Doomed to Fail - Ep 123 - Trip down memory lane: What happened to the Cecil Hotel?

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Have you ever wondered what trauma brought us together as friends? It was working in Downtown Los Angeles in 2013!! Farz walks through the spooky, creepy, and very gross history of DTLA's least-fine hotel, The Cecil. We talk about the people who've lived there and the ghosts who probably still do.Have you been to a haunted hotel? Let us know! #hauntedhotel #theshining #cecilhotel #DTLA Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And we are back, Taylor. Hopefully it's Wednesday. And I get the end. It's on time.

If it's not, it's a great Thursday. We'll see. We'll see what day this comes out. TBD. How are you? Good. How are you? Good.

Do you want to go ahead and introduce us? I do. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Doom to Fail. The podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures, twice a week, every week. I am Taylor, as always, joined by Fars. As always.

I never go anywhere. I've never go anywhere to be. Yeah. Always here. I like it. This week we talked, had a really fun talk about Noserdamus, and now it is my turn to have my little doom to fail story. Taylor, I'm going to sort this off by just not talking to you.

I'm talking to the audience. So, are you ready? Mm-hmm. Yeah. That was for the audience. Did you just hear what I said? We're ready. Thank you.

That was done from far away. So I'm going to go a little bit into our history. So Taylor and I are lives kind of blended in a very fun, unique, interesting way, I think. And a lot of really interesting. things kind of came out of that. So a little bit of the backdrop, Taylor and I met on February 4th, 2013. I recall that because it was, I was moving in on February 3rd and it was the day of the Super Bowl. And so it was the next day we're going to start work together. It was going to be our first day of work at our previous company. And we're both joining as trainees. I just moved

to Los Angeles, literally like, I guess I like the day before from Miami. Taylor moved from New York. We just like, we're introed to each other through our work. And we started kind of communicating that way and it's interesting i don't know about you too i'm kind of like formally this weird punctuation mark in my adult life like yeah there was like free that company and then after that company is like how i look at my life a thousand percent it was wild it was wild and like and like here taylor taylor has like i think we had like different experiences because you things happen to you that we don't need to go into detail that were like not great um i i mostly had a very positive experience but well i i i learned a lot about

being a pregnant woman in the workplace which i had never considered before as a thing that i would have to fight for that i did that would be the thing that i yeah that's my experience i had that you did not have um and it was wild and you know whatever we're regardless regardless it was a very very strange very unique punctuation point in our in our adult that i think and um i bring all this up because our friendship kind of evolved from working together it was through just the terminals of that through living in los angeles um and everything that kind of came with it um but i kind of envision us as like going to los angeles all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and starting this new chapter in our lives i mean so interested and so excited and it's like so cool

and we're going to do this startup thing. We're going to change the world and all that. Yeah. So February 4th, we started that journey. And it was like a fun, cool, like first two weeks in L.A. And this new job. And then February 19th came around. And I don't know. For me, that would be a day that kind of just like shifted my mentality about what we're doing

and what was going on. Is there anything that you can think of that I'm referring to here? Is that the cop that went on the run? no i man i wonder when that was there's so much there's so is it a lisa lamb i think that was right after is that so so so taylor and i are busy working down in our downtown office changing the world every day going to work and be like we're changing in the world a one block west reblogged south of us on february 19th literally half a mile away from where we were sitting, a maintenance worker opened the door to a thousand gallon water

tank and discovered the bloated, marbled, green corpse of a woman who would drown there three weeks earlier. So, I love this story. Thank you for talking about it. I'm so excited. Did you, I'm sure, did you watch a documentary about it? I did. How they're like, you take one step out of the hotel.

You were in the worst place in America. And I was like, exactly that. As far as an eye, bright eye, bushy tail down the street, being like, change of the world, do, do, do, do. And it's like, this is the worst street in all of America. I mean, there's parts of that that are accurate. So I don't know if you recall, but two of our coworkers literally got punched in the face for no reason. I don't know that.

Yeah, Phil got punched in the face. He literally walked out of his apartment and he said some crazy homeless woman turned around to him as he was walking to work and punched him in the face. Another one of our poor co-workers, I can't remember his name now. He didn't stick around too long. he had the worst experience he moved from like san francisco or something he was a very very sweet guy and he got punched in the face by a homeless person and then like a month later he got ran over in hollywood while trying to cross the street i forgot what his name was do you remember this guy no i don't remember um that's really bad that's really funny and yeah i mean i was like i just

i'm a very anti downtown l a person it's really gross um it smells like pee and that's the least of its problems um but yeah no because remember the citizen app i don't have it anywhere because i live here and i don't feel like there's i needed it but i had the citizen app which would tell you when there's a crime and i was connected to you and connected to alex and like every day it'd be like there's a machete attack right right 10 feet from Alex and he'd have and he'd be like it's okay i'm in my apartment around the third floor so it was like a machete attack in the lobby the stories so for people who like have never lived or been around this area the stories you hear of L.A. downtown LA it's like hell on earth it is literally like hell on earth like I remember so

Cameron I think it was cam maybe was I forgot who was somebody that we worked with again at this company they lived they lived somewhere else they lived they were visiting from out of town they came in for some some event that's what was going on in our offices and they mentioned how they heard they were woken up like four o'clock in the morning to screaming happening they looked outside and they they they said they were haunted by the sound in the vision of someone bouncing somebody else's head off the pavement right outside their window like just constantly beating them until

he was like I'm sure they died like I have no idea how that person would have lived anyways that's the environment that we're talking about we were all bushy tail going into we were super super excited and it's like one of the worst places one more one more story I went to I had like an event to go to and it was a mile away from the office and I was like

oh I'm going to walk I like casually said that and Kyle was like you're absolutely not walking and he drove me there and I was like can't just walk a mile I used to walk like 10 miles a day in New York And they were like, nope. Like, there's no safe way to get there. So, so that's, so I'm going to get into this here in a little bit. So this, so I'm not actually, so I'm going to talk about the lamb situation,

Elisa Lam situation, because it's insane. But I'm, I'm actually talking mostly about like the history of the Cecil Hotel itself and like what, what it was all about. And that's been covered a lot too, but I found a lot of really interesting stuff because I was mostly as curious like, what's, what's happening to it today? Like, what is, what's going on now? and that's what like spur kind of this interest in its history but um to your point there's so many people who go to l.A and they accidentally walk into skid row because you go on like the apps

and say hey i'm trying to get to the spot because there's there's basically the clean domesticated quote unquote part of downtown L.A., which is where like a lot of fancy restaurants are really cool stuff then there's the warehouse district which is like super hip and in in like kind of like a grungier kind of a vibe that's where law spirits was i don't know if you ever did law spirits i think i did that with jay but anyways like that's where like a lot of like cool stuff goes on um off the side so if you if you're downtown or or you're in the art um the arts district and you want to go to the other side it'll route you directly through skid row yeah and and you look at it like okay so like what is that like a half a mile or a mile

walk whatever else walk there like i'm not going to get an uber Get the Uber. Always. Always. It is literally hell on earth. Do not walk through it. Yeah. So, um, on that note, yes, we're going to go into the Cecil Hotel because it is, it is absolutely fascinating. I learned so much about how it came to be and why it is the way that it is. It's like all the things around it. So the Cecil Hotel, it was kind of rebranded as Stay on Maine. And so for the person of this conversation, let's call the Cecil Hotel. that's what it is. It is actually a historical building now, or it became one in like 2017 or Fortune. I forget exactly what. But that's what it's known as. So the

re-branding also didn't work. Like, everybody knows what it is. So you can't just like rename it and be like, this isn't haunted. Yeah. So it was built in downtown L.A. in 1924. It was imagined by three hotel years. These guys named William Hanner, Charles Dix, and

Robert Shops. It was designed as an Art Deco Hotel by Lloyd Lester Smith. And it cost about 1.5 million to build back then the equivalent about 27 million today it is actually a pretty beautiful hotel like if you look at the lobby and if you've seen an american horror story yeah i was gonna say so that hotel was um designed after the architectural renderings of the cecil so like that's what it look like it's beautiful and i love that that vibe is very like the shining also rip shelly devald dad this week um he shirley um but

But yeah, it's like that Art Deco, creepy hotel is the best. So cool. So cool. And even today, actually, well, I'll get into this. I'll get into this. So at the time, it was built for high flyers. So this is 1924. It was built to the standards of what you would consider like somebody who would be going

to a Ritz Carlton, not somebody who's going to a holiday inn. It was meant to be kind of like a destination for successful folks. The problem, these three guys and the owners of the season, were met with almost immediately after opening were threefold one was the great depression kicked off about five years after it had opened and and also things just before great depression things aren't great it's not like there's one day when it's great depression it's like it was bad oh shit yeah exactly it was like leading up to it so people people didn't have all that kind of all that much money anyways so there was that piece of it the second problem was that again

Taylor and I's lives kind of tying into this. Our former office was the Biltmore Hotel. And the Biltmore had opened, again, several blocks up from where the Cecil was further north. And at that time, if the, let's call the Cecil, like, I don't know, like a Hyatt, then the Biltmore was like a Ritz Carlton. Like it was, it was a notch above it was also considered the biggest hotel in the country at the time. So it had a lot more cachet. So even people during the Great Depression who might have had money wanted to visit it weren't going to go to the Cs.

They're going to go to the Biltmore. So there was that. The third problem it had was what we just talked about, Skid Row. So one rumor to dispel. Wow, even then. Yeah. Even then. So worse than.

Shockingly enough, Taylor, worse than. Yeah. I moved there from New York City. And I was like, I love cities. I live in New York City for over a decade. And I stepped one foot in downtown LA and I was like, oh no. yeah yeah it is um it is i mean it's kind of a sight to see god i remember there's another guy there's very very sweet guy we work with um and he was like a great family guy out of um

tennessee and he lived in tennessee his whole life and he would come and visit and i remember one time we were talking and he was like i literally cry when i get here because i can't believe the way people live like it is just so terrible so i mean you literally see people dead on the streets like it is not at all unusual to see a dead body like just walking around anyways get back on yeah so so one rumor that is worth dispelling right now is that the cecil's not on skid row like i said where taylor and i worked was only one block up and two blocks away from the cecil where it currently stands and where we worked was across from pershing square like one of the green parts of downtown

LA like it's not in the hellhole that we just described in fact one of the one of like the the hottest tourist destinations is on the same block as a Cecil Cole's French dip one of the birthplaces of the French tip sandwich and a really good place to go eat if you're ever visiting in LA we've definitely been there several times it's a lovely lunch spot if you want to drink a beer and you a sandwich at lunch yeah we've been there a few it's great but it's literally on the same block

as the Cecil. Right now, this part of downtown is like kind of like the hipper part of downtown. That being said, in the 1930s, when Skid Row was actually forming up as a thing, the boundary line for it, the Cecil right on the perimeter. So the perimeter that is articulated of where Skid Row's original boundary lines were, we're going to be Main Street on the north, which is, again, the street that the Cecil is on. to the south of the Cecil is where the between that street in Maine where the Cecil is and south towards where the Arts District currently stops is where the bulk of Skid Row actually is

and the reason why it ended up forming there is just because like that kind of a place held the businesses that would attract homeless people. It had a lot of for example SROs or single room occupancy hotels that were daily or weekly rentals and that's kind of how it developed as of right now there's an approximate 6,000 people living out in the open in the streets of skid row which is like a drop in the bucket. I think that overall the total Los Angeles homelessness is somewhere around 100,000

6,000 or on the streets of um skid row when the Cecil opened that number was 10,000. Wow. Interesting. Yeah. So it's actually like gone down. I also like, I don't know, I feel like I know about single room occupancy things and things like that from like learning about the past, you know, like I don't feel like I know about it from now, but there must still be a thing where you can like do things. I feel like I think about it as like a Great Depression, like old thing. And here's a deep rub, a book that I know you've not read, but there's a book called Sister Carrie, if anyone's read it. I have read that. You have not. Where they like very in detail talk about living in these in these situations where men.

would like stand on the street and then like some of them would be given room some that wouldn't be it was like a whole thing so yes this is still a thing so like if you drive on the highways of texas you will come upon um hotels that have weekly and monthly rates sometimes even hourly um which is terrifying because what are you doing in there hourly well you're doing sex work in their hourly but i think that like the um another thing that i saw on social media about a motel that was like kind of a crappy motel that was like that kind of motel but they were like the people who stay here people who are like running away from abusive partners you know they like need to take a shower they need to chill their insulin like stuff like that that like

you know it's a terrible way to live some of it's really like actually we're going to get into this here a little bit later some of it is like super super sad situations that people should be helping with in other times it's just like we don't need to see any of this but we're going to get into that. Are we going to blame Ronald Reagan yet or get only done a little bit? So this doesn't really touch on Reagan, although you could blame a lot, a part of it on the shutting down of mental institutions, I'm sure. Yeah. But anyways, well, so here's the thing. Those people would end up in jail. I don't know. Anyways, we can talk about that later. But so anyways, as the years progressed, the Cecil didn't really keep up with a time. So it eventually found itself more suited to being an SRO rather than a luxury hotel. So, like, for examples, and by the 1980s, guests of the Cecil still had to use, like,

the same bathrooms on the same, like, per floor, as opposed to, like, you know, now where you expect your hotel to have your bathroom in. Yes. In the room. So from the 1930s on, it was kind of a slow and steady decline as some notable events took place. several were worth discussing. There were nine suicides that occurred that are documented that range from poisoning, jumping from a high floor, slitting one's own throat and a gunshot wound to the head. There was at least two murders, but there was also a few suspected ones that

aren't on the list, which include Lisa Lamb. One of those murders was a 19-year-old woman who in 1944, while staying at the ceaseholder boyfriend, was secretly pregnant and didn't know it or didn't tell anyone, and she went to labor in the bathroom. And she ended up just taking the baby and throwing it out of the window. Don't love that. Not good. For others, we don't know if it's murder or suicide were people who somehow landed dead from a high floor.

So there was a lot of those. And the most recent one was in 2015. Wow. So yeah. The Cecil kind of operated as like a battery of evil attracting just horrible people. I mean, I have a hard time saying horrible people because like you don't know what someone's circumstances are, right? Like, you don't know why someone ends up in the situation they end up in.

So, like, I don't know. Like, I just, it just sounds like hell on earth is what it sounds like. It sounds like the walls of that place is just absolutely just garbage. I think it's like a, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like if you, you know, the people who like need that are probably troubled, you know, and then like, who knows what's going to happen. So the, for example, this battery of evil theory, there's some, uh, punctuation marks on this that are worth noting. So, for example, the black dolly, Elizabeth Schwarz, the last

siding of her was apparently at the, um, at the Cecil Hotel, which I think you called out. It was that and like, so she, so it's, it's not known for sure. So, like, she was also seen, presumably seen in the Biltmore, but she was also presumably seen at the Cecil. But like, it's 19, it's like, people are going to make stuff up. So we don't know. Or it could be part of like the myth building of the Cecil. But we do know for sure is that in room 1419, during the 1980s, Richard Ramirez, the nightstocker, was living there. He was living at the Cecil while going around and killing people. This story is incredible.

I did not know this. Apparently, so it was $14 a night. That's what he was paying. And after a murder, he was covered in blood. What he would do is he would go to the Cecil. Okay, by the way, this is what downtown is like. Like that this guy was covered in blood. You can be covered in blood there.

You could be covered in blood there. What he would do is you would go to the dumpsters on the ground floor of the Cecil, strip naked, throw all of his bloody clothes in the dumpster. Then he would walk up to his room naked. That's what the Cecil was like. And no one knew he was a night star. No one was like, nobody thought it was weird. Shortly after his reign of terror, the Cecil,

another famous serial killer, Jack Winterveger, an Austrian writer and serial killer made his way to L.A., and he stayed at the Cecil, where he went on to kill three prostitutes. That's what he did in the U.S. He killed a further seven in Austria and one in Czechoslovakia. So that's kind of the history of some of the folks that were living there. So as we get into the early 2000s, Skid Row ends up getting pushed further south from Maine.

So that basically means the Cecil's, completely out of being Skid Row. It's not on the boundary line anymore. And so the owners of the Cecil thought, this is our chance to kind of redo this. How do we take this dirty, seedy, bloody, disgusting underground reputation of the shit hole hotel filled heroin needles?

What do we do with it? We're going to rebrand it in 2011 as a stay on Maine. Which is like just so stupid. So stupid. And didn't they like, I think you were talking about this, but it was like still two hotels. But they had, like, changed the lobby.

Yeah. So they didn't change the lobby. It was, it was, um, it was the Cecil and then it was, stay on Maine was meant to be like a hostel type of an environment. So like I said, a lot of people were sharing bathrooms. And so that suited more like hostile living. And so they were trying to advertise with all that is where, where the hostel on this side were like a boutique hotel on this other side. Got it. And they have separate entrances and separate branding.

But it, but you were still, it was the same shit. you were on the same floor right you were like showing an elevator you're showing elevators exactly yeah um and so that was basically what what they decided to do the idea being that we're going to position ourselves for low budget travelers i could have sworn we've like we try to think try to plan like actually staying at the cecil at one point and decide against it we may have and I feel like the thing I'm most afraid of is like bugs uh really really really bad roach and uh mice problem there yeah yeah That checks out.

So one traveler, obviously, that decided to take advantage of this hostile, low-cost living was Elisa Lamb. Again, this story's been covered a million times. The Netflix documentary on it was absolutely incredible. I'll get into the high points of this because it's just so crazy. So good. It's terrible, but I have several thoughts after you're done. So it's funny because actually we have a full outline part of this where I'm like, Taylor, what do you think of it? Exactly.

Great. Perfect. So the highlights of this are Lam was a 21-year-old Vancouver resident. She was studying at the University of British Columbia. She suffered from mental illness and had exhibited weird patterns of erratic behavior. She was put on a number of medications to kind of calm her symptoms. She eventually would withdraw from the University of British Columbia and decided to take a trip south to California via the Amtrak. On January 26, 2013, I guess I was like what, like a week before we were.

you and I arrived. She arrives in LA and checks into the Cecil. She was apparently in a shared room until a roommate complained about her behavior, including leaving notes for her telling her to go away and lock in the door and making her use passwords to get back into her own room, which is like crazy. Apparently she also went to taping of the Conan O'Brien show and made such a ruckets. They kicked her out.

She was like, she was like, I mean, she definitely should have continued to be on her meds. Yeah. that's the part of the lesson here is if you need medication and you feel better stay on my medication it is helping you yeah yeah cured you need to be on your medication and as you know clearly didn't didn't do she yeah she had some medication or let me let me get to that so on january 31st she was supposed to check out of the cecil and she didn't she'd also been contacting her parents

every day to let them let them know about her whereabouts and she also stopped calling and so they ended up calling the LAPD, and they flew down to L.A. themselves to help figure out what's going on with her. Police used docks to search the hotel and couldn't find anything. A week later, they went to putting up fires around the neighborhood. And then a week after that, the police released the last stone recording of blam, which still gives me chills because I already, like, I rewashed it. Like, I literally am getting goosebumps right now, like talking about you.

Taylor, what do you think of the video? Okay. So, I scared the fucking shit out of myself. one time, Googling the elevator game. Have you ever Googled the elevator game? Oh my God. I actually have told her now. Okay, so she, okay, so Llam, this is me by memory, is in the elevator, like,

pressing a bunch of buttons, but like moving and looking out the, looking out the doors and like looking back and like maybe talking to someone, like out of the camera, like in the camera, and it's like really weird, right? Yes. So I was like, I don't know, looking this up, of course. And there's this game called the elevator. game, which is not what she was doing, but it's like a thing where you like press a button and then go to a floor and the door will open. And then you do like a couple other like in order. And then one floor you close your eyes and a woman will get on the elevator, but you can't look at her. And then you have to like press another one and do a thing that you're like that you're somewhere else. And like it's so creepy. There's actually a pretty good horror movie called the elevator game where they do it. And it is scary. So like thinking that she might have been doing that was scary, but also she's obviously having a psychotic breakdown. Have you ever done that? The elevator game, I would absolutely never do it. No. elevator guys if anybody's done this can you please it scares the shit out of me and it's like one of those things you're like why is this scared of me i'm like uh-uh not doing it no way it's too scary what do you what do you recall about the video what did you what did you feel or think when you watched the video so i've also heard rumors that like she was seeing a ghost or she was talking to someone you know richard ramirez had not died yet so people were like maybe it's him or like his ghost or but he wasn't dead so no um she obviously looks like she

She's in distress. And she looks very like just, she looks like she's looking for someone following her. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right. Is that the thing you remember the most about the whole case is the creepiest thing about the case? No, I remember people brushing their teeth with the dead body water. Great. So the next part I'm going into is on February 19th, hotel guests started complaining about the water.

They started complaining that the color was on. off. The taste was off the water pressure flow. So on that morning, the hotel maintenance worker went on to the roof and opened one of the four 1,000 gallon water tanks and found her lying face down naked. She had been in there decomposing for three weeks. I want to die. I like, what would you do? I was thinking myself, like, would I just drink bleach or like, what would I do? Like, I can't. What would you do? How would you? What would you do? I don't know. I don't know. You would have to, like, you would have to join every major religion and go to every... You were eating...

I would eat an exorcism. I would need to see a shaman of some sort. Maybe ayahuasca and just throw it all up. Oh, damn. I mean... Oh, my God. And also, like, what else in those water tanks? Like, how was that a way to store water in 2020?

Yeah. So, so I'm getting into that, too, because apparently... what ended up happening was this guy obviously reported this to the police police would drain the tank cut a hole into it to recover her body she was autopsy her death was reported as accidental drowning with bipolar disorder disorder as a significant factor no drugs of consequence were found in her system except for the ones that she was prescribed but she was also under medicating herself which was clear given the amount of drugs that she was in her system she had a tiny amount of alcohol in her system and the question became how did she actually get into the tank to begin with because there was no direct guest access to the roof. So all police could ascertain was that when they originally did the search with the dogs, the dogs lost her scent at a window that was connected to a fire escape, which if you climbed, it would take you up to the roof and...

And they didn't go up to the roof? Yeah. Yeah, she apparently climbed that once you're on the roof. Yes, she disappeared at this window. Yeah, well, they could have assumed that maybe she like, actually, I don't know what they thought. Yeah, you're right. either be on the ground.

She either went up or down, right? Simply. Maybe they didn't think the dog was good at sniffing. I don't know. Maybe this is first day. I don't know that dog's life. So apparently at that point, she climbed an eight foot ladder and then went inside the tank. And then you assume that she was like opening the, well, no, she got naked, then she got into the tank.

So what ended up being concluded out of this was that two of the tanks, there's four of them, two of the, two of the, the tanks, the doors were just left open, the water tank, which begs a question, what else were they drinking? That's what, oh, yes, that's exactly my question. How many dead pigeons? Exactly. I'm thinking of dead birds and dead rats and like, oh, my God, I need like seven. What a shit in a hotel.

What a horrible, horrible. But every building in like L.A. has that, like, right? Like all the downtown, there's a lot of those wooden water tanks and in New York and everywhere, you know, like, what is in those water tanks? Why is it up there? so gross why is that that they were doing water now so gross oh my god I'm gonna I'm drinking a a cream soda I'm just gonna drink cream soda from now I'm not gonna drink water anymore Taylor how terrifying is that you you from her perspective you're in a thousand gallon tank like this happened in like a couple movies where people die in water tanks like I think what happened in like that Bazlarman Australia movie and like maybe in a horror movie but like once you get in you can't get out you know can't get out there's no like there's like a you know depending how much water is in there there's like several feet of water tank yeah between you and the

easy to get in but hard to get out well she also closed the latch on our way in and so that's heavy too and in a water tank you have nothing to push off of so yeah yeah wow that's really scary i'm getting chills i don't like this story oh my god also taylor the movie it's called dark water. It was from 2005 when, what's her name? Oh, God. Jennifer Connolly her and her daughter move into a run down a apartment building

and the water is all gross and they eventually go to the roof and they find that there was a dead girl that was killed and stuffed the water tank. Oh, God. In 2005. And the name of the daughter that she moves in with is Cecilia

really close to Cecil. Isn't there something else that spells out of Lisa Lam? like a parasite or something what's the other thing thing yeah there's like something oh my god I'll find it later there's something they were like

they found like a thing that it in the water that was like a parasite that is named them a Lisa lamb or like a lamb or something anyway I'm not going to read that I keep going so so one part about this case

that I kind of loved reading about was that the parents apparently ended up filing a lawsuit against the Cecil Hotel about creating an unreasonable risk of harm for its guests. And then I was like if is it unreasonable

or is it reasonable to assume that your guests aren't going to climb onto the roof and then get inside like out of a window, up a fire escape, climb the ladder, go in. I mean, it's crazy. You would never have guessed that was something that was going to happen.

It's absolutely crazy. So anyways, that gets thrown out of court. They're like, obviously we're dismissing this because like, like it's terrible, of course. And I feel so, it feels so bad for them.

But that's not. Yeah, that's not on them. Okay, you do. So, so anyways, we move on. We are in the year 2014. So the owners of the seats are like,

let's get rid of our ghost hotel. And so they ended up selling it to a real estate holding company. The plan was to revitalize a hotel. And, um, Again, by this time, it wasn't part of Skid Row instead of thought we just shut this place down for renovations and just really tear from the ground up, essentially. Unfortunately, during this process, COVID also hit L.A. and all this work was suspended. So the hotel in all operations were shut down during this time because they were planning on just doing the full renovations.

But it's noted that a content creator's a guy named Pete Montzingo, he has a use. YouTube channel. You can look them up. He moved into an apartment building directly across from the Cecil while it was unoccupied. And he just started recording this thing day and night. And the shit you saw, like, again, it will make your skin crawl. Like, what, what happened was that he was crowdsourcing because, I mean, it was just literally recording 24-7. So he was crowdsourcing of people like, hey, tell me if you see anything on this like live stream of the Cecil. And so people would just message him in and say, hey, at this time marker, look at this window over on this side this many floors up and you'd see stuff going on there's stuff happening like lights be

coming going on and off you'd see things moving inside the inside the cecil you'd see people show up on the balcony and you go away like it was really creepy i'm 100% watching the shining tonight i've guessed and i'm gonna make it yeah that's a really good that's a really good uh honor to shirley debaugh and of haunted yeah uh the his the one that i was watching so i was watching one the videos entitled roof hotel cecil is haunted and again if you you go to time markers 316 and 514 you see someone doing stuff like there's someone there inside the hotel i mean who knows like it could have been that homeless people broken and say that but how creepy is that in this giant 14 floor wait tell me the when to go what to go

so it's 316 and then 514 okay it might be like a second before that because whatever like you'll you'll get it oh i see okay but the people probably were in there right yeah i mean even though like it was like maybe like somebody broke in or yeah yeah yeah whatever but like it seems like there's a lot of activity happening in a seemingly abandoned hotel and it's it just adds to the lord how unbelievably creepy this thing is. It's so creepy. I love it.

I heard. So someone else that we worked with had said that, I won't even tell you who it was, but they had told me that they saw someone that they know had a wedding there at Stay on Maine. And they had like, they like saw someone that like wasn't invited to the wedding. And it was like not a real person. Wait,

the person that we know went to a wedding. there. Yeah, and they like saw someone there that like wasn't real. What do you mean wasn't real? Like it was a ghost. Interesting. Is it someone credible? No. Okay. I'm not going to say their team. I have like a short list that I suspect.

So anyways, part of the hotel reopened in late 2021. But I mean, it was pretty much 22. It was like February or December like 13th, 2021. So call it 22. The only reason I'm pointing that out is because COVID was kind of like a little bit going away, and so it ended up reopening and they got enough work done to get it up in working order.

At that time, it essentially became a low-income boarding house. So as of late 2023, the Cecil has about 318 residents receiving rental subsidies from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority or the Department of Health. There is, well, I'll get it. I'll talk about this in a minute. But the conditions are horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. There's mold everywhere. The building, the building itself, the rooms of facilities, all are in disrepair.

All of them are dilapid. There's roaches of mice throughout the place. The elevator breaks constantly. There are only two washers and two drivers for the entire six-hour room hotel. And one thing they didn't mention is like, these people don't have any money. It's like when they do their laundry, they break it because they load every possible thing they can stuff into the damn washing machine in there and it breaks. And so and again,

you're dealing with severely traumatized and mentally ill homeless people. And so obviously there's a lot of substance abuse. There's obviously a lot of violence taking place within its walls. I was reading an L.A. Times article and the entire time I was reading this article, I was thinking, I imagine that what these, living conditions are like or is basically like what prison is like like a horrible horrible horrible prison. Yeah.

Rounded by crazy people who care about nothing and are constantly making life in the conditions around you worse and more miserable. Then I get towards the end where a resident has quoted it as saying this about the room saying, quote, they're like prison cells. I was like, oh, okay, well, there you go. Yeah. Because, I mean, you look at the pictures and you're like, what? It just looks like hell.

Like, again, it's just like hell on earth. Yeah. A while ago, I was listening to this podcast about homelessness. I think it was you're wrong about, which I've quoted before in the past. They're basically talking on the conditions of homelessness and how to get out of homelessness and stuff like that. And one thing that they brought up that seemed like an obvious solution to homelessness is to provide housing. And the example that they cited were people who had like a string of bad luck, kind of like what you referred to earlier to it. It's like a woman who was in an abusive relationship or had a drug addiction and left but had no source of income.

So she slept in our car. Then she racked up some tickets or a car. got towed so now she's homeless and she can't get far enough ahead to get out of homelessness without housing so that's a situation like an example or an anecdotal piece where a roof over that person's head would actually change their lives completely like that would be like the thing that goes on but the problem with the Cecil today is that putting a well the thing that the Cecil today illustrates that putting a roof over any homeless person's head actually doesn't solve anything because they have no services. They have mental health problems that they can't get

over. All you're doing is taking the conditions of being homeless on the streets and putting them in a container so that people can't see it and can't actually help it. I watch just like, I watch a lot of videos of like conservatives like kind of accidentally getting getting to the getting around to it. And there's one that's this young woman who was like homeless people don't want help. Like they actually like don't need houses. They need like mental health services. And it was just like, She went so conservative. She ended up a socialist because they're like, yeah, of course they do. They need help.

I know. If you go far along in one path, you eventually cross over to the other side. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, so the conditions there are, I mean, what we described to the top of this episode, what Skid Row is, take that and put it in a building. That's literally what it is today. And, you know, you look at why that's the situation. and the reason is that the owners of the building need to make money and well they probably

don't need to make money but they want to make money and these subsidies is how they get paid because you know what else you're going to do with it? What are you going to open it as a hotel? It's a it's a roach motel. Like nobody would stay there. Does so do stay on Maine still exist? I think so. Oh no, it says closed as of July 2020. okay yeah so you know what yeah actually that entire concept i guess will be done away with because it's not a hotel anymore it's literally just like low income housing and so these guys owners of

the cecil now get paid off these vouchers the government is providing and so that's why they opened without any any sort of um assistance or therapy or mental health or anything eventually the game plan was turned that beautiful lot of that actually is very, very beautiful, turn that beautiful lobby into kind of like a receiving area for all kinds of services for the homeless. And so that's essentially what it's kind of turning into. So they have plans of bringing this stuff online. It's just not there right now. And so it should get there eventually. The name of the, the name of that LA Times article, which is actually free if you want to read it. Cecil Hotel Housing Homeless Tenants

problem is kind of the name of it. So, um, and you know, And there's pictures of the Cecil on there as well, like what the interior looks like. There are, um, I'm reading the reviews, um, for Google reviews of it and they're hilarious. One of them is terrible experience, heard footsteps from the hallway. Nobody was there. Maintenance suspicious as hell. Anyway, don't say there. Yeah, yeah.

Obviously don't. God. I mean, I wanted to just because I was like, it's so creepy. It's so scary. like it's so haunted um there there was um someone who said i forgot what it was where i read this but somebody said that the higher up you go the more sense of like just desperation and like evil you feel um which i find interesting because the top floor well the top floor is 15 but they don't have a 13 well yeah so the 14th floor is the 13th floor right and i think that's the floor

that Richard Ramirez was on. And so the fact that they kind of reference evilness is like, it's kind of cool. Can you imagine like, he wasn't like devoid of blood when took all his clothes off. He's still wearing his like sambas or whatever shoes he was wearing.

You know, so he's still wearing his shoes. He has, his hair is covered in blood. He looks like Richard Ramirez. He looks like his out of his fucking mind. His teeth are falling out. He's, his hands are bloody and he's naked. He's like, hey guys. I kind of, I kind of love it.

What? Like, I just, it's like, it's like, what a great encapsulation. Like, you literally don't have to tell anybody anything else about anything going on in L.A. in the 1980s in downtown. All you have to do is tell them that story. And it's like, I never want to be anywhere around this. Yep, that is it. That's the answer.

It's interesting, actually. So the 100th year anniversary of the Cecil is this year. So, like I said, it opened on December 20th, 1924. So in a few months, we're going to celebrate the 100th year of the Cecil, which, again, is a historic landmark um i don't know why i mean that's a really great question i feel like potentially because of the architecture and like the dream you know but everything i read about the cecil everything i read about it was like just knock it down like it is just misery just knock it down build something cool and fine nice on on on that property which i'll build like a high

rise apartment you know and then like people will pay an atrocious amount of money to live there even though it's gross yeah yeah i mean for the for what it's worth i've stayed inside the biltmore and the billmore is also terrifying and it's like a nice place i stayed in a similar vibe i stayed in a hotel in culver city i think it's just called the culver um and it was very it was very much like that it was like um it's the same architecture it's creepy when you get in it's like dark and they have like a jazz band playing and they give you glass of champagne and I'm like, are you a ghost lady who's checking me? You know, like you're on like a little tiny elevator with like a great, you know, like a gate. Like that was, it was lovely.

I really liked that. That was when at my last job, I stayed an extra night after a meeting and I refused to go back to the shitty marriott. They always let us, made us say it. So I booked myself at the cul-of her. No one said anything. But yeah, the I liked, when I stayed at the Biltmore one night because I was losing my mind. My husband bought me a night there. I remember this. Young children. I went to the pool.

The pool was really fun. It felt like being on the Titanic. You know? You know, as we were talking, I literally thought about that because I remember you told me you went to the pool. It was like in the morning or something. You went.

Yeah, I went something in the morning, which is out of character. Yeah. And, and I just thought how scary it must have been. It was. Yeah,

because it was, it's an indoor pool. Yeah, yeah. It's in the basement. And it's like, tiled and like it's cool but it's scary. I have a little bit. Wait, this can't be it. Oh, that's the Biltmore. Oh my God. That one's really scary. So I went with, oh yeah, me and

we did this together. We went to the Biltmore state in North Carolina, I remember, and they showed us the pool and I was like, this is the most terrifying, terrifying thing I've ever seen in my life. It was like a weird inside. It's so scary. Look it up. Look at the Biltmore. If you look up indoor Biltmore pool, the first pictures are this pool, which is like the scariest pool in the world. I want to look at the LA one. Okay, this one's not terrible. I mean, the one in the house is way scary than the one in the Belmore.

I was like in the basement. It's weird. Yeah. Okay. I can't look at this. It makes me scared. Yay, I'm scared. It is 10 o'clock in the morning and I am afraid.

So there was. So on April 9th of 2022, there was another story coming out of Mexico in Monterey of a girl, woman. she's like 18, 19 years old, whatever you want to call her. DeBani Escobar, who was also found in a water tank. Yeah.

That story, I didn't go super into the details of. It just came up as like, hey, this is another very similar story to Elisa Lamb. And so I'm going to read more of that and see what comes of it.

But yeah, it sounds terrifying. What a terrible, dark and scary way to go. Yeah. Yeah. So. Well, that was super fun. That was like a walk through our friendship. And I loved it.

Yeah. Yeah, we went all the way back. I mean, I sometimes forget how close in time the Lisa Lamb thing happened to when we moved there. And you look at that and like, yeah, we were just really excited and just happy to be there. And it's like two weeks later, like they're flying a tank over us on a helicopter. that they're taking to some police facility that a woman drowned in it's just kind of crazy did you in the documentary there's that like sweet european couple who were saying there remember they were like yeah the water started to get weird like all the things they're like oh my god you poor babies yeah i have no again i think i think you would just have to i don't i don't know it's weird how would you if you drank that water oh my god oh my god and also i really like american horror story hotel that's the best one it has that great vibe um i really like it

do you agree it's the best one no i like row and oak but um but i do really like hotel those first those first five seasons were just absolutely killer i didn't really get into the most recent one the most oh my god the most recent one

was terrible like just terrible with kim Kardashian yeah like it ended and i was like what's the hell like it didn't it was just so stupid and so bad um but i will keep watching it forever as long as i keep making it because i'm waiting for a good one so murder house asylum hotel i think those were the best ones did you see row and oak

i saw parts of roanoke you've like you bring up the teeth oh all the time enough to where i feel like i might as well seen it you should you should we should make that same pact if if i tell you i saw teeth fall on the sky i need you to believe me and I need you to help me. I will believe you. Deal. Okay. Deal. Um, cool. Well, we can go ahead and wrap up. Is there anything you want to leave us off with? Um, no. Thank you. Everyone for listening and for sharing and everybody who has written in. We're at doom to fillpod at gmail.com and doomed to fill pot on all the social medias. So please tell your friends. Please tell your friends. Awesome. Thanks, Taylor. We're going to cut it off.

Hi. Thank you.