Elisa Lam (WARNING: Stomach-turning news)

[FourthBase]

I'm so disturbed by this I can't even bother with a proper initial post full of backstory and links. Just know, for anyone who has a weak (or even normal) stomach, that when you see the name "Elisa Lam" in a news teaser or headline, you are about to encounter one of the most sickening stories involving a decomposing body ever. There was a two-week long search for her, security footage of her alone (?) in an elevator was released showing some seemingly strange and possibly ominous behavior, there's a long websleuths thread I'm reading through tonight...but I just can't bring myself to do the OP thing right now. Just wanted to alert people here, for now.

[Col. Quisp]

Makes ya wonder how many other water supplies are similarly tainted.

[FourthBase]

Yeah, gives me a whole new area to worry about in terms of Spoiler:maintaining a vegetarian diet: Water. Fuck.

Here's the websleuths thread, for what it's worth:

http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showth ... p?t=198048

[FourthBase]

Story about her initial disappearance:

http://ubyssey.ca/news/female-ubc-stude ... ng-la-687/

That's it for me tonight. Too gut-wrenching and too heart-wrenching. This poor woman...

[elfismiles]

via FB ... Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel Press writes:

Here's weird: this woman arrived in LA the same day as me and stayed at the same hotel:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2 ... urist.html

[barracuda]

[Nordic]

That's a nasty place in a truly disgusting part of town. No wonder they market it to foriegners, anybody who has any clue wouldn't ho near that place. It's a former flop house, and probably not that "former". This is an area where afdicts would throw hypodermic needles with little falls of human shit impaled on the needles at visiting film crews from high perches within the buildings, where once I saw a burly security guard cowering against a building as we were unloading our gear for a shoot, and when asked why he was pressing himself against the building replied it was because last time he was there someone had tried to hit him with a tv set hurled from the 11th floor. It's not a safe place.

[Forgetting2]

That location is right on the line between the downtown revitalization hell to the west/north and the homeless hell just east/south of there. It's the line where those two different types of hell meet and mingle, but only for about a block's space. About 500 feet from that flop house is Coles/Varnish, one of the trendy downtown spots and one of the oldest eateries. The new hotels, lofts and clubs pushed the homeless population just past that line, but if you walk east from there, it's block after block of tents and cardboard boxes on the sidewalks. I've done that walk from there to Alvarado just after sunset, and for someone not accustomed to it, it's a scary place. I could see how someone who didn't know the area might think, 'hey, I'm just a block or two to these trendy clubs.'

[Twyla LaSarc]

Thanks. I had not seen this.

Scary.

[KeenInsight]

That video made me feel incredibly uneasy. What would account for that behavior?

[justdrew]

well, why wouldn't the elevator door close? it looked like she came in and pressed all the buttons, then nothing happened. maybe she used a 'stop' button some elevators have, we'd have to know if that 'vator has a stop thing to pull.

[Nordic]

Makes me think of that Jennifer Connely movie "Dark Water". Very much.

[justdrew]

longer version, in which the door finally closes

[Jeff]

I find that video very disturbing.

I expect it would take a hotel employee to disable the elevator and access the roof and water tank.

The 600-room Cecil Hotel was built in the 1920s and refurbished several years ago. It charges $65 a night.

The hotel is on Main Street in a part of downtown where efforts at gentrification often conflicts with homelessness and crime. It had once been the occasional home of infamous serial killers such as Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker, and Austrian prison author Jack Unterweger, who was convicted of murdering nine prostitutes in Europe and the U.S., the Los Angeles Times reported.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013 ... water.html

[justdrew]

probably not her, but ..?


~0:15:35.00 American Horror Story S01E03, only on screen for a second or two.
Passengers on the Eternal Darkness Tour of LA "Murder Houses"
and slate publishes... Six Ways to Tell If You're Staying in a Murder Hotel