Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: The Creepy Legacy of the Hotel Cecil

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

The Hotel Cecil in downtown Los Angeles has had no less than 16 unnatural deaths, from suicides to murders and everything in between. Listen in to the history of this decidedly creepy hotel. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Bell, connection is everything. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of women's health and gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to decoding women's health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard.

And we pull apart the story behind the image. Discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Hotel Cecil is probably best known as the site for the very sad death of Elisa Lamb in 2013,

or maybe you know it as a setting an American horror story. It turns out that Elisa was just one in an unusually long line of deaths that took place in the Cecil, which seems to have had way more than its fair share of tragedy since it was built in 1924. I'll leave it to you to get to the bottom of what's up with the Hotel Cecil. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and Jerry's hanging around in sun air lurking, like an awesome spirit in a haunted hotel.

And this is stuff you should know. Yeah. Can we do a couple of quick announcements? Yeah, sure. Without singing that announcement song? Did we have an announcement song ever? Well, not us, but it, like, summer camp. Okay.

You never did that? No. Well, I'm not going to sing it now, then. I kind of want to hear it now. No, no, no, no, no. Was it like announcements, announcements, it's announcement's time? Sort of, almost. Yeah, that's close enough.

Trigger warning for this one, first announcement. Because there's some grisly stuff in here. I guess that's all we need to say. Okay. And then also, we've been remiss in that we haven't mentioned the fact that there's a stuff you should know board game out. Yeah, it's not Grizzly at all. No, it's very family-friendly, in fact. It's one of the highest honors that's ever been bestowed upon us and stuff you should know, Chuck,

because out of the blue, out of nowhere, about a year and a half ago, maybe. Yeah. Trivial Pursuit. The makers of Trivial Pursuit got in touch with this and said, we want to do a stuff you should know, Trivial Pursuit game. And they did. It wasn't a practical joke.

The fine people at Hasbro, who I got to say, I mean, we've worked with a lot of outside companies for various projects. And boy, Hasbro is about as tight and buttoned up and awesome as any company we've ever worked with. Right. But also, like, super friendly, super fun, super nice. And not in like that creepy everybody's trying to be nice way. Like, they're all just like a genuinely pleasant group to work with. But yes, they are super buttoned up as well.

They make games. Yeah, they make games. They all seem like they make games for a living, which would mean that you have a pretty cool job. And developing the game with them was fun. And the questions are based on real stuff you should know, episodes. And it is not just trivial pursuit. It is co-branded. So it is not, do not expect to get the trivial pursuit game with the little pieces of pie.

No, no. They just want to be clear. They said, we want to make up a brand new game for this. And they did. They made up a game, and this is the stuff you should know, Trivial Pursuit game. That's right. And you can get it wherever you get games.

I recommend your local little indie toy gaming store if they have it. But otherwise, we would love the sport. You got a weirdo in your town who dresses up in wizard clothes and goes to work. Go buy your game there. Yeah, a great Christmas gift, by the way. Yeah, for sure. Also, why just stop there? It's great for dads, grads, moms, proms, everything.

I think it's like 20 bucks, right? Yeah, it's like really, really reasonably priced, if you ask me, $20. $20. You got two 20s in your wallet. You could buy our book and the game at the same time. So we did the TV show. We did a book. We do a podcast.

Don't forget our YouTube series. Sure. You can. And now, Chuck. And now the game. It's amazing. And now the Hotel Cecil. Yes, on to the show.

So I'm glad you did that little trigger warning because there is some grizzly stuff in here. But there's also, I think, some, like, fact settings, some fact straightening that, you know, we should do from the outset. Because one of the things that people who get into the Elisa Lamb story, which we'll talk about in a little bit, quickly find that there are all manner of internet urban legends and myths and conspiracy theories surrounding it. And none of those seem to be true. It's pretty annoying, actually. Yeah, it is very annoying.

It's just so internet-y, too. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, this goes on a lot these days, but it seems like this one may be more so than even others. Because the bizarre nature of one part of this. story and I don't know I found myself slightly annoyed I am too in the exact same way that I'm annoyed by people who believe that the couple from the conjuring were like you know legit in real life right you know I mean sure but at the same time it goes even further than that I think I ran across a couple of articles that I really think struck home what's genuinely annoying and even

disrespectful about that is that like at least a lamb died because she had serious mental illness that had been diagnosed and she wasn't managing properly with the medications that she was on. And that happens a lot. And she died because of it. And so to say that she was, you know, possessed by evil spirits or that there were, you know, ghosts at the sea soul or even that she was murdered by an unknown suspect, it's really, it really, really disrespects the reality of the situation, which is, you know, sad enough as it is. But at the same time, Chuck, there's one more. more thing I have to caveat all this with. It's understandable the impulse to bring in, you know, restless spirits and, you know, you know, the conspiracy theories. It's understandable in this

particular situation because of the setting. Yeah. And I guess, you know, the first part of this show will be about the setting, which is the Hotel Cecil and downtown Los Angeles, which is not open right now. it may be open in the future. I think they were doing a, this thing was open in the 1920s during the height of the Depression. And it's a very large hotel, 19th floor, 700 rooms. And in the 1920s, it was sort of like a big deal

for downtown Los Angeles. It was near a major rail station, and it was kind of just what L.A. needed. And it was kind of fancy-smancy for the time. And over the years, you know, we'll talk a little bit about, the downfall, but at the time of Elisa Lam's stay, they had carved out three floors and built a separate lobby entrance to try in, in an effort to rebrand this hotel as something called

Stay on Maine, and that they had three kind of floors that were a little bit redone, cosmetically, a little bit of a nicer lobby that was, you know, sort of away from, you know, some of the situations that were going to detail here at a second. But they did all share a common elevator, and Elisa Lam was staying in the State on Maine section. State on Maine. But that's just to point out the fact that the hotel was going to eventually supposedly undergo a massive renovation

and that it was all sort of put on hold because of COVID. And I think now it's just being sat on with some of the long-term tenants that are protected to stay there. Yeah, I think there's like 30, but there's, like you said, 700 rooms. Sure. But you said it that the Cecil Hotel, which is very much down at the heels now, started life in a much different way where it was meant to be like a pretty nice hotel designed for middle class travelers to L.A.

And that situation next to the rail station was a big draw for it. It was definitely a feather in its cap. And I saw it's in the Beaux-Arts style. It's not incredibly pretty from the outside, but the inside lobby is still pretty neat-looking. Lots of tarasso tile and columns, and there's fake Roman statuary and a big clock and over the check-in desk.

It's really pretty in a really like 1920s original style still, although it's just kind of got this drab air that's kind of fallen over it over the years. Yeah, and that is in large part because, like you said, there are a lot of unhoned people there today. A lot back then. The area called Skid Row of downtown Los Angeles is kind of right there. I used to drive through that area sometimes when I lived in L.A. when we would go downtown to eat sushi or back then when I lived there downtown was not as much of a destination. nation unless you were going to Stapleson or something, but it's made a real resurgence since I've left

and kind of trying to build downtown back up. But Skid Row is still an issue, and they're, you know, like you said, there are people there that work with unhomed folks that are really trying their best to take care of them, and the fact that that hotel is right there, the sort of looming large, is a bit of a thumb in the eye. Yeah, and I get the impression that the area that's now Skid Row in Los Angeles had had at least since the 1880s kind of had an unusual reputation. It wasn't always, you know, for people down on their luck or anything like that. But, you know, it was a little more low rent than other parts of Los Angeles. Like there was just a mismash of all sorts of different people. It seemed like really alive. And the CISA was kind of built at the outskirts of that

between what would become Skid Row and then one of the nicest parts of L.A. at the time, Bunker Hill. And everything was hunky-dory for the Cecil when it first opened in either 1924 or 1927, depending on who you ask. I could not confirm one way or the other because both dates have kind of taken off so much. But when the stock market crashed, that area that was just kind of colorful and a little bit low rent, that it quickly became Skid Row as we understand it, beginning around

the Great Depression. And not only did the proximity to Skidbro kind of like lower the Cecil Star rating, when the tenants started, the hotel guests started to dry up, they had to lower their rights and start catering to people of less means. And so the hotel just kind of stopped taking care of itself little by little, starting around the Great Depression and continuing on through World War II. Yeah, and, you know, it kind of became a last resort kind of destination for people with addiction problems, people in the sex working industry. And, you know, it got that reputation and pretty soon got a reputation for all kinds of bad things happening there.

There have been no less than 15 or 16, what's classified, I guess, is an unnatural death at the Cecil. Many people took their own lives there. I mean, if you read down the laundry list, it's like quite a few people ingested poison. Quite a few people jumped or maybe were pushed out windows. There have been some murders by gun. There have been murders by strangulation. There have been sexual assaults. This one sad case of a woman who gave birth to a baby and was suffering from some sort of mental illness,

evidently thought her baby was born not alive and went to throw the baby out the window and it turns out the baby was alive, then then died. She was found not guilty, I think temporary insanity was the plea there. And just weird, kind of tragic, awful things happening over the years time and time again at the Hotel Cecil. Yeah, like another frequently referred to incident, was where a woman named Pauline Otten, she jumped from, I think, like, the ninth or tenth floor to take her own life and landed on a guy who was a passerby who happened to just be walking unluckily beneath the Cecil at that moment on the sidewalk and was struck by Pauline.

And they were both killed. And, like, that doesn't usually happen very often. Like, that's a pretty remarkable thing. And I know that like the most I could find was I think 18 incidents, but it seems like those are just ones that have been documented. There seems to be quite a bit more. There was a Netflix series, I think a four-part series on this recently. And they interviewed a woman who had spent 10 years managing the Cecil. And she said that her name was Amy Price.

She said that under her 10-year tenure, at least 80 people died that she knows of. And you can kind of imagine, like, you know, you could find newspaper write-ups from like the 20s and 30s and 40s when somebody jumps out a window. And definitely when somebody jumps out a window and lands on a hapless pedestrian, like, that's definitely going to be documented and make news. But if somebody on Skid Row overdoses and dies in this hotel, you know, is that going to be documented? So it's possible that there are a lot more people who have died at the Cecil from unnatural causes over the years than just those 17 or 18. Did you watch all of that documentary? No, I haven't seen it actually yet. Oh, okay.

Have you seen the whole thing? Yeah, you know, I feel terrible because the director is the great Joe Berlinger who actually had on movie crush. in one of my favorite episodes where we kind of just talked about documentary filmmaking, he's a legend. He did the Paradise Law series. He did that documentary on Metallica when they're all in therapy.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, I mean, he's just sort of a legend in the genre. I said he did the Ted Bundy tapes recently. Yeah, he did that, and then he directed the movie version with, what's his face? Zach Efron. With who? I said Ryan Gosling.

Oh. Close. Another super handsome hunk. And that was a good movie, but this wasn't so great. I didn't love it. It felt kind of overlong and a little salacious. Yeah, that's the impression I had from reading about it. Yeah, so I was disappointed.

But Joe was a great filmmaker and a good guy, so I feel kind of bad giving it. I think that's a fair caveat. A great filmmaker and a good guy can still make a hunk of poop. It wasn't a hunk of poop. It was all right. Okay. But maybe let's take a break, and I'll, email Joe and tell them I'm sorry ahead of time.

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Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, this is Robert Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick, and we're the host of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. This week on the show, it's Star Trek. So we're going to be talking about the Borg all week long. Are you ready to get some probes put in your flesh? That's right.

Tune in. Resistance is futile. We're going to talk science, the culture of the Borg, various interpretations, and we're going to talk about Star Trek First Contact on Weird House Cinema on Friday. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. You're not incurable. You're not broken. You're having a normal human experience, and we have a solution for that. And that solution is our show Free Therapy. I'm Ben. And I'm Kevin. And we think everyone could use a little bit of therapy, including us. Absolutely. That's why each week we sit down with a different therapist to talk about the things we're all dealing with.

If you're trying to get rid of anxiety, you're actually fueling more anxiety. We talked to some of the leading therapists in the country about all of life's headaches, work, family dynamics, and of course, dating and relationships. Everyone chooses a different set of problems, challenges, flaws. You have to figure out which set of problems you're willing to work with. So listen to free therapy with Ben and Kevin on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because therapy is expensive, but our podcast is free. So, okay, the Cecil Hotel starts to get a pretty, not a great reputation, even around town. I read an article on KCEET.org, which I guess is a PBS station in SoCal.

And they said that local residents started to refer to the Cecil as the suicide. That was the name of the hotel for people around there. And it just kind of like, it just kept going. Like every time, you know, maybe a couple of years would pass without some high-profile death in the hotel. And then it would happen again. And it would just reaffirm everybody's ideas that there was, that place just wasn't quite right. There was something wrong with it, almost like it was a magnet for that kind of tragedy, you know? Yeah.

I mean, I think most major cities have had at least one of these hotels that just sort of, sort of is inexpensive, maybe in the wrong part of town, and has a reputation sometimes for lurid activities and checking in and not checking out. And this was L.A.'s, and L.A. for sure, had more than one. Sure. It did not help their reputation in the 1980s when Richard Ramirez, aka the Nightstocker and one of the more sensational serial killers in American history, he stayed there for a while and live there and apparently brought body parts

back to the Cecil Hotel said Cecil like I'm British Cecil Hotel from some of his victims to ingest there and that's certainly like super creepy wait did you say ingest

I hadn't come across that he eat that victim's eyeballs I think so wow we and other he wasn't like I don't think he was dommer level but he was known to eat some body parts he has a there's a great documentary on his his case too yeah super disturbing yeah that's on netflix as well i think um yeah if i'm not

mistaken but um one thing i hadn't realized before that i ran across when i was researching some of his stuff was how he was caught it's just absolutely triumphant it was a mob of people in a neighborhood in east la yeah he was great he was spotted he saw himself on the front page of the newspaper and just instinctively started running, tried to carjack a woman, hit her, was seen hitting her, and an older man basically ran over and helped the woman pulled Richard Ramirez out of his car.

And the woman whose car was husband came over and started beating him. And he tried to get away and just an increasingly large mob chased him and would beat him and he'd get away some more and they'd chase him down and catch him again. finally pinned him down and waited for the cops to come. That's how he was caught. It's so great. Caviot that I'm not down with mob justice, but a group of people finding a serial killer on the street and like subduing him,

I'm way okay with that. No, I totally am. In this particular instance, like I'm all fine with that kind of justice for sure. Yeah, it was a badge of honor for East L.A. Because the entire city of Los Angeles was, I mean, it was a scary situation there. Yeah, I can imagine. That's where Cheech Marin was born, according to that one song of his. That's right.

Yeah. So the Knights Stalker, he was not the only serial killer that checked in there. He actually inspired just a few years after he was convicted in, I think, 1989. I think like in 92, maybe, 93, there was another serial killer named Jack Unterweiger, who was Austrian, who had our... already been convicted, I think, when he was like 19 or early 20s of killing a woman by strangling her with her own bra. And went to prison.

He was very, very smart, very charming. He used this to basically get early parole. He convinced the public that he was actually reformed. And apparently it was held up as like a great example of how, you know, the prison system could rehabilitate someone. And it was just a complete false fabrication. He was basically posed as a true crime journalist, like he reinvented himself as that, went to L.A. In other parts, he went to Europe, traveled through Europe a little bit, too, but also ended up in L.A.

To do research on his true crime novels, went along on ride-alongs with the LAPD, and ended up using that to scout victims. He killed three sex workers. and the whole time he was staying at the Cecil Hotel, and they think probably is an homage to Richard Ramirez, or at least a connection to him, you know? Yeah, so that, I mean, at this point, like the reputation for the hotel, it's not the kind of thing that is going to appear online, you know, 15 years ago, when young people like Elisa Lam are searching for an inexpensive place to stay.

And sadly, that's exactly what happened. was a Canadian traveler. She was 21 years old, was on her way kind of up the West Coast, traveling by herself. Her parents were a little unnerved by her traveling by herself. So she was, you know, asked to check in every day, which she was doing. And at the time, it was, you know, they had kind of dorm style rooms, kind of youth hostel style rooms where you had bunk beds in a shared bathroom. And so you could stay there. It was a traveler's hotel. And if you you know, I hate to say it, but if you didn't know much about L.A., you may end up at the Hotel Cecil because you could stay there for like $75 a night or something like that.

Yeah, from what I could tell, stay on Maine did a really good job of making their, you know, using their website to their advantage and making it seem like this is a really hip happening spot. And, I mean, in some ways, they were kind of like just a little ahead of their time because apparently that area around Skid Row in downtown L.A. is like the hippest spot to live in now again. But at the time, it was still really, really skid rowy, basically. Yeah. And it could be dangerous. Yeah.

And I think it still is, but I think it's just becoming more and more gentrified. And it's becoming, I guess, less dangerous in that sense. But at the time when Elisa Lam showed up in 2013, it was, you know, it was a dangerous place to be. But this particular spot was just full of, you know, especially European kids on basically budget holidays staying in L.A., basically in hostiles. And I know originally she was put into a room with a couple other girls that I think were traveling together, but she was traveling alone. So it was very hostile and not hostile with an E. Right. Well, yeah, there's an E, but it's in a different place than you'd expect.

youth hostily. It was very youth hostily. Like she was put in a room with other people at first. Yeah, L.A. didn't have a lot of that. I remember there was a youth hostel in Venice that for some reason I always wanted to stay there when I lived in L.A.

I was like, I can't go down and stay in that hostel one night. Because the beach was so... The beach was really far when he lived on the east side and you kind of never went over there much unless someone came to town and wanted to go to the beach. Oh, that makes sense, sure. So, and, you know, I was broke back then, so it could have been like a little staycation. Did you ever do it?

Nah. No. It's one of those things you think about late night and then you wake up the next day and you're like, nah. You blew all your money on Taco Bell instead? Oh, man, I miss Taco Bell. Do you? I don't. I mean, I didn't need it that much, but like I haven't had it in years. I've had too much, I think, was my problem. Oh, okay.

Was that the deal? By the way, side note, speaking of weird late-night foods, we had a guy on our front door camera the other day come in the middle of the night and leave a package. And we were like, what is this? We went out the next day, and it was a bag full of crystals. Wow. And I think it was a delivery, like a door dash or something. Oh, crystals. I thought you meant like amethysts or...

No, no, no. I mean, tiny square sliders. He had the wrong address. I think so. Either that or your daughter has mastered the telephone by now. It was really weird, and of course, the first thing I did was feel terrible that someone's late-night munchies didn't get satisfied. Did you eat them the next morning? Just says that homage?

No, no, no. No? You don't like crystals? Or was it because it was sitting there overnight? Both. I never was into crystal for some reason. Man, I like crystals. It was the thing.

I just was. I don't know why. I think I was just a Waffle House guy. I don't, I'm fine with Waffle House, too. The big problem with crystals, though, Chuck, I'll tell you, is their fries are probably the worst fries of any fast food locate. They're the most bland. Somehow, if you just bit into a raw potato, it would be less bland and tasteless than if you ate a crystals fry. Yeah.

I don't know how to do it. And if you're from the other places in the country, you might White Castle is sort of an analog. to Crystal. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, this is not an episode of the doughboys. This is stuff you should know. And back to Elisa Lamb.

She was supposed to be there for about, I think, four days and check out on February 1st and did not get in touch with her parents like she had been doing each day. Yeah. She had been seen shopping for books at a nearby bookstore and then bought some books. and this is one of the things in the documentary, like, you know, they didn't really have any footage of her with any other people inside the hotel before her disappearance. Well, she was also reported to be constantly by herself,

too, by people who saw her. Yeah, I mean, she was traveling alone, so that makes sense. But she did get handed off. There were two gentlemen that handed off a kind of a large, large-ish box to her on camera in front of the hotel. And, of course, the Internet sleuths are like, who are these guys, what was in the box? And apparently in the box were these books that she got

because she had spoken with the book reed seller about like the size of them. And boy, I don't even know if I can carry these. And I think had them delivered to the hotel or whatever. So kind of nothing to see here. And another example of how annoying this case can be with people online speculating like wrong stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It can be a little annoying for sure.

But yes, so she was she was alone, traveling alone. I think she had started out in San Diego, or at least her last stop had been San Diego. Her next stop was going to be Santa Cruz. And, yeah, her parents have been like, okay, you need to call us every single day. And she had been pretty faithfully until that February 1st came and went with no call. And I believe they pretty much immediately contacted the hotel and the LAPD and said, hey, our daughter hasn't checked in. Can you see what's going on?

I don't know if they did it on February 1st or not, but in pretty short order, the LAPD determined that she was just gone. She was nowhere to be found and that there was some suspiciousness going on for sure. Yeah, I mean, they did a thorough inspection. They went to her room. They had found that the hotel had gathered all her stuff and bagged it and was holding it in storage, which was regular protocol when someone doesn't check out. just leave stuff. Nothing shady going on there. They checked around the hotel in the alleyways and sidewalks. They checked up on the roof. They didn't find anything. And things got really strange.

And I guess we should take another ad break here. But things got really strange when the hotel sent them footage from inside the elevator of the Cecil Hotel. And we'll get to that right after this. The long loading times. The glitchy video. calls. That's your house asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from $75 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. You're not incurable. You're not broken. You're having a normal human experience and we have a

solution for that. And that solution is our show, free therapy. I'm Ben. and I'm Kevin. And we think everyone could use a little bit of therapy, including us. Absolutely. That's why each week we sit down with a different therapist to talk about the things we're all dealing with. If you're trying to get rid of anxiety, you're actually fueling more anxiety. We talk to some of the leading therapists in the country about all of life's headaches, work, family dynamics, and of course, dating and relationships.

Everyone chooses a different set of, problems, challenges flaws. You have to figure out which set of problems you're willing to work with. So listen to free therapy with Ben and Kevin on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Because therapy is expensive, but our podcast is free. Hey, this is Robert Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. This week on the show, it's Star Trek. So we're going to be talking about the Borg all week long. Are you ready to get some probes put in your flesh? That's right. Tune in. Resistance is futile. We're going to talk science, the culture of the board, various interpretations, and we're going to talk about Star Trek First Contact on Weird House Cinema on Friday.

Listen to stuff to blow your mind on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Chuck. So Elisa Lamb is now known to be missing. She left her stuff behind at the Cecil Hotel, and she didn't check out. She didn't call her parents as she usually did. and she's officially a missing person. Within a couple of days, I think maybe February 6th, the police held a press conference and explained what was going on to the public and basically asked for everybody's help. And if anyone had any info, you know, where did she go? Where is she? How is she doing? Is she okay?

And I guess I didn't see anything about any crazy leads or anything like that. It doesn't seem to have really kind of captured the public's interest at first. And I saw there's this guy named Josh Dean who's written several articles on the Elisa Lam disappearance. And I believe one of the ones that he wrote kind of pinpointed why there wasn't a huge public interest in the first like week or even two of her case. it was because Christopher Dorner had gone on his rampage against the LAPD, basically declared war on the LAPD and was killed in, I think, the mountains of San Bernardino in a standoff, like right when Elisa Lam went missing. So not only was the public's attention on this, especially in L.A.,

the LAPD's attention was definitely on that as well. So Elisa Lamb was kind of like this faint little chirp in this huge maelstrom at the time. faint chirping and maelstrom it's the best i could come up with on shorts it's amazing are you kidding me oh thanks you just made that up yeah yeah i did you like you yeah but i just have the feeling that next time i'm in your house it's going to be like that's going to be carved into your desk or something right it's on a t-shirt right that you put you make momo wear that t-shirt every day that's right uh yeah and you know the other big reason was until this footage actually came out of the elevator car than, you know, that's when the public's attention really caught hold.

That changed everything. Yeah, I mean, there's no way around it. It's a very sort of unsettling, and I remember when this happened before any of the facts of the case were kind of out, I remember looking at this video, and it is very unsettling, and it does appear to be very creepy, and that a young woman gets on an elevator, very kind of casually, presses all the center buttons on all the floors. I think they determined she was on the 14th floor and sort of pressed all the floors on the way down. Elevator doesn't do anything. The doors don't shut. She moves to the back corner and sort of standing there. She goes and she looks

outside of the elevator both ways a couple of times in the hallway and then kind of retreats back quickly. At one point, she steps out into the hallway and appears to be gesturing towards somebody, or she's at least making hand gestures to the right down the hallway. Yeah, and they're unusual hand gestures. They're not like the normal hand gestures you might make. They're not at all subtle or casual or almost even like, you know, you might not even realize you're using your hands when you're talking sometimes. Like these are more gesticulations than just mere gestures. You know what I mean? Yeah, and, you know, there's no doubt.

And eventually she kind of leaves around to the left and exits to the left, and the door stays open for a while before it shuts. But there's no getting around the fact that having known nothing and knowing that this person disappeared, this young woman, and then you see this, it seems very suspicious. And creepy, admittedly creepy. I think it looks, I don't even think it looks that creepy. It looks to me like that she is trying to get a way. away from someone and is afraid someone has followed her or is gesturing at a person who she

feels threatened by it's what it looks like to me i know other people online or talk about other worldly spirits and she's con like you said earlier she's conjuring uh spirits with her hands like i just that never occurred to me it just looked like she might be in some kind of peril and was trying to get away from someone right um but that's creepy in and of itself you know yeah i just mean that creepy in like a supernatural like what's going on here way no i think the thing that really when it really turns creepy to me is when she turns around and hides in the corner of the elevator like she's she's hiding and then the second part that's that's genuinely creepy is when she like leans out and like looks both ways and then kind of jumps back into the elevator it's yeah i mean it's

really hard not to kind of put yourself in her shoes and she's clearly frightened at that i mean just see somebody frightened like that, it's, that's creepy. And you're, and you're waiting on someone to enter the elevator, but that never happens. And with the internet sleuthing, you couldn't really make out the time code very well. And so all the people online are like, well, why can't you make out the time code and the timestamps? Like, what would degrade that and not the rest of it? And then they think they, right. And then they think they decoded it. And there's almost a full minute missing and the Hotel Cecil edited out a portion clearly and before they sent it to the cops and they interviewed the woman and that you're talking about the manager and she was like,

no, of course we didn't edit anything out. Like we were horrified by this disappearance. It just sent them everything we had. Right. Plus I'm sure also that most of the employees that stay on Maine know exactly how to edit video out before handing things over to the cops anyway. Well, it is L.A. That's true. That is a good point, actually. But I don't buy it. I think it was, it is what it was, which was a person in an elevator who had some, was having some mental issues. And, you know, we'll get to that in a second. And I think, you know, it's sort of like the easiest explanation of the video, at least, to me, seems to be the most accurate. All right. That's what I buy. That's how I buy it to you. That was, so that video was released on February 13th. And now all of a sudden, the public is taking notice. She becomes an internet meme like almost overnight with people like watching and analyzing that video like you were saying.

And yet they still can't find her. No one has any idea where she has to spend two weeks now since she went missing. This video is out there that the entire internet is on the case now. And it wasn't until a couple days, I think two days after the video came out, Chuck, that one of the guys, one of the custodians of the Cecil Hotel of Stay on Maine, I should say, was asked to go check on the water supply on the roof because the Cecil Hotel used gravity-fed water.

They had four 1,000-gallon tanks on the top of the roof, and when you open the tap, the water would come pouring down from those tanks into your room and out the faucet. And some of the tenants, I don't know if it was just the hotel or some long-term tenants, but they were complaining that the water pressure had suddenly gotten really low and that the water that was coming out had a strange odor and taste and weird kind of color to it. And so they dispatched the custodian to the roof. And he went and checked. And I think as he was approaching the main water tank, I think tank number one, he noticed that the hatch was open and in very short order made the grisly discovery of Elisa Lam's body.

Yeah, he was kind of like the super. He was a maintenance guy. His name is Santiago Lopez. And he's in the documentary too. I don't think he saw the hatch because the hatch is on top of the tank. But he went to go and he said it was a routine thing if there was any kind of water issue, was to climb the ladder to the tanks and go look and see what was going on because there's probably a clogger. something and he saw her body naked about a foot below the water just sort of

suspended there and you know when they interviewed this guy in the documentary it's really sad you know he was sort of at the center of a lot of this with interviews and he he was speaking through it I guess not through a translator but through a subtitles but he was clearly you know still very upset about this and it it scarred him to see this woman floating in the tank and he knew immediately who it was and called down to the hotel manager who we've been talking about and said, you know, she's up here in the tank. And, you know, the cops came.

They found her clothes, which were determined to be the same clothes. She was wearing in the elevator video, kind of at the bottom of the tank. They had sunk. And, you know, immediately the new mystery is not what's going on in this video, although, you know, that played a part because they were still trying to figure that out as far as foul play goes, but was how she made it in here and why she made it in there? Yeah, because she, it was like the hatch is not easy to get in or out of. They had to like cut her out of the, they had to cut a hole in the bottom of the tank so they

could access it, right? They couldn't just pull her back out of that hatch. So that's kind of weird in and of itself. She's also nude. That also kind of added to the mystery of the whole thing. And then also the, you know, the coroner, when he made his toxicology report available, he basically said it was, he wasn't able to make any conclusive, find any conclusive results because there wasn't enough blood to take a sample from, you know, she had just kind of permeated

the water in that, or her blood had. And it wasn't, you just couldn't like take a water sample and be like, oh, yeah, there's no, you know, there's no drugs in here. anything like that. So all of that combined really kind of just took that mystery, you know, that people had been primed to start thinking about with that video and then just blew it through the roof. You know, I mean, the water being, you know, going to other people's taps in the hotel. And, you know, Lisa Lamb basically being a part of that water really kind of solidified her legendary status or the legendary status of her mystery, I think in people's

imagination. Anybody who comes across that case can't help it like let the mind wander in that respect. Oh, for sure. I mean, the idea of drinking water and bathing in water with a decomposing body. I mean, the body had was in a pretty, pretty rough state of decomposition at that point. They did do, obviously, in the autopsy, they didn't find any signs of foul play. There were no, obviously no, like obvious wounds. There were no internal wounds. There was no strangulation. they pretty much said this doesn't look like foul play at all. One of the mysteries was how she got up there. Because if you want to go just through the regular staircase to the rooftop,

and this is not a rooftop that you, you know, doesn't have like a rooftop hangout area or whatever. Although people, you know, there was plenty of graffiti and beer bottles and drug needles. And so people would make their way up there. But if you go through the regular door, it's one of the alarm doors. which would trigger downstairs and all throughout the lobby. That never came on, and you have to have a key to disable it, but there is a fire escape entry with the ladder, basically, for the last,

like for the last story. It's a little precarious, but she could have just simply gone out the window to the fire escape and climbed up the ladder and then up the ladder to the tanks. It's not, you know, it's a little, it would be a little bit of a scary trip up that ladder, I think. Yeah. But considering what happened, she clearly was not in a good place mentally. So I think that's completely believable. That journalist Josh Dean went in, I think, 2015 to see the CISO himself. He had gotten obsessed with the case. So he went and kind of investigated it in person. And he quickly found that open window was still open. And the fire escape was easily accessible.

And I think one of his articles is called American Horror Story, which is a reference to what I think the hotel season of American Horror Story was based on or inspired by Elisa Lam's disappearance. But there's a picture that he took of that ladder leading from the fire escape on the 15th or 14th floor up to the roof. And all you see is up. Like you just see the ladder and then above it is sky. But after reading about it, your imagination just thinks of like the 15 stories behind you, like, as you're, you know, as you're looking up this ladder. It's one of the most unsettling pictures I've ever seen if you read the text, you know, that surround it. But he said, by his judgment, an average person could easily make it up that ladder, especially if you don't look down. Yeah.

He said, if you're carrying a body or another person, you could not do it. He said it just would be too difficult. It's one of those straight up vertical ladders on the side of the building. Yeah. But if you were in a manic state, as a lot of people believe Elisa Lam was, you could probably make it up that ladder pretty quickly, and you wouldn't even necessarily consider looking down,

and all of a sudden you'd be on the roof. And after you were on the roof, it would be a fairly easy proposition to get into one of those tanks, especially I think she weighed about 115 pounds and was about 5 feet, 4 inches. So it was possible for her to get into one of those tanks through that hatch. But either she was too scared to come out conceivably or she couldn't get out when she wanted to get out and tired of treading water because the water would have been about eight feet deep and drowned after a while. Yeah, I mean, they did, I think the police dogs did pick up her scent near that window.

So that seems to be what happened. You know, this is one of those cases where the more I read, like, all I could feel was despair about this poor woman having what looked to be some sort of medication-related manic episode, maybe scared, maybe thinking someone was following her and trying to get away and going at great lengths, going to great lengths to maybe hide somewhere, like inside of a water tank. I don't know why her clothes were off or why her clothes ended up in the tank. I'm not saying any of this makes sense, but it is something that could happen. And all I can think about is what an awful place that she must have been for something like this to have happened. Yeah. And I mean, to kind of back up the mental break theory, which is what I buy, that's where I put my stock. she remember I said she was originally put in a room with a couple other girls she didn't know

at the stay on Maine they complained about her behaving strangely so she was moved to her own private room apparently she went to a taping of the Conan O'Brien show and was escorted out because she was behaving strangely and then detectives also found she was on four different medications for bipolar 1 disorder and depression. And the LAPD, based on the prescription dates on the bottles and then the number of pills that were left and the instructions on the bottles, the LAPD were able to determine that she hadn't been following the dosage recommendations or taking her pills or medication. So if you put all of that together and then also that people take.

their clothes off as part of a psychotic episode happens. It's been documented. You, like, there's no, there's no pieces missing on the table. Like, she could have gone out on that fire escape, gone up the ladder. Like, there's nothing that is, well, yeah, but then there's this really big thing that remains unexplained. Like, it explains absolutely everything. And then suddenly it kind of makes all the other stuff, like government mind control or ghosts or whatever, seem just kind of gross, you know. Totally agree. I believe her parents brought a lawsuit against the hotel that was eventually dismissed, if I'm not mistaken. And it just remains a very, very sad situation and a sad case. And it is very annoying when you get online and everyone thinks that their spirits being conjured and all this wacky stuff. It's just not the case.

Not the case indeed. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, that's it for the Cecil Hotel and the Lisa Lamb, RIP. And since I said RIP, that means it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this follow-up to Y2K. Oh, yes. And this is something that we actually had in our notes that we, I guess, just kind of failed to bring up. Yeah, right?

Yeah, I mean, you had it in your notes as well? Yeah, yeah, the 2038 problem. We got a lot of emails about this. and we're not going to fully probably explain to everyone's satisfaction how it works, but hey guys, just got done listening to the Y2K podcast, which brought back an interesting range of memories of living through that time. In case you weren't aware, there's something called the Unix Y2K problem that still exists, but is slowly being fixed by smart people behind the scenes.

Thank goodness. The majority of computers in the world run Unix-based operating systems, not Windows or MacOS, and unless these things, systems are patched at 314 on January 19th, 2038, their clocks were roll over to think it's midnight, January 1st, 1970. Yes. The cause is basically the same in the early versions of the OS, only had so much memory allocated to time representations, but more modern versions, now have this fixed, and hence computers aren't susceptible once they're updated or upgraded, although not all systems can be easily updated. And that is from a bunch of people, but specifically from PhD Alan Chalker. That's great.

Thanks, Alan, to everybody who wrote in. I was like, oh, man, I meant to include that. But apparently Unix represents time as the number of seconds from the epoch date, which is some date in 1970. And then eventually it's going to have more seconds than it can represent in the number of digits. So it'll just roll back over like he was saying, which is pretty neat. Unix? Pretty cool.

And also I'm glad to hear that there are smart people working on that because we got 17 years, man. You guys take it easy. Take a weekend, you know? Sure. Go sit in your house and social distance from everybody. That's right. We also got a lot of emails just from people that some people whose parents helped rewrite code or were heading up projects, rewriting code. And it was pretty cool.

We got a lot of emails about that one. He struck a cord. Yeah, it was a good idea, Chuck. Well, if you want to get in touch with this like Allen and everybody else did, you can send us an email. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause.

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