CCTV footage of Elisa Lam behaving bizarrely in an elevator a few moments before she lost her life by drowning in the hotel's rooftop watertank.

CCTV footage of Elisa Lam behaving bizarrely in an elevator a few moments before she lost her life by drowning in the hotel's rooftop watertank.

WHEN guests at a crumbling hotel on LA’s Skid Row noticed the tap water was black and foul-smelling, they complained to the manager.

The last thing they expected was to learn the body of a young woman had been rotting in a water tank on the roof for two weeks.

Police were baffled over how she had got through the alarmed door on to the top of the hotel. Strange CCTV footage showing the 21-year-old, a Canadian student, hiding in the lift and gesturing to an unseen person off-camera only added to the gruesome mystery.

As more pieces of the puzzle emerged, her case captured the imagination of internet sleuths across the globe, with the tragedy inspiring high-profile TV crime dramas and horror movies. Elisa Lam has become the ultimate enigma for the digital age.

THE CECIL ON SKID ROW

Her parents, Hong Kong immigrants who ran a restaurant in Vancouver, were concerned for Elisa’s safety on what she called her “West Coast tour”, but Elisa was full of confidence. On January 27 2013, she checked into budget accommodation the Cecil Hotel in LA, a faded art deco building in a dodgy part of the city, with 700 rooms and many permanent residents.

She wrote on her Tumblr blog that the block was “classy but then since it’s LA it went on crack,” adding that Baz Luhrman should film The Great Gatsby there.

On January 31, she visited The Last Bookstore to buy gifts for her family. Manager Katie Orphan later told CNN Elisa was “very outgoing, very lively, very friendly,” chatting about whether her purchases would be too heavy to carry around for the rest of her travels. That day, the girl vanished.

Ms Orphan later compared the story to the opening of a Raymond Chandler noir novel — and she isn’t the only one who thought it was like something out of a storybook.

BODY IN THE TANK

Elisa’s parents were worried by her silence straight away, because she had been calling them daily. They contacted the police and then flew to LA. On February 6, there was a press conference asking for anyone with information on the missing student to come forward.

A week later, on February 13, LAPD released bizarre CCTV footage filmed on the night of Elisa’s disappearance. It showed her ducking in and out of the stationary hotel lift, frantically pressing buttons and apparently communicating with someone just out of shot.

They couldn’t have predicted the response. Within 10 days, the footage had three million views. Viewers questioned why the timestamp had been hidden, the film apparently sped up and what happened in several jumps that suggested gaps in the video.

Six days after it appeared, guests at the Cecil started complaining about the dark, musty, sour-tasting trickle of water coming out of the taps. A hotel maintenance man went up on the roof, and found a naked dead body in a water tank, with no signs of external trauma and clothes discarded nearby. Police confirmed it was Elisa. So how did she get through the alarmed door, up the three-metre ladder and into the water tank?

That wasn’t the only question mark. The girl’s Tumblr blog was updated several times after her death, attracting hundreds of thousands of shares by readers. Most think this was because of the site’s Queue option, which allows posts to automatically publish when the user is away, but since her mobile phone was never found, others suspect the thief — or the killer — was posting for her.

Finally, there’s this detail. At the time of Elisa’s death, the Centers for Disease Control had dispatched a team to stem the largest outbreak of tuberculosis in a decade on Skid Row. The name of the test used to identify potential victims was LAM-ELISA.

CCTV footage of Elisa Lam behaving bizarrely in an elevator a few moments before she lost her life by drowning in the hotel's rooftop watertank. CCTV footage of Elisa Lam behaving bizarrely in an elevator a few moments before she lost her life by drowning in the hotel's rooftop watertank.

GHOULISH THEORIES

From the moment the video appeared, threads on Reddit and Websleuths began debating Elisa’s disappearance. They wondered if she had been on drugs, why she wasn’t wearing her glasses, whether she was having a psychotic episode or if she was playing hide-and-seek with a hidden gunman.

Bedroom investigators discovered from Elisa’s blog that she did suffer from bipolar disorder and depression, and was taking various medications for her conditions, but it didn’t satisfy their curiosity. While the LAM-ELISA test had been used around the world for years, it seemed too crazy to be coincidence.

Some claimed to see a third foot in the video at the 2.27 mark, while others said it was merely a shadow. Bloggers and conspiracy websites discussed government mind control, the Masons and the secret service. Fingers were pointed at a registered sex offender living at the Cecil, and a death metal singer known as Morbid.

The Daily Maverick website claimed doctors had called the autopsy report “distressingly vague”, that it had strange alterations and evidence of a possible sexual assault that hadn’t been investigated.

Others delved into the Cecil Hotel’s chilling history. Since its construction in 1927, it had seen multiple suicides, murders, disappearances and serial killers — could all this be coincidence?

Ghost hunters think not. Web forums reveal blurry photos of people on the hotel’s window ledges and tour guides now give visitors a macabre overview of the area’s sinister past.

The Cecil in the 1980s was filled with tormented people who had reached rock bottom. In 1985, “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez murdered at least 14 people while living there, returning each night to dump his blood-soaked clothes in the bins at the back and walking into the hotel naked or in his underwear. The story has drawn disturbing comparisons with the loss of Elisa’s clothes.

Six years after Ramirez, Austrian journalist Jack Unterweger stayed at the Cecil while he worked on a story about LA crime, going on ride-alongs with LAPD officers which were revealed as scouting missions. Unterweger was a serial killer who strangled prostitutes, local guides informed Medium in Josh Dean’s in-depth exploration of the case.

DEAD FAMOUS

Two years on, the retelling of Elisa’s story has reached dizzying heights. Not only is her death the subject of relentless speculation across internet forums, she’s reached the mainstream too.

It began with YouTubers reposting the CCTV video with breathless voiceovers about what might have really been going on. Less than a year after Elisa’s death, Hong Kong horror film Hungry GhostRitual featured a scene apparently inspired by the elevator video, while another Chinese director, Liu Hao, said he was working on a movie inspired by her life and death.

A May 2013 episode of Castle in which a woman’s body is found in a rooftop water tank of the “Cedric Hotel” in Manhattanis thought to bebased on the tragedy, and in-production Sony movie The Bringing reportedly draws on her terrible story. The fifth series of American Horror Story is believed to use Elisa’s death, after Ryan Murphy said he was inspired by a surveillance video of a young woman who “got into an elevator at a downtown hotel ... [and] was never seen again.”

What’s been pointed out as even weirder is the striking similarity between Elisa’s death and Dark Water, a Japanese horror flick remade by Hollywood eight years earlier, in 2005.

A few months after her death, on June 21 2013, the Los Angeles County coroner listed cause of death as drowning, with bipolar disorder as a contributing condition. Her parents took her body home to Vancouver and never spoke to the press or a single internet detective. They filed a wrongful-death suit against the Cecil Hotel, which is still pending.

For those closest to the case, it is closed, but it lives on in the thoughts of the intrigued and the haunted across the internet. Elisa’s troubled, expressive Tumblr is now littered with sad, heartfelt comments from people who see her as a kindred spirit.

Her darkest moments are summed up in the blog’s tagline, a quote by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk: “You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life.”

That’s not how her transfixed chroniclers would see it.

