I Know What Happened to Elisa Lam

The biggest mystery of the Cecil Hotel is solved

Elisa Lam was a Vancouver college student who died under mysterious circumstances in Los Angeles in 2013

This article is a departure from my normal series dedicated to the Manson Family such as this article, this one, this and also this most recent one. Don’t worry: I’ll be back to writing about the Family in no time, but I wanted to take a step away to write about the Elisa Lam case.

Like so many others in the true crime community, I was fascinated with the story of Elisa Lam. To sum up Elisa’s story:

In January 2013, she traveled from Vancouver, BC to California on a personal vacation. The daughter of immigrants to Canada from Hong Kong, Elisa was a college student on break from the University of British Columbia and avid social media poster at sites including Tumblr, who wanted to explore the West Coast. Many of her Tumblr posts were about fashion, pop culture, and dealing with her diagnosis of a bipolar disorder. Elisa was taking four prescription medications for her bipolar disorder including Effexor, Lamictal, Seroquel and Wellbutrin. She frequently complained in her posts about having to take these medications, and about the periods when she felt nothing.

“Having depression seems to mean that you’ve lost the ability to even help someone else in trouble. I don’t want to end up bitter and resentful and angry at everyone.” — Elisa Lam’s Tumblr account “Nouvelle/Nouveau”

Elisa flew from Vancouver to San Diego, where she spent a few days, and then she traveled north to Los Angeles via Amtrak. She booked a shared room using an app online, with an entity known as Stay on Main in downtown L.A.

Stay at Main was created in 2011 by owners of the Cecil Hotel, to separate new paying guests from their long-term, low-income residents

Stay on Main was actually the Cecil Hotel, a once-grand property on Main Street, opened in the 1920s. By the 1980s, it was a rundown and seedy has-been, home to vagrants, drug addicts and prostitutes. From the recent Netflix series, I learned that some patrons were spending as little as $250 per month to live at the Cecil.

“I have arrived in Laland… and there is a monstrosity of a building next to the place I’m staying

when I say monstrosity mind you I’m saying as in gaudy