She pressed all the buttons. She looked scared. Then she was gone. The footage still haunts the internet—and the answers never came.
On January 31, 2013, Elisa Lam entered an elevator inside Los Angeles’ infamous Cecil Hotel and pressed a series of buttons that seemed random. What followed looked like something torn from a nightmare: she hid in corners, peered out as if watching for someone—or something—then stepped outside, made strange hand gestures in the hallway, and vanished.
The surveillance video, released by police weeks later, was a four-minute fever dream that launched a thousand theories. There were skips in the footage. The elevator doors didn’t close when they should have. Her movements felt rehearsed yet frantically paranoid, like she was acting out a ritual or responding to someone invisible. When the video went public, it exploded across the internet, fueling speculation faster than facts could keep up. At first, it was a missing person case. Then it became something else—something haunted, unsolved, and deeply unsettling.
Elisa, a 21-year-old Canadian student visiting California alone, never checked out of the Cecil. After that final elevator footage, no one could say for sure where she had gone. Her body wasn’t found until February 19, floating naked inside a rooftop water tank—one of four massive reservoirs that supplied drinking water to hotel guests. For 18 days, hotel residents had been brushing their teeth, showering, even drinking water with an untraceable hint of decay. Her discovery was a horror no one could prepare for.
And the answers, when they came, felt like they were missing something.
A Mind in Motion
Elisa Lam wasn’t a ghost hunter or thrill-seeker. She was an aspiring writer and student from Vancouver who posted book reviews, fashion shots, and raw entries about her struggles with mental illness on Tumblr. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression, Elisa had been taking four medications—Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Seroquel, and Effexor—before and during her trip. Her online presence was thoughtful, articulate, and sometimes vulnerable. She’d battled isolation and anxiety, but her decision to travel alone was framed as part of her healing.
The Cecil, however, was a strange choice. Once a glamorous destination in the 1920s, by the 2010s the hotel had decayed into something more sinister. Its history included suicides, overdoses, and temporary stays by serial killers like Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger. Urban legend practically dripped from its walls. The hotel was so notorious that part of it had been rebranded as “Stay on Main” to lure budget travelers who didn’t Google too deeply.
Elisa’s behavior in the days before she vanished hinted at disorientation. She was moved from a shared room to a private one after reportedly alarming her roommates. She visited a bookstore nearby—her last confirmed sighting alive—where the manager described her as lively, engaged, buying gifts for her family. Nothing outwardly unhinged. But later that evening, something shifted.
Whether she experienced a severe bipolar episode, as some believe, or was responding to something more external remains a fault line in the narrative. Toxicology reports later showed her medications were present but at subtherapeutic levels, suggesting she may have skipped doses. That opens the door to psychological disarray—but it doesn’t close the one marked strange.
The Water Tank Question
Elisa’s body was found only after hotel guests began complaining about water pressure issues and a foul taste. A maintenance worker climbed to the roof and pried open one of the water tank hatches. Inside was her body, decomposing in the cool water. She was naked. Her clothes were later found floating nearby.
What made this death feel impossible were the logistics. To access the tanks, one would need to pass through a locked door or disable a rooftop alarm. The tanks themselves were high—10 feet tall, heavy-lidded, with slick sides and no built-in ladders. Getting in was hard. Getting out alone was nearly impossible.
The coroner ruled her death an accidental drowning. There were no signs of sexual assault, no trauma, no drugs beyond her prescription meds. Her behavior was attributed to bipolar disorder. That’s the official narrative. But to many who followed the case—investigators, armchair sleuths, her grieving parents—it felt incomplete.
Was it really possible she had a full psychotic break, wandered to the roof, climbed into a tank, and drowned—all without triggering alarms, being seen, or leaving a trail?
And if she’d climbed in alive, why? Was she hiding? Escaping? Seeking something?
A Mystery With Teeth
The internet did what it always does: it filled the void with speculation. Some focused on the elevator footage, suggesting someone had been following her and was edited out of the tape. Others pointed to hotel guests or staff, even invoking paranormal elements—ghosts, demons, or a curse rooted in the Cecil’s tragic past. There were claims of a government cover-up, a tuberculosis outbreak in L.A. (with a test named LAM-ELISA, eerily enough), and whispers of dark rituals.
Many theories were absurd. Some were cruel. But underneath the noise was a collective discomfort: that a young woman could die in such an improbable way, in such a visible place, and leave behind no clarity. Even the hotel’s response felt antiseptic—claiming no wrongdoing, settling a lawsuit with her family out of court, and continuing business as usual.
The Netflix docuseries Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel tried to peel back the myth-making, reframing the story around Elisa’s mental health and the chaos of internet obsession. It presented a sobering truth: sometimes the scariest answer isn’t the most dramatic—it’s that no one was paying enough attention.
Still, something in the footage lingers. Something about the impossible climb. Something about how Elisa disappeared for nearly three weeks in a building packed with guests. Maybe the horror isn’t that someone did this to her. Maybe the horror is that no one noticed.
New Theories About Elisa’s Death
In the years since Elisa Lam’s body was found floating in the Cecil Hotel’s rooftop water tank, the internet hasn’t stopped asking questions. And more recently, new theories have surfaced—some unsettling, some conspiratorial, and others that simply point to how much still doesn’t make sense.
One of the most persistent ideas suggests that someone inside the hotel—an employee or someone with inside knowledge—may have played a role. The Cecil’s rooftop was supposed to be locked and alarmed, yet Lam somehow accessed it. Could someone have led her there? Helped her in? Or worse?
Others continue to argue that something paranormal was at play. Lam’s behavior in the elevator footage remains disturbingly surreal, and the way she gestures at something—or someone—unseen still sparks debate. Some believe the footage was edited before being released, pointing to a missing minute, slowed frames, and inconsistencies in the timestamp.
More grounded but still troubling is the theory that Lam was suffering a psychotic break—but one made worse by her environment. A recent post on Medium proposed that while she may have entered the tank herself, her mental state alone doesn’t explain why she went to the roof or how she got past the hotel’s supposed security measures.
A disturbing coincidence that continues to fuel conspiracies involves a tuberculosis test called LAM-ELISA, which was being used nearby during the time of Lam’s disappearance. Some argue it’s a freak occurrence. Others suggest she was an unwitting subject in something much darker.
What’s consistent across all these theories is that the official version—accidental drowning due to mental illness—feels too clean, too quick, and too dismissive of the contradictions. Whether it was human negligence, psychological unraveling, or something still unseen, the silence around what really happened to Elisa Lam continues to echo.
