RedHanded - Episode 88 - The Mysterious Death of Elisa Lam

Episode Date: April 4, 2019

In March 2013 college student Elisa Lam checked into The Cecil Hotel on LA’s infamous skid row. Soon she started displaying some odd behaviour; some of which was caught on CCTV - this footage then went viral on the internet after Elisa’s body was found 3 weeks later in a water tank on the roof of the hotel. Forums still buzz with theories about what really happened to Elisa.  Was it murder? Suicide? An accident? The paranormal? Or a hit?  Check us out on HarmonTown here:https://starburns.audio/podcasts/harmontown/   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah.

I'm Saruti. And welcome to this week's Red Handed, where once again, we're not under the duvetsets in our bedrooms. We're in Los Angeles this time and Saruti's sitting right next to me in real life. And we're not under a duvet though in this heat I think I would actually expire if we tried to. But yeah don't get used to this Hannah. We're in a very nice studio in Los Angeles. You're telling me not to get used to it like we're married. Don't get used to this kind of treatment. We'll be back under the duvet next week. Yeah, I will.

I will. In my box. And you'll like it. We're in LA because we went on Harmontown last night and if you're listening to this on the day of release, it would already be out, wouldn't it? It's coming out for a week. Yeah.

So it's called Card cardigan with stab holes cardigan stab holes yeah we'll put the link in the episode description we've been doing some LA stuff we almost died of heat exhaustion yesterday because we're stupid so we decided that we were gonna go and go look at the Hollywood sign because obviously we are um tourists tourists and you need to go do that kind of thing but what we didn't realize is that you can literally just get an Uber to the Hollywood sign and you end up in quite a nice little park with a water fountain and loads of dogs and all that shit. And you can just sit and look at the Hollywood sign. No, no, no. We started, I'm going to tell them where we started from in case there are any

LA people listening so that they can properly laugh at us. We started from the observatory and we walked all the way to the Hollywood sign. There were some times we were on road. There were some times we were on dirt path. There were some times we were just bushwhacking. Sheer rocks. Sheer rocks. We were essentially bouldering for bits of it. And you had sandals on. Yep. I was wearing flip-flops. Luckily, I had a hat on. Otherwise, I think I actually would have died. But we had one bottle of water between us.

That's so stupid. And we were walking slash bouldering slash bushwhacking through land that I'm pretty sure has rattlesnakes in for about three hours. And then we got back and, yeah, it was... We have heat exhaustion. So much gay trade has been drunk. And we were also hungover when we started that walk. So we just don't know how to... We're Brits. We just don't know over when we started that walk so we just don't know how to we're brits we just don't know how to behave in the heat I just don't know how to do

difficult walking like I just I just can't do it no so instead of going to the Hollywood sign which is what we planned we accidentally ended up summiting Mount Hollywood that's what happened yeah good for us and then after that we came back and had an aggressive two hour nap and then went on Harmontown and somehow didn't make fools of us. Which all things considered, went well, went all right. Well, you can be the judge of that. It's been out for a week. So because we're in L.A., we're going to give you an L.A. case. It is quite a famous one. of traipsing around the entirety of the mountain ranges, we wanted to go to the place where this all happened, which is near the equally famous and disreputable Skid Row. But unfortunately,

after a brief rebrand as the stay on Main, the place where this all happened is no longer open. So we couldn't go. And we are, of course, talking about the infamous Cecil Hotel, which has now closed its doors for good. But for decades, it was home to some really unsavoury characters and a paranormal reputation. The Cecil opened in 1924. It was intended to cater to businessmen, but the Great Depression meant that there was a distinct lack of businessmen lying around. So the Cecil changed its business plan and introduced incredibly low weekly rates, which meant people with incredibly low incomes could live there permanently. As the Depression worsened and crime rates dramatically increased in and around Skid Row,

the Cecil slowly became a den for the down and out, and it attracted some really scary people, because nobody asked any questions. The Cecil Hotel is where Richard Ramirez lived for a year while carrying out a good chunk of his murders in the mid-80s. It also housed Austrian serial killer Jack Unterwinker. How are we saying that? Unterwurger? Unterwurger. Well done. That was very good.

Do you think anyone Austrian listening is not going to agree with you? Jack spent his time at the Cecil strangling sex workers with their own bras and the name drops just keep coming many people think that the Cecil Hotel was the last place that the Black Dahlia was seen alive and we are actually even though we couldn't get to the Cecil Hotel we are actually just like maybe a few blocks away from the real Black Dahlia body site which we realized when we were waiting for our second uber trying to get here because we fucked it up so hard trying to get it from West Hollywood. So yeah, according to the Uber map, we are very, very close to the real Black Dahlia body dump site. So delicate. So delicately put. Body dump. That's what it's called. By the 60s, so many people had killed

themselves at the Cecil that people actually started calling it the suicide instead of its actual name. Probably the most famous of these suicides was Pauline Otten, who threw herself from the building in 1962, killing a pedestrian as she hit the pavement. The suicide. That really is just such a fun name. Would you stay somewhere that's called the suicide? No, but I think it does fit in. You know, in London, you've got like the cheese grater. You've got the gherkin. What's the cheese grater? Is it not the cheese grater?

I know about the walkie-talkie. Oh, the walkie-talkie. He's got the cheese grater. Is there not one called the cheese grater? No, probably not. The walkie-talkie, the gherkin. There's something else. There's other ones. And the Suicide. suicide now we'll add to that list so while hannah looks up whether the cheese grater is a real building or not let's go back to the cecil

because the cecil was also a hot spot for paranormal activity and for years it was known as the most haunted hotel in los angeles we did actually go to a haunted restaurant last night for dinner didn't we yeah but we know no one ever told us what the actual story was we just waited for ages for our dinner and then left we did we heard that it was haunted we heard that there are loads of male ghosts in the bathrooms there yeah that's all i heard that's what dan told us and then we didn't hear the end of that story so if anybody knows why the pacific dining cart in los angeles is haunted please let us know because we never got to the bottom of that and so once we found

out that this easel was haunted we did a lot of googling we tried to find you a ghost story all we could find were a list of killers who stayed there and rundowns of the case that we're covering today along with some very dodgy looking photos of apparitions hanging out of windows i was really disappointed by that because it's so famous i was like oh there's gonna be there has to be some sort of list somewhere of all of the like ghosts wandering the halls. You know, like Hampton Court Palace, like, everyone knows it's haunted by Anne Boleyn. Maybe it's, like, more legit because you couldn't find that show. Is it?

I don't know. We've both left half of our brains in Los Angeles. It's gone. Fried. Fried. It's far too hot. And also, if you know anything about the Cecil Hotel, and if you've ever watched American Horror Story, you will know that American Horror Story based their fifth season in and on the Cecil Hotel.

It's the one where Lady Gaga is a vampire. Absolutely, categorically, the worst season, in my opinion. Oh, no, it's not. I hated that season. I think it's my second favourite. What? Yeah, but you like Coven, so... I like Coven. I think Covent's a good one.

Whatever. No, it's a terrible season. The worst one. The Cecil has a reputation. That's clear to see. And we were, like we said at the start, desperate to go there and get creeped out. But like we said, we can't because it's being refurbished or whatever. But the thing is, not everyone is as morbidly enthused about the Cecil's dismal reputation as we are. A lady named

Becca Dennison, a director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, said that she was offended by AHS choosing to set their series at the Cecil Hotel. She said that it serves now as homes for elderly and disabled people and people on very low incomes. And the quote, one incident doesn't change that, and certainly not the mythology of American horror story. It's ridiculous. But it wasn't just the one incident, was it, Becky? Because there are many, many, many incidents that have occurred there over the years. And I think, if anything, that quote is proof that you can do the most obvious thing, like set a horror TV show in a famously haunted hotel with a dark past,

and somebody somewhere will find a reason to be offended by it no and i get what she's saying you know it's like leave the people who live there alone but it's not about the people who live there it's about the building it's about the building and decades long reputation it's not about making life difficult for the people who live there it's absolutely not about demonizing the people who live there or anything like that it clearly is in a difficult part of town and it is a place for people on low incomes to live. There's no one's taking away from that. But there has been some really creepy shit that's happened there, as we're going to talk about. The most recent Cecil Hotel headline to hit the world, and more importantly, the internet,

is the one that we're going to tell you about today. And this story starts on the 19th of February, 2013. By 2013, the Cecil hadn't had a serial killer for a while, and it was ticking over as a low-budget hotel-slash-hostel. People could rent private rooms or dorm rooms with strangers, and entire floors of the hotel were occupied by permanent residents. On the 19th of February, several guests at the hotel lodged complaints with the management. The Cecil was a dump, so complaints were common.

But these ones all concerned the same thing. There was something wrong with the water coming from the bathroom taps. Some guests had said that it was coming out discoloured, even black, before settling back to normal. For some guests, their water pressure was extremely low. And the most unlucky guests reported that the water from their bathroom taps tasted off. A little bit too sweet.

Can I just say, I'm really struggling with the water situation. In LA in general, my hair is not doing well. And drinking it. Even bottled water. It tastes really sweet to me here. I feel like the water back home

is a bit more savoury. And we've got all that chalk in it, that's why. And do they not put fluoride in the water here? Oh, maybe. Maybe we've just got too much fluoride at home and we're used to it. It's delicious though. Delicious fluoride. Delicious brainwashing fluoride. Because even when I used to go to uni in Birmingham, the water was horrible. And also my teeth feel funny here. So maybe it is the fluoride. You're not getting enough fluoride here. That must be it. So with all these guests complaining about the water situation hotel maintenance man santiago

lopez headed up to the roof of the 14-story hotel to have a gander at the water supply the cecil had four water tanks on its roof one was bigger than all the others and it was the main supply to the building these water tanks are four by eight foot tall and propped up on concrete blocks, so they're quite tall, and in order to get to them, Santiago Lopez needed to use a ladder. Once atop his ladder, Lopez saw that the hatch to the largest of the water tanks was open, which it definitely shouldn't have been. So Santiago looked through the tank's open hatch, and there he saw a face staring blankly back at him. Inside the water tank was the body of a woman.

She was totally naked, and it was quite obvious that she had been in there for some time. When a body is left in water for an extended period of time, the epidermis becomes blistered and greenish black. Except the hands and feet, which become bleached, swollen and wrinkled, like when you stay in the bath too long. But imagine you've stayed in the bath for three weeks too long. Now when you die, your body fills up with gas as it decomposes, especially in your intestines and chest cavity.

This gas is what causes submerged bodies to float to the top of the water that they're in. But limbs aren't full of gas, so they tend to dangle behind the torso, which is why most water bodies are found facing down, but not this time. The hotel's water problems were clearly the result of the decomposition of this mystery woman who was floating face up. The emergency services were called and they set about getting the body out of the water tank, but they couldn't just pull her out through the hatch in case she fell apart. The woman's clothes, room key and watch, were in the tank too. Her clothes were floating next to her and they were covered in what was described

by authorities to be a sand-like particulate. The woman was determined by the Los Angeles County coroner to have died by accidental drowning. The autopsy revealed that the woman hadn't taken any recreational drugs and her blood alcohol level was just 0.2%, which is actually normal for a decomposing body. But what it does tell you is that the woman hadn't had any alcoholic drinks on the day that she died. She was tested for marijuana, cocaine, MDMA, barbiturates, opiates, and amphetamines, none of which were present. And I thought this was really interesting. Apparently, you might think her body being submerged in water for three weeks would void a toxicology report, but that's not true because they're testing her internal organs like her liver,

and they stand the test of time better than the bloodstream can. The autopsy also revealed that there was no evidence of sexual assault. Although, I really wasn't sure whether to put this in or not, but we're here now and in for a penny, in for a pound. So the woman in the water tank had a prolapsed anus. Some people argue that this is evidence of sexual assault but I've also read in other places that it's a pretty normal part of the body decomposition process in water but I'll leave you to make your own minds up about that one. Equally I'm not sure about how effective a rape kit would have been on a person who has been submerged in water for three weeks. In some places you'll read that no sexual assault assessments were carried out on the woman at all.

I think they just might have been a bit pointless due to the condition of the body. So maybe that's why the results were not released or are difficult to find, rather than evidence of some elaborate cover-up. Now, there was no other evidence of physical trauma, and it didn't look like this woman had tried to get out of the water tank at all. The autopsy report wasn't released until four months after the body was discovered, and they were released with obvious corrections. The initial cause of death was listed as a classification error.

People go absolutely nuts over this. The amount of time it took for the report to be released, and that there's crossings out and amendments. Like coroners are just people, like they make mistakes. Like I really don't think it's that much of an indication of like a massive multi-level cover up. No, because I kind of feel like if you were going to do a cover up, you wouldn't just cross shit out on the original autopsy. Exactly, yeah. And then just write something else in its place. You would

just write a fresh autopsy report because it hasn't been released yet. So no one would have had to have known that you've made those changes. It's quite an elaborate double bluff, isn't it? To make it look like a mistake when it actually wasn't, it seems a bit... I'm sure they've got better things to do in the coroner's office. No. If you're going to do a cover-up, you wouldn't release the ones with your errors in crossed out. No. That seems stupid. No, I just don't buy that. But the first thing we will come across today, because there's lots, but this is the first of them, that makes people get their tinfoil hats out,

is that some claim that this autopsy report was held back to cover up foul play, and that the woman's cause of death was changed retrospectively to protect someone. Seems very much like a big leap. I think we can just forget about it. The big thing that struck me about this case, obviously it's so famous and people have so many theories about it, but when you actually go through what's actually true and what's actually not, the coincidences, which there are, there are coincidences around it that are quite shocking and concerning, but it's not the 10 or 12 that people think it is, it's two or three. And it's easier to dismiss two or three coincidences than it is 10. And the first of our debunks in this episode is that, like we said, we don't really think that

the LA coroner's office works on anyone's schedules but their own. This case only became famous after it unfolded on the internet. And although we may be fascinated by it, to the coroner's office, the lady in the water tank was just one of hundreds of cases. So soon after the discovery, the coroner's office were able to identify the woman, going on body markings alone. How would they identify your body if your face was gone?

I have like a white patch that runs up my leg on this leg. Do you? I've never seen that. It's quite faint. Let's have a look. It was more prominent when I was young. It's really entertaining for everyone listening at home. Can you see? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and it's got no hair follicles on it, so it's very smooth. A little patch there, so you can use that. On my passport, I've got this little freckle on my finger. I also have a chicken pox scar on it. Did you say on your passport? Yeah, you have to give identifying marks on your passport. I also have a chicken pox scar here. Did you say on your passport? Yeah, you have to give identifying marks on your passport. Do you?

Yeah. It's not written in your passport when you do the application. Oh. I haven't done a passport application for about 10 years. So the little freckle on my middle finger.

That's a good one. And I have a chicken pox scar on my face there. Just one. Which I was really weird about that chicken pox scar. My mum has one in exactly the same place.

Really? Exactly the same size. Isn't that weird? That is really weird about that chicken pox scar? My mum has one in exactly the same place. Really? Exactly the same size. Isn't that weird? That is really weird. So yeah. You can go on those. I also have freckles on my tongue if my tongue survives. I forgot about that.

How about you? So weird. I've got 15 birthmarks. Wow. Yeah. Don't know why. But the biggest one is on my calf and it's like pretty large. We have similar marks on our shins is

that the one you're talking about the big one yeah but mine's from an accident and yours is a birth mark yeah apparently it disappeared when i was like three days old it was just like hi here forever you will hate me until you're 18 years old and then you'll not care anymore exactly yeah i used to really hate it i wanted it lasered off i was really conscious of it yeah no and i've got like 14 other ones that I know about. And maybe some I don't. Who knows? What a mystery.

Maybe I've just got some on the parts of my body I can't see. So under my butt cheeks, I suppose. I suppose that's the only place you can't really see, isn't it? Yeah, it's true. No one's looking. As long as I keep hold of my legs. You'll be fine. You'll be all right.

I also have several tattoos. You do. I've only seen one of your tattoos for the first time on this trip. That's true. I have a tattoo. Yeah, that's a good one. It's a good one. I feel like the feet survive.

There you go. If anyone, if we ever go missing, now you know. Now you know. And if they find bodies and they say it's us without all of these distinguishing marks. Yeah, we should do a checklist. Get your tinfoil hats out because it's not really us. So using the birthmarks that they found on this body in the water tank, like we said, the coroner's office were able to identify who it was and the body from the Cecil Hotel water tank turned out to belong to a 21-year-old Canadian

woman called Elisa Lam. She had been reported missing to the LAPD three weeks before. Elisa had been on a solo public transport trip around the west coast of the states, stopping off at a bunch of cities on the way. Elisa had checked into the Cecil on the 29th of January 2013 for three nights. She arrived alone and checked into one of the shared rooms. So it was a dorm situation because Elisa was sharing with strangers. What's your worst sharing with strangers dorm story? Oh my god, I have so many.

So many. I lived in dorms for like almost a year it was brutal i'm just going to give you the most recent one that jumps out to me so i went to iceland and i stayed in a dorm because it was just so ridiculously expensive and there was this girl who was like sleeping in the bunk next to me and everyone gets up really early you're there to go on excursions you're not there to just like sit about or whatever and because we were there in winter you had to leave really early so you could be back before the sunset. Because it's like pitch black. Yeah, it's pitch black.

So this girl is clearly got a plan to be out early. Her alarm goes off at four in the morning. I'm like, I'm okay. Right. I have to respect this. I'm in a dorm. And I wasn't planning to get up till six. But her alarm goes off at four.

And she just snoozes it and goes back to sleep. And I'm like, okay, fall back asleep. Ten minutes later, her alarm goes off again. And she snoozes it and goes back to sleep. And then now I'm just lying there for ten minutes waiting for the alarm to go off again. And it goes off again. And she just snoozes it. And I just lost it.

And I just sat up in bed. And I was like, listen, if you're not going to get up, just turn the alarm off. And then she just looked really scared. And she turned the alarm off and turned over. You're scary, though. I don't want to sound like a up, just turn the alarm off. And then she just looked really scared and she turned the alarm off and went and turned over. You're scary though. I don't want to sound like a bitch, bitch. I'm sorry. Don't keep putting snooze.

You're not in your room. No, no, that's wildly inappropriate. I'm so conscious of stuff like that, especially when you're like. No. Oh my God. And there was another time when I was in, I want to say Vietnam. You wake up really early. Sure.

Because you've got like a flight to catch or something. Wake up, put all the lights on in the dorm room. Start washing your hair and then blow drying it. And speaking at the top of your lungs about how you're having the best trip ever. Ugh. Nerd. Get in the bin. I hate that.

Stupid, stupid girl. And there was two of them. And one of them was whispering. Clearly trying to be like signaling to her friend. This is the volume that which we need to speak. Now her friend was just yelling. that which we need to speak now her friend was just yelling oh my god and then i yelled at them and then they left i don't want to sound like a bitch but i just think if you're going to stay in a hostel room to a level you need

to accept that people are going to be slight dicks but if you also stay in a hostel room you need to accept that you need to follow hostel room etiquette and i think that i was fair and justified and sleep deprived you're going to get yelled at. Anyway, so Elisa was staying in this hostel room at the Cecil on Skid Row. It's just going to be a bit dodge. Elisa was set to check out on the 1st of February and continue her journey but she never did. After a night Elisa was upgraded to a single room on her own because her roommates complained to the hotel management about her, quote, odd behavior. The Cecil's reputation hadn't improved much since at House Richard Ramirez.

So I wonder just how odd your behavior would have to be for people to complain about sharing a room with you. Pretty bad, I imagine. Like, did you complain to the management? I just take matters into my own hands. So she's not leaving her alarm on like it's something worse. Yes, exactly. On her West Coast tour, Elisa rang her parents back in Canada every day. But on the 31st of January, David and Yina Lam didn't hear from their daughter. So they rang the LAPD and filed a missing persons report. So when Elisa Lam turned up in the water tanks at the Cecil Hotel, the LAPD already knew who she was, and they had already been digging around the hotel.

When Elisa was reported missing, the LAPD did search the Cecil to the furthest of their complicated, legally speaking, to search because technically they are permanent residency. So you would need an individual warrant for all of these people who live there, which they don't have. They just have a blanket one for the hotel. So when they're searching the Cecil Hotel, yes, they're searching it, but not all of it. So kind of like the Amy Bradley cruise ship situation, a lot of doors in the Cecil Hotel remained unopened. And quite obviously the police didn't search the water tanks because Elisa was in there for three weeks decomposing into the tap water supply. So the initial search of the hotel was not particularly thorough. And who knows what was missed.

Having found no leads at the hotel, the LAPD released CCTV footage of Elisa in the Cecil Hotel that was captured on the 1st of February. And if you know anything about this case, you will already have seen this video footage and know that it is scary shit. The first time I watched it, I genuinely didn't sleep that night. I was terrified. I've been trying to think about what is it specifically that makes it so terrifying? It's her behavior. She's acting so strangely. And it's because she looks scared, but also eerily calm. I don't think she looks scared.

It's the hiding. It's when she's like looking. Okay, we'll talk about the footage, but I think she looks scared. But at the same time, really resigned to whatever's happening. And that's what makes me feel scared. I think she looks like she's playing a game. But she never smiles. She's totally like poker face.

I don't know if I'm smiling to myself when I'm playing hide and seek. Yeah, because it's like sneaky and you're like, you're not just like poker face. I'm like inwardly like. No, but you're not poker face. You'd have a little smirk because you found a great place to hide.

I don't know. I take it very seriously. So we don't know about elisa lambs and hide and seek playing game face but i was scared when i watched it and i watched it again in the cab over here still scary so the lapd released the cctv footage on the 13th of february so that's five days before elisa's body was discovered and they released it hoping that someone would recognise her and come forward with her whereabouts. But obviously no one did. But the footage went viral instantly. And again, if you've seen it, you'll know why. We will definitely, definitely, definitely post the YouTube footage of this on social media, but you can also just go find it. Just search Elisa Lam in YouTube. The film that you'll see is from a CCTV camera in an elevator

at the Cecil. It's the classic grainy closed circuit footage and you really do have to watch it to get the full effect. Our description of it that we're going to give won't do it justice but for the sake of this being a podcast we will do so and this is what it shows. You see Elisa get into the lift and she presses multiple buttons. Quite deliberately, I think. Yeah, she gets very close to the button pad and then presses them very carefully. And her actions are very slow. She almost looks to me like she's underwater. She's not panicked?

No, she's not panicked at all. She looks very like she's moving through honey or something. So she presses a load of these buttons. And you're right, it's not arbitrary. She's not just slamming her fist into it and getting the lift to close. She's pressing them very deliberately. But the lift doors remain open. That creeps me out, that the lift doors just don't close.

Right, but the Cecil's a dump. It might just have been a malfunctioning lift. I know, but then towards the end, as soon as she leaves, the doors close. Right. But maybe it's because she's pushing multiple buttons. Maybe. And that's what freaks out

because it's all at the same time. I don't know. But I'm not an elevator engineer, so I don't know. No. I hadn't seen that on your CV. When I applied to join this podcast, I had to write an eight-page cover letter

with all of my birthmarks letter. Is how I roll. With all of my birthmarks listed. And how you behave in hostel rooms. So badly. Oh no. Okay, back to Elisa in this lift. So she's pressing these buttons, the doors remain open. Then she sort of paces around the lift.

And then she like steps to the front of the lift towards the door and then looks out and looks down the corridor like she's seeing if anybody is coming. And then she suddenly steps back into the elevator and starts hiding essentially in a corner of this lift. That bit is fucking scary. Quite a lot of people describe it as cowering and I'm not sure if it's quite cowering. But she's hiding yeah she's not cowering but she's like steps out looks through the door looks down the corridor steps back into the lift gets into a corner then moves to the side and stands pressed up against the wall of the lift she's not cowering but she's hiding yeah and she the bit I she does this like sidestep yeah which is like a

really measured movement I'm not going to be able to describe it properly you're just going to have to watch it i cannot think of a single situation where i would move like that no it's very odd movements it's like it's like dance moves she's almost doing like a weird step like it's a rehearsed movement that she's doing and it is the bit where she hides against the wall that is scary because the direction she looks down the corridor almost to check it looks like if somebody's following her and then she's pressing these buttons is she trying to get the door to close i don't know and then when she steps back and stands there the direction that the person she's checking for the way they would walk if

they just looked into the lift from the way they were walking they wouldn't see her from where she was hiding that's what makes it quite eerie and sinister. We don't think cowering, we think hiding, but we're not totally sure exactly what she's doing. And again, after she's doing all of this, she's not pressing the buttons anymore. So the idea that some people say, you know, she's pressing the open door, hold door button. She's not pressing the buttons at this point, but the lift doors still remain open. But it does look, the way she's hiding, like she's waiting for the doors to close.'s the bit that's creepy she's hiding looking like she's waiting for the doors to close but they don't Elisa then gets out of the lift and this is when

it gets really creepy she then gets out of the lift steps into the corridor and looks as if she's talking to someone off camera but you can't see anyone else. You can just see her moving her arms around in an animated discussion with somebody that you can't see. And that's the hand movements that people really don't like. They look not real. I've heard it described in so many different ways. And I think like the closest, like some people think she looks like she's on strings, like she's a puppet.

Yeah, yeah. And I can kind of see that because it's a really like hyper extended articulated movement and again like i just i cannot think of a situation where i would move like that some people think she's doing uh asl sign language it looks unnatural it looks to me how you would move again to come to that underwater thing like you were underwater and like treading water or something or moving your hands around it looks like that kind of very fluid movement which in real life on dry land looks very very odd yeah almost i can't make my hand do that movement but that's what she's doing it looks really weird and so as soon as she steps off having this conversation the lift doors open and close several times and again i take your point the hotel is a dump like the lifts are probably doing all sorts of crazy things but it does just add to the weirdness of the whole situation go watch it

tell us what you think about her hand movements we think either she looks like she's miming swimming or maybe hannah you said like stroking a massive dog it's something weird like that and we'll get into the details of these hand movements in a bit like everything else associated with this case there are a lot of theories but important things to say now about the video is that the time stamp is obscured and a lot of people claim that there are 58 seconds missing from it. But equally, there are just as many people who call themselves video editing experts, I don't know what that is, that claim that the footage hasn't been tampered with at all. But not knowing when this footage was taken is pretty significant.

Elisa was supposed to check out on the 1st of February, which is when the footage is from. So if it was filmed in the evening, that's important because it means she decided to stay another night. And she doesn't call her parents on the 31st. So she's already had a whole night of acting out of character because she was calling her parents every day up until that point. I kind of always assumed that this all went down at night, but now I'm not sure. We can't know. That's the thing. There's no windows in that corridor. You can't see anything.

You can basically only see into the lift and that very small part of the corridor just outside. And the thing that I found the most unsettling about the footage is after Elisa disappears out of the shot, the lift doors close and that obscures the light to the camera. And in the darkness, what looks like a face appears. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. I know logically that that is probably just like a trick of the light. But when I think about the video, that's the image that sticks with me even more than her hands is that face.

I mean, it's perfectly explainable. Yeah, but it's terrifying. It's because also by that point in the video, if you're me, you're scared. Yeah, looking for things that aren't there. The lift doors open and close several times and the face is there and then Elisa never reappears.

The last time Elisa was seen alive outside the hallow grounds of the Cecil was on the 31st of January, the day she failed to call her parents, the day before she's captured on the CCTV in the lift. A shop owner called Kate Orphan told the LAPD that Elisa had come into her bookshop to buy souvenirs for her family. According to Orphan, Elisa was bubbly, happy and very talkative. She was trying to figure out whether she would be able to carry all the gifts that she had bought around with her on the rest of her trip. Doesn't really sound like someone who's thinking about ending their own life. But a lot of people do think that this is the case. Elisa

had a history of mental illness. She had bipolar disorder and was prescribed four different medications to keep her mood stable. You'll often see Elisa listed as a student at the University of British Columbia, but just before Christmas in 2012, she had actually stopped going to class altogether. Elisa had a quite serious episode of depression, and she was quite open about this on her blog, which is still live. It's a Tumblr blog called Nouvelle Nouveau, and it's quite an eclectic mix of shatteringly honest posts describing her experience with bipolar mixed in with colourful fashion posts and a lot of Ruth Wilson gifs. And there's a quote at the top of her page that reads

you're always haunted by the idea that you're wasting your life. Obviously in this context like that is quite scary and because her Tumblr blog has just an archive now, so it's just a blank page with that quote at the top, which is quite unnerving, I think. It's really sad. It is sad. It's really sad. Elisa's blog wasn't all doom and gloom.

Although she was very honest about living with bipolar, her parents told police that she'd never run off before or exhibited any behaviour as seen in the footage from the cctv camera i think that's important you can't just like she was mentally ill therefore we don't we don't really need to try that hard to figure out what happened to her absolutely not i think it just can't explain everything but it it does feel like an important part of this story although her parents are saying she's never exhibited this kind of behavior before strangers in a dorm room probably quite tolerant behavior before. Strangers in a dorm room, probably quite

tolerant strangers if they're staying in a hostel room on Skid Row, complained about her enough that she was moved. She was not okay, probably, at this point. And the really scary thing about Elisa's blog is that it continued updating until December 2013. That's 10 months after she died. And the thing is, Elisa's phone was never recovered. So could someone have been updating it for her after her death? You'll hear about this a lot too, people saying that it was updating for three years after she died and all of this. It's bollocks. It's not true. It's 10 months is that it keeps updating. So is she updating her Tumblr blog from beyond the grape? Short answer, no. When I first read about it, I was like, oh, that is absolutely terrifying. How can that

possibly be happening? Yeah, because even if it's not three years, 10 months is a long time to be updating your blog after you're dead. Well, right, exactly. But I've looked into Tumblr a bit and we're going to have to do more myth busting, I'm afraid. I'm not actually a Tumblr person, but I asked our Russian consultant who's doubling as our online forum consultant this week. And apparently on Tumblr, if you want to reblog an image or a post, you can schedule it to be reblogged on your page for any time up to a year in advance. And the things that are reblogged on Elisa's Tumblr after she died are pretty seasonal things. There's spring and summer fashions that are posted in like march and then june and then there's considering the situation quite a scary image of this light bulb and inside the light bulb is this like snowy scene so some

people interpret that as like oh like a world that we can't see inside of you know but it's also just like it's just a christmas image and she reblogs it in December. So she set it up before she died. And it just. That is so organized. Yeah. Can you imagine scheduling tweets for Red Handed 10 months in advance? No,

sorry. No, absolutely not. But I think that's how Tumblr, I think that's a very Tumblr thing. I think it's a specific thing to that. Yeah. I've never really used Tumblr.

I was going to start a Tumblr once. Tell the listeners at home what you were going to start your tumblr about so um when i was traveling obviously you encounter a lot of different types of tourists i was going to start a tumblr of me taking pictures of asian tourists taking pictures of themselves and it was going to be a media sensation i just filled my phone with pictures of strangers taking photos of themselves and then I just never started so you've just got an album on your phone full of Asian tourists taking pictures of themselves for no reason you die if someone goes through your phone that's you're gonna be in big trouble oh it's gonna it's great I feel like I can get away with more because I'm also Asian different type of Asian yeah it would be much worse if I did it

yeah it would be much worse if you did it I Yeah, it would be much worse if you did it. I'm going to use this skin colour for all it's worth. I'm going to do it. I'll just take my white guilt and leave. Get out. Don't even look at my Tumblr. That I will obviously- Not for the likes of you. So, get this. The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you a profile. Her first act as leader, asking donors for a million bucks for her salary. That's excessive. She's a big carbon tax supporter.

Oh yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here. She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah, higher taxes, carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it. That'll cost you. Aie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it.

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This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media. To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. And the other thing about, obviously, her phone. No one finds it. It's not in her room. It's not in the water tank. Nobody knows where it is. However, pretty rough end of town.

I think she's left it somewhere. If she's acting erratically enough to be, I'm just a bit dehydrated and I left my laptop in a restaurant this afternoon. Luckily remembered it. But I think she's just left her phone somewhere. Someone's nicked it. That's it. Yeah.

But the blog does help us with one thing. I think that if Elisa had been planning a suicide attempt, she would have blogged about it. Because when she's talking about mental health and her, just her relationship with herself, and she gives quite detailed accounts of how disappointed she is with herself for having a relapse and having to stop going to class and not feeling on top of it and feeling quite, I want to go and do all of these things, but this is stopping me from doing it. And I don't know how to. This is a difficult topic to talk about. And I wouldn't claim in any way to be an expert on suicide. There are warning signs, right? The thing that we were always taught when we used to do

safeguarding stuff was if somebody has a plan, that's when you know it's imminent danger. When they say, this is what I'm going to do. And this is how'm going to do it. Because they've thought about it to that extent. Elise's biggest outlet was this blog. She doesn't seem to have a plan. She doesn't seem to post about that around about the time she disappears. People who have interacted with her, yes, there was odd behavior, but she was buying presents. She was planning the rest of her trip.

Like I said, I'm no expert in this and there are people listening who I know are. So please do correct me if I'm wrong. But it's weird to me that she doesn't talk about it on the blog because she is so brutally honest. There would have been, even if it was a cryptic post about something, that just in the days up to her disappearance, there just isn't. I just think that there would have been if that was on. And, you know, she's buying presents. She's going out.

She had her room key with her she was going back and on top of having her room key on her she left other items of value in her room like her laptop was there i just think she was planning on going back i agree but according to amy price the manager of the cecil at the time elisa shouldn't have been able to get up onto the roof at all. The roof was accessible by fire escapes and by an alarmed door. Only staff were able to disable the alarm with a key. According to the engineer who maintained the hotel's alarm system at the time of Elisa's disappearance, the alarm on the roof was being regularly tested and was in good working order. Now there are people on all corners of the internet who claim that this is proof

that a hotel employee was involved in Elisa's murder. However, I have seen this debunked in loads of places. There are a few YouTube videos of people making it up to the roof of the Cecil via one of the fire escapes without setting off an alarm. So I'm fairly confident that Elisa could have done the same. And why would a hotel employee, think about it, why would a hotel employee put her in the water tank? Why would they keep her in the hotel? No, they more than anyone would know how the water system worked and therefore would know that she would eventually be found and that they would have to clean up the mess the only thing i can think is it's quite hard to dispose of a body especially in a major city so maybe they were killer dumper in there we'll deal with it we'll deal with it we'll deal with it three weeks ago

i don't know what to do or maybe it just wasn't someone who was thinking particularly logically no and they have three weeks to get away i think before you sort of zoom in and start talking about was it an employee was it this was it that i think the larger question is was it someone else or was it not and then it's if it was someone else there's no reason it couldn't be an employee because i think someone who kills somebody and dumps them in a water tank isn't thinking that clearly anyway that's true what's important though is uh when you read a lot of the initial things about the case before you get down to the myth-busting, everyone's like, how did she even get up there? But it was perfectly possible for her to have done it.

She didn't need to be with anyone else. And I think that's a really important point because you see that a lot, that it was locked, that it was secured, that it was alarmed. Again, the Cecil Hotel was a dump. Another thing you'll see when you're reading about this is that Elisa is only ever seen alone on the CCTV in the Cecil Hotel, and that's actually not true. According to the LAPD, CCTV actually captured more footage of Elisa on the 1st of February, arriving at the hotel with two men. One of the men gave Elisa a box, and then the trio went their separate ways. The two men. One of the men gave Elisa a box and then the trio went their separate ways. The two

men were never seen by the police on video again. Some people say that Elisa had blogged about a quote, creeper in the hotel. And I'm sure there were a whole host of creepers in that hotel. And maybe there was one particular one that was bothering Elisa. Perhaps they're the ones who put her in the water tank on the roof. But I'm actually going to have to debunk that one too. Elisa never wrote anything about anyone in the Cecil Hotel. In the post where she talks about creepers, she wrote that on her blog before she even got to LA. She doesn't even write about one person in particular in the post. All she says is, I'm going out tonight. I really hope no creeper comes near me. Seriously though, those Italian and Mexican guys go after you strong. Show the slightest inclination and they hound you.

So a bit racist, but not talking about anyone in particular. And she wasn't even at the Cecil yet. She wasn't even in the city. I've been truly amazed by this, how people will just pick the tiniest particle of a thing and spin it into a story on this one. Absolutely. And I think that when we started this case, we thought it was going to be us talking about all of these crazy coincidences and all the stuff and the creepiness and putting it together into this story. This is just as interesting, but it's debunking a lot of

the stuff that's out there, which has to be said because this kind of stuff is just like wildfire. It catches hold and then it's just Chinese whispers through the internet. And a lot of this just didn't happen the way that people say that it did. Another really key thing to remember with this case is that the hatch on the water tank was open when Elisa's body was discovered. More myth busting because you will read in a lot of places that it was closed. And the very first time I read about this, watched YouTube videos, whatever, everybody told me that it was closed. And it just wasn't. It's just not. And, you know, if it was closed, this would have been an indicator of foul play. And I would think that, you know, if somebody was trying to hide a body, they would have closed the hatch. This is the biggest thing in the case for me that it was open. And it's Santiago Lopez who tells in his deposition, he leaves out that she was naked when he found her, but he says that the hatch was open. For me, it's the most important detail. It is because when you look at it from the point of view, if the hatch is closed, yeah,

that's somebody covering up a crime. And that's her being in there being trapped. I don't think she could have closed the hatch behind her when she was in there that easily. So it would have indicated to me that somebody had closed it for her. But no, the hatch was open. And that's really, really important. And this makes it far more likely for us that Elisa jumped into the tank herself. Santiago Lopez, if you remember, needed a ladder to get to the hatch on the water tank. So logically speaking, so would Elisa. And the thing is, no ladder was found near the water tank. And again, this may sound like we're saying, oh well, somebody took the ladder away and left her in there. But again, I don't know how significant that is, to be honest. She would have been in there for three weeks presumably people would have been

on the roof in that time so to be honest anyone could have just seen this ladder propped up against a water tank and just moved it right exactly because the hatch is right on top of the water tank so you wouldn't be able to see unless you're on top of the ladder that it was open and you wouldn't have been able to see inside so it's entirely possible i think that someone has just gone off on the roof to do something else, seen it and been like, oh, that shouldn't be there, I'll move to it. Yeah, the ladder could easily have been moved, not for nefarious reasons.

Easily. Another thing people say about the hatch on the water tank is that there's no way Elisa could have opened it because it's so heavy. The hatch is weighed 20 pounds. That's nine kilos. I could definitely open a nine kilo hatch. I wouldn't enjoy doing it,

but I could do it without supernatural strength. And that's what some people say would have been necessary for Elisa. I do think, however, like you said, it would have been very hard to close the hatch from the inside if you're in the water and then to get your arm out and then close it. It's not so much the weight, it's the angle at which the hatch door sits. She's quite a petite woman. I think it would have been quite difficult for her to reach out and have the limb length to be able to grab that actually and close it. But it wasn't closed, so it doesn't really matter. I really just feel like I'm being such a killjoy with this one.

But before I put a real downer on all of the paranormal aspects of this case that people love so much, let's go through the coincidences surrounding Elisa's death that I do have to say some of them do make me feel a little bit uneasy, especially after seeing the face in the lift. And we have spoken about the Cecil's dark history briefly and we've looked into it quite extensively and we really didn't expect an appearance from Alistair Crowley. But he shows up. It's claimed that Mr. Crowley and possibly a couple of other members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn opened a portal into another world at the Cecil Hotel back in 1918. Crowley famously drew a picture of an alien life form that he claimed to have interacted with. This picture looks exactly like Paul the Alien from the film. Alien fans call them small greys.

It's the image basically everyone thinks of when they think about aliens after they think about little green men. It's the grey ones next, I think. And according to Crowley, this creature's name was Lam, spelled like Elisa spelled her name, L-A-M. Which some people lose their goddamn minds about, honestly. That is quite fun though. It's fun, but also Elisa's parents are from Hong Kong, where Lam is a super, super common surname. So it's a stretch for me, honestly. But there's more. During his stay at the Cecil, Alistair Crowley wrote a poem called Jephthah,

in which the eponymous character, a judge of Israel, sacrifices his daughter called Celia. Celia's with an S. So it's an anagram of Elisa. Bit of a stretch again, honestly. Come on. You're just, you're racking them up though.

I am racking them up. I'm racking them up. And the best is still to come. Because my problem with all of these Alistair Crowley references, and again, it's something that you'll see referenced in connection to this case a lot. Although all of these things did take place in the Cecil Hotel, it was an entirely different Cecil Hotel.

The one in London that was built in 1886 and torn down in 1930. So the connections were tenuous enough as it was. So now I think we can just totally ignore them because they all happened in a hotel that was connected to the LA Cecil Hotel in nothing more but name. And I also think you wouldn't call it the Cecil. No, you'd call it the Cecil.

The Cecil, yeah. It's not owned by the same people. It's not the same business. It's nothing. They're completely separate. They happen to have the same name. Which would be pronounced very differently. Pronounced differently. And the London hotel was demolished in 1930 so it's all it's just a

coincidence we should i think it's a i think it's on the strand actually so we should go and is it still called the sessel oh no i mean it's not there anymore but there'll be something else okay so we'll just go to the area we'll just go and have a look at the the interdimensional portal alice acrali scares me and i don't know yeah me too if you don't know who alice acrali is go and find out last podcast do a really good series on him they do i actually struggled to get through it did you it's i love it i love that shit he's so fucked up yeah i can't i kind of wanted maybe i'll do a patreon on him yeah we're gonna do a patreon on him because i think we started it and then we were well in like the really early days before we knew what we were doing and how like hard research was. And we were like, yeah, we can do this in a week.

Wrong. If you were enjoying the anagram wordplay, we're not done with that yet. So hold on to your hats. When Elisa went missing, this, I think this is my favorite bit. This is my favorite bit too. There was an outbreak of TB in Skid row right near the cecil and the test that is used to detect tb specifically in hiv positive people is called are you ready the lamb elisa l-a-m hyphen e-l-i-s-a spelt exactly the same as elisa's name that's crazy yeah i read that

apparently it's quite difficult to detect tuberculosis in people who are HIV positive. Oh, really? Because they've got a compromised immune system anyway. So it is a test for TB in general, but it's particularly effective in diagnosing TB in people who are HIV positive, which is quite difficult to do. Okay, that's interesting. And the Lam Elisa stands for the... Go on, I believe in you. I'm going to do it.

Lipo-arabinomanum. Oh, someone's got a chemistry A level. Lipopoarabinomanum oh someone's got a chemistry level lipoarabinomanum yeah good job let's go with that enzyme linked immunosorbent assay that is absolutely true and scary but again i hate to say it probably just a coincidence this is the thing like if it's this this being a coincidence and then there's a couple of other ones that we're going to cover but i can kind of write them off because there's just not as many as people think there are. No but the thing is if you're wondering why I even bring this up yes like the name is the same blah blah blah but it is quite interesting because people run with this particular conspiracy theory in one of two ways. Some claim

that Elisa and this I think is my favorite version of the two conspiracy theories. Some claim that Elisa Lam never actually even existed and that the whole thing was staged to cover up an illegal TB study amongst the homeless of LA. It's pretty tinfoil, isn't it? That's pretty tinfoil. Like a false flag person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they said that the whole story with the whole Elisa Lam going missing, turning up in the water tank was invented so that when you Google Lam Elisa, you would be just overwhelmed with pages and pages and pages of conspiracy theories about a woman that went missing and turned up dead rather than finding out about the homeless people who have been intentionally infected with TB by the government.

It's quite nice, isn't it? It's a nice theory. It's a nice theory. I like it. But conspiracy theories like this, as much as I like're fun and I'm like, they're so dangerous. This is when people just like start saying all sorts of crazy shit like Sandy Hook didn't really happen. And you know, it's dangerous because it does. Yes, we should critically evaluate things and we should question things and we shouldn't just take everything we're told at face value

because that's how we end up in like a North Korea situation. But it also kind of primes people to believe in any old random shit that they're told without any evidence. Yeah. And that's dangerous. Don't want to be a killjoy about conspiracy theories, but they are dangerous. But we're not perpetuating them because we're saying this isn't true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously this story, as much as it might be fun to think about, has all kinds of holes

in it. But the biggest one is that as far as I can tell, the Lam Elisa test was being used long before Elisa made it to LA, because we've seen it mentioned in medical journals dated from as far back as 2009. And if that was one too much for you, some people think that Elisa had actually contracted TB herself and had been put on isoniazid, an antibiotic commonly used to treat TB. Some internet sleuths say that isoniazid can cause abnormal behaviour and confusion, but I found absolutely no evidence to back that up. Also, Elisa Lam had just been in LA for three days.

That's like how long we've been here. I don't think that that's enough time for her or for us to have contracted TB, realised she had it, go to a doctor in a country where healthcare is extremely expensive, and then end up taking a drug for long enough that she saw the ill effects of it. Yeah, I just don't buy it. Like, if I was ill here, there's no way I'd go to the doctor in the States. I'd wait till I went home. Yeah.

And then they'd tell me that I'm dying. In LA a couple of years ago, I went to LACMA and i was so hungover that i genuinely thought i was going to faint and i had to like talk myself down and be like you can't faint here because someone put you in an ambulance and then you will be in tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt and you don't have that kind of money so just sort yourself out absolutely so i just i don't bite she's canadian she would have had health care at home she was nearing the end of her trip even if she was feeling a bit ropey and it's not like TB comes on all of a sudden no taken time she's only in LA for three days at that point yeah there's she can't contract it find a doctor I wouldn't even know where to start no I don't I don't buy that but the coincidences don't stop there in 2005

the film Dark Water came out and it follows a mother and daughter in a hotel, which in my opinion is very obviously based on the seesaw. The mother's name is Dahlia, for God's sake. This mother and daughter duo also encounter elevator trouble, black water, and a body in a water tank. So do we have a copycat? Possibly. And like I said, I could buy that someone else was involved. They did have three weeks to get away. The only reason I am reluctant to fully get behind that is because the hatch was open. So Darkwater came out before this happened? Yep. That's quite creepy.

I think there's just quite a lot of very obvious connections between that. It mirrors it, basically. That's really creepy. When we were doing this and I asked you, have you seen Darkwater? and then we watched it i i thought dark water had come out after this case happened no way before oh my god that one is is a creepy one but the the the most ridiculous one i found i quite like it because it's just so extreme but also just categorically not this is the most ridiculous one we have a more ridiculous one after this. Do we? The elevator game.

Oh, yeah. But that's like a creepy one. This is just like straight up outlandish. This is the most tinfoil hat theory. And it concerns an invisibility cloak. I completely understand if you turn off now. I completely understand if you stop listening. But please just stay with me.

Goodbye. Have a nice weekend. We'll see you next week. There'll be no invisibility cloaks.. But please just stay with us. Goodbye. Have a nice weekend. We'll see you next week. There'll be no invisibility cloaks. So please try to stay with us. Apparently, there is a project being run by the Pentagon and the South Korean military. And the basic aim is to create an invisibility cloak. And after watching the men who stare at goats, I can kind of believe that.

I can believe that that is something that could possibly be working on. Because what is camouflage, really? What's the aim? To be not seen brilliant i love it so just immediately what what is when you think about it what even is camouflage what even is it are we even real are we even here exactly do i even know what your name is probably not i don't know who knows apparently elisa retweeted a post about this invisibility cloak project before she died. So some people think that she knew too much. So the government had to get rid of her. And to elaborate on that, people think that we can't see who she's talking to in the elevator footage because they're wearing an invisibility cloak. No, you can't see who she's speaking to in the elevator because the camera doesn't pan that far.

That's why you can't. It's not like she's speaking to in the elevator because the camera doesn't pan that far that's why you can't it's not like she's speaking to thin air you literally physically cannot see who she's speaking yeah or they're wearing an invisibility cloak but we still you how difficult would it be to trick a shit camera no but the camera doesn't show her speaking to nobody you can't see who she's speaking to because the elevator is in the way maybe they're standing really really close to her we can't see them we don't know where they that's what i mean no i mean you can't see an absence of a person either there's space in between her and the rent is she doesn't take up the whole shot i don't know she's right at the edge for me i'm just like there could be i'm not on board with the unvisited i don't know why i'm arguing this to be honest i'm just feeling argumentative and to make make things even more ridiculous,

there used to be a company registered to the Cecil Hotel called the Invisible Light Agency, who some claim were the ones that were working on this invisibility cloak. The same people who claim that Alistair Crowley opened a portal there. I'm going to save you the bother of deep diving into this. They were actually a special effects company that has since gone out of business. Absolutely nothing to do with invisibility cloaks or the

south korean military or the pentagon uh so all elisa did she just retweeted a post about something she thought sounded cool doesn't really make her cia black ops as some people think we were talking about this with dan the other day i'd quite like to think that if the pentagon wanted elisa dead they wouldn't have just sort of left her lying around but then if you look at gareth williams i would have i wouldn't have left anyone in a bag in a apartment either danny casolaro exactly so maybe i don't i don't think it was a government job but maybe that argument which i have used quite a few times that the government would just do a better job maybe i just need to retire that one now. As I alluded to a little bit before, we couldn't talk about this case without bringing up the Korean elevator game. And reading about this genuinely sent shivers down my spine. I think

it was like a couple of, it would have been more than a couple of years ago because before we started doing this podcast is when I heard about Elisa Lam. And I watched YouTube videos and I read Reddit posts about the elevator game. And genuinely, I was so scared. This case, I think, when I first read about this and watched it, it scared me more than anything I've seen in a really long time. And I watched this guy on YouTube in a very deadpan voice talking you through how you play the elevator game. So we're going to tell you now how to play the elevator game.

And I don't think my voice is as scary as his is, but I'll do my best. So apparently, in any building that is 10 stories or higher you can play a game that opens a gateway to another world i did ask anna to play this game in our hotel but she flatly refused what we just got off the plane i was already not at my best oh please dan floor's here first class gonna let me finish finish my reasons. I can't remember what had happened, but I always find getting places quite stressful. Getting from London to LAX was absolutely wonderful. LAX to the hotel, slightly more stressful.

Not that it was particularly stressful. I was just tired. And we got into the elevator and it just went, restricted floor. And it was really dark. That's how close to the edge you are all the time. All it said was, you can't go to that floor and you were ready well why can't i go because it's like half of the hotel is a construction site right now we just needed to use our key card that's all we needed to do that so i

just couldn't get that far my brain process good i'm glad i'm here to anchor you to the floor so we didn't play the game but if you do want to play the game, here are the rules. There's still time. You can play it tonight if you want. Maybe. So you need to find this elevator. You need to find a building. You have to be on your own. You do have to be on your own. So find a building with 10 stories with an elevator. And like Hannah said, you have to be playing this on your own. And it works like this. You get into the lift and you go to a series of floors, one after the other. Four, two, six, ten, five. Then when you get to the fifth floor the doors will open and a woman will get into the lift with you you mustn't look at her that's important and you

mustn't speak to her or even acknowledge her presence i've read that sometimes she looks like someone you know but not someone you know closely like someone you worked with once or someone you went to school with or something like that so that you'd be more inclined to like yeah and i also read in a couple of places her feet won't be touching the ground oh i didn't read that oh yeah but don't look to check so how do they know because they're the people that didn't come back oh my god stop it but they are still quite dark in here still on reddit from the other world apparently they're still still starting subreddits from the other side the do's and don'ts sounds like a great afterlife just forever being on reddit right so she gets in you don't acknowledge her then you press floor number one and if the lift instead of

going down starts going up to the 10th floor you will know that the combinations of floors has worked and you're headed to the other world. When you get to the 10th floor, the doors will open and now you'll be in the other world and no electronic devices will work and all you'll be able to see is a red cross shining in the distance. The woman in the lift will now ask you where you're going, but again, you have to ignore her as you leave the lift. You will be the only person in the other world and you can stay there as long as you want when you're done you can get back to our world by the same combination of floors that you came in by but it's important to know that you have to use the same lift it really reminds me of like some silent hill shit yeah and i also read that like you're

going to be really disorientated when you come back so you might not remember which lift yeah you came up in oh my god stop and so some people claim watching the cctv footage of elisa that she was playing this game got it wrong and ended up dead and i can see why they think this in the video elisa presses multiple buttons in the lift and like we said before it looks like she's pressing them quite deliberately and the way she steps from side to side it definitely looks like she was playing some sort of game and maybe the person she was talking to that we can't see was the woman who gets in the lift on the fifth floor we don't know what floor that footage was taken on it could have been the fifth floor where the mystery lady is supposed to show up and i don't know this whole thing is terrifying and honestly if you're like oh the elevator game there's a reddit post called something came back with me it's something like that I'll find it

we'll post it on the social medias you could probably also just google it elevator game reddit something came back and it's about this guy who played the elevator game and he came back you know same lift etc came back to quote unquote our world and he was convinced that something followed him back. No, hate it. Hate it. Get in the bin. Definitely didn't happen. That's what I'm convincing myself. So let's get back to reality for just a moment. I think that Elisa Lam's toxicology report is much more telling than a Korean game that takes you to an alternate dimension. And we let you know at the top of the show that no drugs were found in Elisa's system.

And that's just the problem. Elisa was supposed to be taking venaflaxine and propoprine, which are antidepressants. She was also supposed to be on ketalapine, which is an antipsychotic, and lamotrigine, which is a mood stabiliser. The autopsy toxicology report showed that only venaflaxine had been ingested on the day that Elisa died. The other antidepressant and mood stabiliser were present in her body but in very tiny amounts suggesting that she had taken them recently but not on the day that she died. The antipsychotic wasn't found in Elisa's system at all. So it's very possible that Elisa had come off her antipsychotic and experienced a manic episode which would

explain her peculiar behaviour in the lift and possibly why she was speaking to someone who wasn't there. Some people with bipolar will experience hallucinations and it can sometimes lead to a potential misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. And this theory is backed up by some who explain Elisa's strange hand movements as psychomotor agitation, which can sometimes be an indicator of an extreme change in mood. But I'm not sure that is what they really are. Any examples of psychomotor agitation that we've seen

look a lot more flayly and urgent looking. And like we said, Elisa looks quite calm and serene and the hand movements aren't flayly, they're quite fluid. It's almost the opposite of what you normally see. Okay, so we've talked a lot about the theories that are out there that people talk about on the internet. But here's what we think happened to Elisa. Elisa came off her antipsychotics

and then subsequently her mood stabilizers and antidepressants. And then she went on to experience a serious manic episode. Now, obviously, I can't say whether she was hallucinating or not, but she somehow found her way up to the roof. Some of the more conspiracy minded accounts of the case will be like oh but there was nothing on her body to indicate that she'd even tried to

get out but what are you going to do what does that what does that look like like it's completely smooth on the inside and also water tanks aren't designed for people to be able to get out of them exactly i feel like they should have to have little ladders on the inside yeah i think you're right because this just feels like something that could happen. And it has happened. That's horrifying to me. I feel like, yeah, if the water tank was full, she could have just bobbed around at the top and been able to pull herself back out because the water would have kept her at the top.

As that water level drops, there would have been no chance. What could she have done? Nothing. Nothing. Screamed from inside this water tank. Yeah, on top of a 16-story hotel. Oh my God, it's the thought of being in that water tank. Yeah, on top of a 16-story hotel. Oh my god, it's the thought of being in that water tank at night, sunset, it's just pitch black and you're

in water. Dark water is my biggest fear. Not the movie, the thing. But I don't think that when she got into that tank that she was intending to hurt herself. I don't think so either. I don't know what she was doing. I don't know if she was hallucinating. I don't know what was going on or what she was thinking, but I don't think she was trying to kill herself. And LAPD detective Wallace Tennell agrees with us. In a deposition, he said, quote, my partner and I tried to figure out how somebody could have put her in there. By that, they mean the water tank. And it's difficult for someone to have been able to do that and not leave prints, not leave DNA or anything like that. So she climbed in on her own. No one had been up there looking at the tops of those tanks over those three weeks.

I can understand why people might be like, oh, but three weeks had gone by. So any evidence, any DNA, any fingerprints, anything like that would have gone. But I'm not sure if they would have done because who's up there? If no one's going up there to see that the hatch door is open, no one's going up there to disrupt fingerprints. Exactly. I kind of buy that. I think if someone put her in there, they would have closed the hatch door.

A lot of people do make a big thing of the fact that she's naked. But like I said, I really just think she took her clothes off on her own. The only other thing that is maybe a bit of a question mark, but it's not indicative of anything in particular, that sand-like stuff they found on her clothes what was that about it could have just been like on the tanks like maybe she's just picked it up as she's been climbing up there yeah yeah some people say like oh well why wasn't that tested but like how it's been submerged in water for three weeks what's going to come back from that we have to focus on the fact that this is a really sad case of a woman

who was on her own going through a difficult time. And I don't mean by that she tried to kill herself, but she was not okay. And it led to a really sad and tragic death. I don't think she was murdered and I don't think there's much more to it than that. No, me either. Apart from a horrifying story of a woman trapped in a water tank, unable to escape. And I think why this case is so famous is because it unfolded on the internet. That footage came out before she was found.

So everyone was following it in real time as it happened. And that's why everyone's so obsessed with it, I think. And it's how weird her behavior is in that lift. In September 2013, Elisa's parents, David and Yina, attempted to sue the Cecil Hotel for negligence that led to the wrongful death of their daughter. But the case was dismissed after the hotel argued that there was no possible way anyone could have known or prevented Elisa from entering the water tank. And no one has ever been able to prove how Elisa got up on the roof. So the hotel can't be held liable until someone can. So how Elisa got onto the roof and into the water tank is still a mystery but it's a pretty mundane one it's a case of which fire escape she took up to the roof and whether she used a ladder or not and i think

that elisa's tragic death is far more likely to be a result of her coming off her medication suddenly than it is an elevator game or a ghost or a portal opened by alistair crowley in london in 1918 i think people want it to be those things but it's just not it's like when you when you watch The Haunting of Hill House and it's like, is it ghosts or is it mental illness? It's both. Surprise. It's both. Surprise. Or hereditary. Is it ghosts? Is it mental illness? It's a cult. Yeah. In this, is it ghosts? Is it Alistair Crowley or is it mental illness? It's mental illness. It's just really sad that Elisa was on her own. She was on medication, but something happened. She came off them and she suffered a break. And this tragedy happened.

Let's not cheapen what happened to her by trying to make it a fucking ghost that like dragged her into a water tank. She was just a girl going through a really difficult time. And it's really sad. I honestly, I can't get out of my head how horrifying it would have been when she realized she was stuck in that tank. And three weeks people were drinking her decomposing body in that hotel. So yeah, that's the story of Elisa Lam. Next week we'll be back home. We'll be back home, back under the duvet. So next week we will be doing a case that I'm excited isn't the right word. I'm really keen to cover. It's the story of a girl named Shafili Ahmed. She was a British girl. And yeah, it's a really horrifying case of quote unquote, and I hate this phrase, but

it is the phrase that the police use and the people are aware of, honour killing in the UK. And it's something that we haven't touched on in the past. And it's something that I really am keen for us to do. So prepare yourself for next week. Tune in next week. And in the meantime, you can follow us on social media at red handed the pod and uh join our facebook group so you can read all the subreddits and if you would like to support the show you can do so at patreon.com forward slash red handed and here are some people who

already have thank you to josephine o'brien rose west yeah yeah i i've seen rose posting on Facebook group and she did have somebody be like Rose West but she laughed off so that's cool oh good for you Rose West Jodie L West oh two Wests Mel M M's messages and I can't remember what I was supposed to say sorry I'll do it next week Maria Maria Mojica Nicole Renault you're doing great today no you do it then I didn't say I could do better me Constance Patrick

Andrea Stoner Laura Exley Georgia Reynolds Mia Childers Emily Brydenback Alexandra oh I did even worse than you but there you go.

Thank you guys anyway. Thank you very much. And we'll see you next week. Bye. Bye. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies

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