This Day in History: Elisa Lam died mysteriously on this day in 2013. This strange death has piqued my interest for quite some time. This all started with an odd video released by the LAPD of Elisa Lam of her strange behavior in the elevator of the infamous Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. In the video Lam is seen exiting and re-entering the elevator, talking and gesturing in the hallway outside, and sometimes seeming to hide within the elevator. The video went viral on the internet, with many viewers reporting that they found it disturbing.
Residents at the hotel began complaining about the water, so a maintenance worker investigated the water tank atop the hotel and discovered her body inside. However, the doors and stairs that access the hotel's roof are locked, and only the staff had the passcodes and keys, and any attempt to force them open would have triggered an alarm. If you're thinking that this sounds familiar, this situation is part of the plot of the 2005 movie Dark Water starring Jennifer Connelly. In the movie, a mother and daughter move into a rundown apartment building. A dysfunctional elevator and discolored water gushing from the building's faucets eventually lead them to the building's rooftop water tank, where they discover the body of a girl who had been reported missing from the building a year earlier.
Interestingly there was also a tuberculosis outbreak at the same time on Skid Row, just a few blocks away from the Cecil Hotel. The TB test that was used was called the LAM-ELISA (Lipoarabinomannan (LAM) Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA), which makes for a weird coincidence.
Elisa Lam's story made it into an episode of ABC's Castle and How to Get Away with Murder, and perhaps even the fifth season of American Horror Story.
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