the body in that time" is yes...theortically they could...if she was alive
Could there have been some sort of supernatural influence? We just don't know.
because the stuff that flushes drugs out of your system are working organs
and a lot of recreational drugs are not water soluable
meaning they wouldn't just dissolve in the water into nothing
then again it would depend on what level of drug testing they decided to use
Also consider the water they drained. Did they keep any of it to test? Would it have done any good at that volume? (I honestly don't know)
There's so much we don't know... There may have even been other factors that didn't get recorded, clues we may never know about.
I hope the family at least finds some closure, but who knows if anyone'll ever get there.
also
unrelated to her actual death but just a really weird coincidence
shortly after there was a TB outbreak in a nearby community
the name of the TB diagnosis test kit is LAM-ELISA
that is eerie
it's been around for years
long before her
Oh, thanks for pointing this out! I would have skipped right over it because it's got "American Horror Story" in the title.
ohhh
Oooh....i like the idea of the elevator game. I'm not sure i believe it, but i like it
....wow that is a creepy as fuck game.
I can't stop clicking on pages on this site fml
....and now i'm tempted to actually do that, but in all seriousness, what do people get out of the elevator game and the hide and seek game? All they seem to offer players is death
i present exhibit a: people are fucking stupid
thrill-seeking on a budget
at least the elevator game offers nonfatal curiosity
This is super gr8 story fodder though, especially for us urban fantasy folks out there.
(Also horror, but that's a given.)
it's also the kind of thing that invites people to poke holes in it, actually: the comments section has at least once instance of "so what if multiple people do it in the same building in different elevators?"
You're alone in the otherworld so does it only work for one person or does everyone get their own?
Fun to think about.