For today’s case, I give to you the most recent event we’ll cover. Occurring in 2013, Elisa Lam’s death is also the first of our topics that delves into the possibility of the supernatural. Either way, the young 21-year old’s is shrouded with mystery, and demands a closer look.

Elisa Lam. “The Unsolved Mystery Behind The Disturbing Death Of Elisa Lam,” by Natasha Ishak. ATI, 15 Oct. 2019.

2013: On January 26th, Elisa Lam arrived in LA. She was headed to Santa Cruz as part of her solo trip around the West Coast; a getaway from her studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she was originally from. While her family was nervous about her being so far from home, she was always sure to ease their fears by calling them each night to tell them about her adventures from the day. All went well, and according to plan.

Of course, until January 31st.

On January 31st, Elisa never contacted her family, nor would she again.

On her final day staying at The Cecil Hotel, Elisa failed to update her family, thus prompting them to grow concerned enough to call the hotel staff asking if they’d check on her. Upon examining her room, Elisa was nowhere to be found, and she had never officially checked out.

Staff decided to take a look at security footage to attempt to locate Elisa, or at to get an idea of when she was last seen. What they found however, would prompt more questions than answers. The hotel video showed Elisa in one of its elevators on the date of her disappearance acting rather strangely. In the footage, Lam can be seen stepping into the elevator and pushing all the floor buttons. She steps in and out of the elevator, poking her head out sideways toward the hotel’s hallways in between. She peers out of the elevator another few times before stepping out of the elevator entirely, never to be seen again.

At the time of writing this, the video has 24,432,537 views due to how strange the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, as well as her strange behavior.

Two weeks would go by without another development in the case.

Hotel maintenance worker Santiago Lopez began to receive complaints about the water quality. Low water pressure, strange coloring, and a weird taste coming from the tap water were all reported, and he began to investigate the hotel water tank. Upon opening the tank, Lopez discovered Lam’s rotting corpse.

Rescuers try to remove Elisa Lam’s body from the water tank on the rooftop of the Cecil Hotel. “The Unsolved Mystery Behind The Disturbing Death Of Elisa Lam,” by Natasha Ishak. ATI, 15 Oct. 2019.

Nobody knows how Lam’s corpse (floating lifelessly next to the same clothes she wore in the surveillance video) ended up in the hotel’s water tank or who else might have been involved. It was ruled to be impossible to Lam to have climbed into the tank and closed the door on herself.

One of the final people to see Elisa Lam alive was the owner of a bookstore that she traveled to prior to her death. Katie Orphan, owner of The Last Bookstore was quoted with stating, “It seemed like she had plans to return home, plans to give things to her family members and reconnect with them. She bought things to bring back to them.”

Lopez gave a detailed description of how to get to the water tank (which presumably was the exact way Lam would have to get up to the tanks): Take the elevator to the 15th floor of the hotel before walking up the staircase to the roof. Then, first turn off the rooftop alarm (which only employees can do), climb up on the platform where the hotel’s four water tanks were located. Finally, climb another ladder to get to the top of the main tank.

In the end, Lam’s death was ruled accidental, and no further pieces of evidence have surfaced since. Theorists point to the hotel’s historically supernatural ties, Lam’s bipolar disorder (and her subsequent medication), and a 3rd party as all possible in her death. Either way, we may never understand the strange circumstances surrounding such a young woman’s death.

As always, the BuzzFeed Unsolved video delving more in depth with details and theories is provided here for further reading. Best of luck, until next time.