The Cecil Hotel

Built in 1924 in downtown Los Angeles, the Cecil Hotel was meant to be a beacon of luxury. Instead, it became one of the most tragedy-soaked addresses in American history. Suicides began within years of opening. Serial killers Richard Ramirez and Vaughn Greenwood both called it home while carrying out their crimes across the city. Over the decades, deaths stacked up — unsolved murders, mysterious accidents, and over 80 documented fatalities within its walls.
Then in 2013, 21-year-old Elisa Lam checked in and vanished. Her body was found nineteen days later in a rooftop water tank — a case that gripped the entire internet and still has no satisfying answer.
The Cecil is still standing. The history isn’t going anywhere.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Imagine you've just arrived in downtown Los Angeles. You're tired. You've been on the road for days. You spot a hotel. Grand, gorgeous, this old school art deco building that looks like it was plucked right out of a 1920s postcard. The man at the front desk smiles and hands you a key. Room 504. You don't know that people have died in that room. You don't know that a serial killer once slept in the bed you're about to lay down in. You don't know that somewhere above you, a 21-year-old woman is about to disappear in a way that will puzzle the entire internet for years to come. You don't know any of that. You just know you need sleep. Tonight on the Breeze Files, we connect into the Cecil Hotel. And today I have a special announcement. Today I have added a co-host to the Breeze Files, my good friend, Nicholas Holly. Nick, why don't you go ahead and tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your thoughts and feelings about the world of the paramount?

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Hey everybody. Hey Cody. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to join this podcast. Longtime listener, probably a couple months now. A little bit of background about me. My name is Nikon. I never believed in ghosts until I came face to face with my quest to capture what I once saw on the video. Just kidding. But I do have a lifelong fascination with the paramount. I do love all things, ghosts, UFOs, goblets, um, but I will say that the older I get in my my journey into fatherhood, I uh I I do have a growing skepticism of the paranormal, but my fascination is unwavering. So I think that'll be a good contrast to uh your thoughts and opinions on the paranormal. Um it is good to know that we do share uh that same fascination and I'd love to uh tell these stories with you and kind of share my my opinion, whether they be aligning or opposing. Um it's good to be here instead of crossing mostly. Um I'd be hard to look at that square-shaped head of yours the whole time, but um I do have a beer and we're gonna make this work.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Thank you for that introduction, Nick. Uh even though you know I'm a bit sensitive about my cube-shaped head. Um that's fine. I mean, I just asked you on this podcast because you're my friend. I didn't expect you to be mean about it, but whatever. I'm just gonna I'm not that sensitive. Anyway, uh we're gonna get right into it, Nicholas. Uh, do you know anything about the Cecil Hotel?

SPEAKER_02 3:52

Yes, Cody. Unfortunately, I I have done my my research. I do know a little bit um about this location, and it's is uh it's heavy, and it's uh a lot of uh heavy death count, um serial killer lore. Uh you know, you have your Richard Ramirez, uh your Alyssa Lamb's um situation, um, what's happening inside and outside of the hotel, it's uh pretty dark stuff, and um yeah, it's gonna be uh it's gonna be a bumpy ride, but um you know about bumpy rides. Okay. Um but yeah, see the hotel um has a little bit of everything. Murders, suicides, hauntings, and that's just on the inside. Outside, it's a bit of a rough neighborhood, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Kind of a rough neighborhood is kind of keeping it light. But everything you did say is correct. All right, Nick. I think it's that time that we go ahead and check ourselves in to the Cecil Hotel. Before we get into the murders, the mysteries, and the madness, let's talk about what the Cecil Hotel actually is. Because I think the building itself matters here. The place has a personality, and it's not a good one. The Cecil Hotel was built in 1924 in downtown Los Angeles, right on Main Street near 7. The architect was Lloyd Lester Smith, and the idea was glamour. Here, unapologetic glamour. 14 floors, 700 rooms, grand ballrooms. The kind of place you'd bring a date to feel fancy. It opened in 1927, and for a brief moment in its life, it was actually that. But downtown LA shifted hard. By the 1950s, the neighborhood around the Cecil had changed dramatically. Skidrow began expanding right up into the hotel's front door. I mean that almost literally. The boundary of Skidrow runs right along the streets adjacent to the Cecil. For context, Skidrow in LA is one of the largest concentrations of homeless people in the entire United States. The Cecil sat at the intersection of transient desperation and faded grandor for decades. And that tension, it never left. The hotel became a magnet, not for wealthy travelers, for people with nowhere else to go. Long-term residents, people recovering from addiction, people were running from something for someone. Weekly rates were cheap, no questions were asked. At its lowest point, rooms were going for as little as $14 a night. Now, here's the thing about Cecil that I find genuinely chilling. From the very beginning, people were dying. Within just a few years of opening, the hotel recorded its first suicides. A man named W.K. Morton, a traveling salesman, checked in under a fake name in 1931 and died from poison pills he brought with him. A few months later, a retired army captain named James Corbin shot himself in his room. And it didn't stop there. Through the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and beyond, people kept dying at the season. Suicides mostly, but not always. Somewhere along the way, the hotel stopped being a destination and became a destination for last resorts. You want to know how bad the reputation got. Sounds like you can check out referencing the Solid Hotel California by the Eagles. Yeah, I agree with that. Definitely they had a plan, and that plan went to shit real quick. Now you might be asking, why didn't they just close it? Why didn't someone step in? And the honest answer is complicated. There's a housing element here that gets overlooked in the true crime coverage. By the later decades of the 20th century, the Cecil was providing housing, however grim, to hundreds of people who absolutely had nowhere else to go. That's real tension. That's not nothing. But we're not here to talk policy. We're here because the Cecil Hotel didn't just have a run of bad luck. It had serial killers. It had an elevator death that shouldn't have been possible. It had one of the strangest viral disappearances cases the internet has ever obsessed over. So let's get into it. Nick, since you have a weird obsession that's highly disturbing about serial murderers and your love for them, uh, why don't you go ahead and tell the uh listeners about the Night Stalker and the Skid Row slasher?

SPEAKER_02 9:30

I uh I don't like the way you just said that code. There's uh I do find serial killers um interesting, but I certainly don't condone what they've done. But um, you know, I'm like uh I'm like a middle-aged woman after work every night, pull a popcorn, glass of wine, sit down and watch my favorite true crime movie. Um I think they're interested interesting in that way, yes, but uh sure I can uh I can dive into this. The CISA Hotel's most infamous connection to murder doesn't involve a guest dying in the hotel. It involves killers living there while hunting elsewhere. Let's talk about Richard Ramirez. You know this name, and if you don't, you're about to. Richard Ramirez is one of the most terrifying serial killers in American history. He called himself the Night Stalker. Between 1984 and 1985, he terrorized Southern California, the killing spree so brutal, so random, so ritualistic, that the entire region descended into paranoia. People slept with their windows bolted. Hardware stores ran out of locks. LAPD was getting hundreds of calls a day. Ramirez killed at least 13 people, though many believe the number is higher. He didn't have a type, he didn't have a pattern, not a predictable one. Men, women, elderly victims, young victims. He broke into homes, he shot, he stabbed, he strangled, he left pentagrams drawn in lipstick at crime scenes. He was a Satanist who genuinely believed he was doing the devil's work. And during a significant portion of that killing spree, Richard Ramirez was a resident of the Cecil Hotel. He was staying in a room on the 14th floor, one of the cheapest rooms in the building. He would go out at night, commit his atrocities, and come back to the Cecil. According to accounts, he could come in through the back entrance and leave his blood-soaked clothes in the trash. He is reported to have used the building's communal showers. Other residents of the Cecil at the time have said they remember him. Weird guy, kept to himself, smelt bad. A tenant who was identified in accounts as a front desk worker allegedly said Ramirez would come in very late or very early, often disheveled, and go straight to his room without making eye contact. Nobody at the CISO reported him. Nobody put it together. This building is full of people who are trying not to be noticed themselves, and that's haunting. Thankfully, Ramirez was eventually caught in 1985. He died in prison in 2013, waiting on death row. Now, Cody, you might be asking yourself, was Ramirez the only serial killer in the building? The answer? No. Ramirez isn't the only killer tied to the C Sword. Because even before him, the hotel housed a man known as the Skid Row Slasher. His real name was Vaughn Warren Greenwood, and he operated in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Greenwood killed at least 11 people, most of them homeless men on Skid Row. His method, he slashed their throats. And Cody, you think it may not get worse than that? It does. Because after he cut their throats, he drank their blood. He left salt rings around the bodies. He arranged the victims' shoes near their heads. Greenwood was also linked to the SISA Hotel during his killing period. Investigators believe he used the area around the hotel as his hunting ground. He was ultimately convicted in 1976. So we have two distinct serial killers. One in the 60s and 70s, one in the 80s, both connected to this single building in downtown LA. The odds of that happening by the coincidence are, well, I'll let you do the math. Some paranormal researchers believe there's something about the Cecil that attracts darkness. That the weight of all those deaths, all those final moments, all that despair, creates something.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

A pool. An invitation. Wow, that's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Two high-profile serial killers staying at the same hotel? Is that a coincidence, Nick? I honestly don't know. Alright, Nick, and people listening from all around the world. This is the one. If you found this episode because of the Cecil Hotel, this is probably why. Alisa Lamb. Lisa Lamb was 21 years old. She was Canadian, born in Hong Kong, living in Vancouver. By all accounts, she was a smart, curious, funny young woman. She kept a Tumblr blog, and if you read it, you know she wrote the way a lot of young people do. Searching. A little melancholy sometimes, but also hopefully. She talked about books. She talked about her struggles with mental health. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She talked about wanting to travel, wanting to see the world. In late January 2013, Elisa set out on a solo trip to California. She visited San Diego first and then Los Angeles. She checked into the Cecil Hotel, which by then was operating under the name Stay On Main, trying to rebrand the budget floors as a kind of hostel for young travelers. Elisa was staying in a room with other guests initially. She was reported to be cheerful and social, making friends. And then on January 1st, 2013, Elisa Lamb disappeared. Her family reported her missing after she stopped making her regular check-in calls. LAPD launched a missing persons investigation. They searched the hotel. They found nothing. For 19 days, Elisa Lamb was simply gone. Then, on February 19, 2013, hotel maintenance workers went to check the rooftop water tanks. Guests had been complaining about water pressure, about the water tasting strange, and about it having a dark color. One of the maintenance workers opened the hatch on one of the large black rooftop water tanks. Lisa Lamb's body was inside. She had been in that tank for 19 days. The hotel's guests had been using that water, drinking it, without knowing. Her toxology screen showed her medications were present in her system, but no evidence of foul play was found. The manner of death was officially ruled accidental, with the contributing factor being hurt bipolar disorder. We know that the rooftop was not easily accessible. The door to the roof was alarmed. Tanks themselves had lids. These are not places a person accidentally waters into. And this is where everything gets really strange. LAPD released elevator surveillance footage from the Cecil Hotel from what they believe was the night Elisa went missing. And when this footage went public, the internet broke. The video shows an elevator. Elisa gets on, she presses buttons, multiple buttons, including buttons for several floors. The elevator doesn't move. She steps out into the hallway and looks left and right, almost as if she's hiding from someone. Or checking to see if someone is coming. She goes back into the elevator. She presses more buttons. The elevator still doesn't move. She steps out again, and her movements become harder to describe. She pushes herself against the wall beside the elevator. She peers around the corner, her hands move in front of her face in these flowing, almost wave-like gestures. She's talking to herself or to someone off camera. Though we can't hear her, she looks up at the ceiling, she looks at her hands, and then she walks away down the hall and she disappears from the frame. The elevator, after she leaves, finally closes its door and begins moving. The explanations range from the mundane to extraordinary. People say she was having a psychiatric episode, disassociation, psychosis, a manifestation of her bipolar disorder. Some say she was playing a game called elevator surfing. A real thing some hostile guests did, which involves pressing certain button combinations to see what happens. Some people swear the footage is timestamp draw. Some people have pointed out that the timestamp on the release video appears to have been redacted, which LAPD confirmed was done to protect the integrity of the investigation. And then there are other theories that someone was with her in that hallway that night and was deliberately kept out of frame. That the footage was edited, that she was being hunted. Another theory is about the water tanks. The tanks on the Cecil Rooftop had a locked hatch. Investigators said the hatch was closed. Not locked, but closed, when Elisa's body was discovered. The tanks are about eight feet tall. There's a ladder on the outside. But here's the question that people keep asking. How does someone, especially someone who is disoriented or in a psychiatric episode, climb the ladder, open the hatch, get inside, and then if the hatch was found closed, close it behind themselves. The LA County Coroners Report noted that the water tank's lids were heavy, not something that swings freely or would fall shut on its own. I'm not saying someone put her in the tank. I'm absolutely not saying that. But this is an odd set of circumstances of how she ended up in one.

SPEAKER_02 20:57

The internet's obsession with this case eventually became a thing unto itself. YouTube channels and Reddit threads and amateur investigators numbered in the tens of thousands. Some of them did things that were genuinely cruel. Like harassing a metal musician who happened to have a stage name that sounded like morbid and had stayed at the Cecil around the same time. That man received death threats. His life was appended. He had nothing to do with Elisa's death. That's what happens when the internet gets its teeth into something. The Netflix documentary series, Crime Scene, The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, cover this case extensively in 2021. And honestly, while I have some feelings about how it was framed, it does give Elisa's family a voice, and it does push back on some of the wilder conspiracy theories. But here's what I want to keep coming back to Elisa Lamb was a real person. She was 21 years old. She had plans. She had people who loved her. She wrote about wanting to be a writer. She was documented a cross-country trip like someone was falling in love with the world. And her story ends with her ending up in a water tank on the roof of one of the most notoriously cursed buildings in America. Whatever happened up there, whatever the full truth is, she deserved better than the CISO Hotel. As if the history of the CISO Hotel couldn't possibly get any more cursed. A few months before Lisa checked in, a tuberculosis outbreak swept through Skidrow, centered very close to the CISA Hotel. The test used to detect the strain, it was called Lam Elisa. That's not a joke. That's not made up. The TB test that was being administered in that neighborhood at almost the exact time Elisa Lamb disappeared had her name built into its acronym. I don't know what to do with that. I really don't. But I can't not mention it. By the 2000s, the Cecil Hotel had changed hands several times and was operating in a strange liminal space. The lower floors were rebranded as Stay On Mate, trying to attract a young budget traveler crowd. Backpackers, hostile types. The upper floors remained the Cecil. Same building, two identities. The ownership was a man named Richard Bourne, and later the hotel came under the management of Simon Property Group. There were genuine attempts to renovate, to rebrand, to shake the history, but the history doesn't shake easily. After Lisa Lamb's death in 2013, the international spotlight on the CISA was brutal. The story went around the world. And while notoriety can sometimes help a property, people love to visit cursed places. This felt different. This felt like too much weight. The hotel limped along for a few more years. Then, in 2017, a New York-based hospitality company called the Green Wave Hospitality Partners acquired the property. Their plan was an ambitious one. Convert most of the building into an affordable housing with a smaller boutique hotel section. Then, COVID hit. The renovation stalled. The city of LA actually used the CISO as a temporary housing for unhoused residents at a certain point during the pandemic. As of my research for this episode, the CISO Hotel has been undergoing an extended renovation. The plan is still largely to convert much of it into a low-income supportive housing with a smaller hotel component. It's been open and closed and delayed for years now.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Let's talk about what people have experienced in that building.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

There have been numerous accounts over the years from guests, staff, and paranormal investigators who spent time inside the Cecil. I want to walk through some of the more consistent ones. The stuff that comes up repeatedly from people who didn't know each other and weren't coordinating their stories. The elevator. Multiple accounts from multiple different time periods. Stopping on floors without being called. A feeling of being watched inside the car. One former long-term resident described consistently seeing the elevator arrive at their floor. Doors opening and no one inside, no buttons pressed. The hallways on certain floors, specifically floor 14, the floor where Amir stayed, shows up a lot in accounts. Guests describe a persistent cold spot near the end of the court. A sense of unease that is described as direction. Like it's coming from somewhere specific. One paranormal team that was given access to the building before the most recent renovations reported that their equipment showed significant electromagnetic anomalies on that floor. We move on to the stairwells. This one comes up a lot. The stairwells in the Cecil are described as oppressively quiet in a way that doesn't feel right for a building that's occupied. And several people have described hearing footsteps in the stairwells, above them or below them, when they are confirmed to be alone. And then there's the water. Even before Elisa Lamb, the water of the Cecil had a reputation. Guests complained about the color and the taste. Some described a smell. One former resident, a woman who lived there in the 1990s, said that she would sometimes run the tap and the water would come out brownish for several seconds before clearing. She assumed it was the pipes. And maybe it was. Or maybe the building had been accumulating tragedy for so long, even the infrastructure was saturated. I want to take a second and talk about the broader philosophical question that a place like the Cecil Hotel raises. Because I think it's worth sitting with. Is there such a thing as a cursed location? Not in the sense of like a witch casting a spell, but in a deeper, more structural sense. Can a place absorb the energy of what's happened inside of it? Can stone and concrete plaster hold memory? There's actually some interesting science adjacent to this. Researchers like Dr. Dean Raiden at the Institute of Noetic Sciences have studied what they call place memory. The idea that strong emotional events might leave some kind of imprint on a physical environment. Theory remains highly contested and is far outside the mainstream. Most physicists would tell you it's nonsense. But here's what I find interesting. Cultures all over the world independently have developed the idea that certain places hold spiritual weight. Indigenous traditions. Ancient Greek concepts of genius Loki, the spirit of a place, Chinese Feng Shu, which takes very seriously the idea that the history and energy flow of location affects the people in it. Every major culture, without coordinating, arrived at the idea that place matters, that history leaves a mark. The Cecil Hotel has been the site of more than 80 documented deaths since it opened in 1927. Some estimates put the number even higher. Suicides, murders, accidents, disappearances, decades of concentrated misery among its residents, killers walking its corridors. If any place on earth has earned the label Haunted, by whatever definition of that word you prefer, I'd argue the Cecil Hotel has a strong case. Well, I'd like to keep it plain and simple. That is some crazy shit, Nick. What what did you think about that?

SPEAKER_02 29:47

You're right about that, Cody. The Cecil Hotel's history is dark, layered, haunted, cursed. Like some kind of gross design or something.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

Yeah, uh, I agree with that. Uh so let's let's talk about let's talk about something I find very interesting. Like earlier, I was talking about how this place could be cursed. Some locations, something dark or something catastropic happens there. Do you think that because of those things, it leaves an imprint on that place where possibly that kind of energy affects the people there and very well could be the reason why some of these catastrophic things happen in this place? What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_02 30:45

Well, Cody, I think you're right to say that it is interesting to look at it that way. Could a piece of property be cursed? And honestly, I think that this is a case where it may just be more coincidental that all of these things are happening, and I'll explain why. I think that the CISA Hotel inside and what's happening outside. Um is a curse, or is it a matter of a situation that could have maybe been prevented had certain things been taken care of before, during, and after certain situations happen? So what it would would we be looking at a different situation if maybe Skid Row hadn't been right on its front doorstep? Sure. Could we be in a different situation entirely if maybe people spoke up about seeing Richard Ramirez's uh blood-soaked clothes? Um could we be in a different situation if maybe the security was tighter, if they had paid closer attention to what was happening at the time? Um maybe so is it cursed? Um I don't know. Maybe people should have been paying closer attention. Um maybe if Skidrow hadn't been allowed to be so close to the hotel, maybe uh as far as Lisa Lamb, um that's still kind of a mystery. Like there's still a lot that we don't know. Um maybe her cause of death was, you know, yeah, from her bipolar disorder, um, which led to her drowning, but I still think there's still a lot of unanswered questions. How did she get in there? Wasn't the latch to the water tower super heavy? Is that something that she could have done herself? How did she close it back up? We may never know. So that's my take on it.

SPEAKER_01 33:11

I like that take on that, Nick. Definitely making a lot of sense with it. Um also, I also go back to I always go back to the Velisca ex-murder house, right? Where something catastrophic happened in that house. You know, nine people get murdered uh brutally, right? That leaves, in my mind, and I'm always gonna think this way, I think, is that it leaves some kind of imprint on that place. Now, what happened on the on the land where the Cecil Hotel is is placed at, you know, I don't know. I don't think anybody really knows, but something could have happened to why people never spoke about Richard Ramirez. Maybe the energy in the hotel kept these people from doing that. Um you know, same thing with Skid Row. Maybe people are drawn to this location for some kind of reason, you know. Um regarding Lisa Lamb, I don't think we're ever really gonna know the full story on what happened. Um it's a it's interesting and I'm very curious as to what I think everybody is, all the internet uh ever since that Netflix documentary came out. But I just don't think we're ever gonna have the real answers to that. All right. As we come to close out this episode of The Breeze Files, uh Nick, do you have anything else to say on this matter of the Cecil Hotel or you know, just being the new co-host of the Breeze Files in jail?

SPEAKER_02 34:52

Absolutely, Cody. Thank you again for inviting me onto your podcast. Umward to future episodes. And wow, what a wild ride this first one for me was. Um also want to thank the fans. Um looking forward to the future. Thank you, Cody.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

That's awesome, dude. I'm glad to have you aboard the Breeze Files team, and I look forward to doing some more episodes with you. And there's there's a lot of shit we gotta talk about. You know what I'm saying? Uh speaking of stuff to talk about. Listeners, uh I might have talked about it last episode. I cannot remember if I did or not. But if anybody could please, please, please, please, please, please, um, you know, talk to your family, talk to your friends, talk to your uncle, whoever, uh, yourself, uh submit to codybrees25 at gmail.com, cody br e-e-z two five at gmail.com, any events or instances or moments you've had that have been of paranormal nature, any ghost stories, you're out in the woods, you heard something, you saw something, I want to hear about it. I'm interested in hearing about it, and I'm sure the whole world and the you know, 30 to 40 people that listen to this podcast are interested about it as well. Um I really, I really want to hear about it, and eventually I'm hoping when more and more people find out about this podcast and how good it is, that they will also that I'll have a whole episode dedicated to people's ghost stories or paranormal stories and stuff, because I think that stuff's fascinating. So I hope I hope I get some submissions, even one, one just to start it off. As always, guys, thank you guys for listening. As you know, I appreciate it. And I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the breeze files. You guys know what? I got another catchphrase for you. This has been the breeze files. And the dark is never as far away as it feels. I like that one. That one that might be the one, people. That might be the one. Anyways, I hope everybody's having a good day, a good night. Um I'll see you guys next time.