SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: The Creepy Legacy of the Hotel Cecil

9:17Josh Clark:But that's just to point out the fact that the hotel was going to eventually supposedly undergo a massive renovation and that it was all sort of put on hold because of COVID. And I think now it's just being sat on with some of the long term tenants that are protected to stay there.

9:33Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I think there's like 30. But there's, like you said, 700 rooms. Sure. But you said it that the Cecil Hotel, which is very much down at the heels now, started life in a much different way where it was meant to be like a pretty nice hotel designed for middle class travelers to L.A. And that situation next to the rail station was a big draw for it. It was definitely a feather in its cap. And I saw it's in the Beaux-Arts style. It's not incredibly pretty from the outside, but the inside lobby is still pretty neat looking. Sure. Lots of terrazzo tile and columns. And there's fake Roman statuary and a big clock over the check-in desk.

10:23Chuck Bryant:It's really pretty in a really like, you know, 1920s original style still, although it's just kind of got this drab air that's kind of fallen over it over the years.

10:35Josh Clark:Yeah, and that is in large part because, like you said, there are a lot of unhoned people there today, a lot back then. The area called Skid Row of downtown Los Angeles is kind of right there. I used to drive through that area sometimes when I lived in L.A. when we would go downtown to eat sushi. Back then when I lived there, downtown was not as much of a destination unless you were going to Staples Center or something. But it's made a real resurgence since I've left and kind of trying to build downtown back up. But Skid Row is still an issue. And like you said, there are people there that work with unhomed folks that are really trying their best.

11:18Josh Clark:to take care of them. And the fact that that hotel is right there, the sort of looming large is a bit of a thumb in the eye. Yeah.

11:26Chuck Bryant:And I get the impression that the area that's now Skid Row in Los Angeles had had at least since the 1880s kind of had a, an unusual reputation. It wasn't always, you know, for people down on their luck or anything like that, but, um, you know, it was a little more low rent than other parts of Los Angeles. Like there, there was just a mishmash of all sorts of different people. It seemed like really alive. And the CESA was kind of built at the outskirts of that between what would become Skid Row and then one of the nicest parts of LA at the time, Bunker Hill. And everything was hunky-dory for the CESA when it first opened in either 1924 or 1927, depending on who you ask.

12:09Chuck Bryant:I could not confirm one way or the other because both dates have kind of taken off so much. But when the stock market crashed, that area that was just kind of colorful and a little bit low rent, it quickly became Skid Row as we understand it, beginning around the Great Depression. And not only did the proximity to Skid Row kind of like lower the Cecil Star rating, when the tenants started, the hotel guests started to dry up. They had to lower their rates and start catering to people of less means. And so the hotel just kind of stopped taking care of itself little by little, starting around the Great Depression and continuing on through World War II.

12:58Josh Clark:Yeah, and it kind of became a last resort kind of destination for people with addiction problems, people in the sex working industry. And, you know, it got that reputation and pretty soon got a reputation for all kinds of bad things happening there. There have been no less than 15 or 16, what's classified, I guess, as an unnatural death at the Cecil. Many people took their own lives there. Quite a few, I mean, if you read down the laundry list, it's like quite a few people ingested poison, Quite a few people jumped or maybe were pushed out windows. There have been some murders by gun. There have been murders by strangulation.

13:43Josh Clark:There have been sexual assaults. This one sad case of a woman who gave birth to a baby and was suffering from some sort of mental illness, evidently thought her baby was born not alive and went to throw the baby out the window. And it turns out the baby was alive, then died. She was found not guilty. I think temporary insanity was the plea there. And just weird, kind of tragic, awful things happening over the years time and time again at the Hotel Cecil. Yeah, like another frequently referred to incident was where a woman named Pauline Otten, she jumped from I think like the ninth or tenth floor to take her own life and landed

14:34Chuck Bryant:on a guy who was a passerby who happened to just be walking unluckily beneath the Cecil at that moment on the sidewalk and was struck by Pauline. and they were both killed. And like that doesn't usually happen very often. Like that's a pretty remarkable thing. And I know that like the most I could find was I think 18 incidents, but it seems like those are just ones that have been documented. There seems to be quite a bit more. There was a Netflix series, I think it's a four-part series on this recently. And they interviewed a woman who had spent 10 years managing the Cecil. And she said that, her name is Amy Price.

15:19Chuck Bryant:She said that under her 10-year tenure, at least 80 people died that she knows of. And you can kind of imagine like, you know, you could find newspaper write-ups from like the 20s and 30s and 40s when somebody jumps out a window. And definitely when somebody jumps out a window and lands on a hapless pedestrian, like that's definitely going to be documented to make news. But if somebody on Skid Row overdoses and dies in this hotel, you know, is that going to be documented? So it's possible that there are a lot more people who have died at the Cecil from unnatural causes over the years than just those 17 or 18.

15:58Chuck Bryant:Did you watch all of that documentary? No, I haven't seen it actually yet.

16:02Josh Clark:Oh, okay. Have you seen the whole thing? Yeah, you know, I feel terrible because the director is the great Joe Berlinger who I actually had on Movie Crush in one of my favorite episodes where we kind of just talked about documentary filmmaking. He's a legend. He did the Paradise Lost series. He did that documentary on Metallica when they were all in therapy. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I mean, he's just sort of a legend in the genre.

16:28Chuck Bryant:I saw he did the Ted Bundy tapes recently.

16:31Josh Clark:Yeah, he did that, and then he directed the movie version with, what's his face, Zac Efron. With who?

16:39Chuck Bryant:I said Ryan Gosling.

16:41Josh Clark:Oh. Close. Another super handsome hunk. And that was a good movie, but this wasn't so great. I didn't love it. It felt kind of overlong and a little salacious.

16:51Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's the impression I had from reading about it.

16:54Josh Clark:Yeah, so I was disappointed. But Joe is a great filmmaker and a good guy, so I feel kind of bad giving it that.

16:59Chuck Bryant:I think that's a fair caveat. A great filmmaker and a good guy can still make a hunk of poop.

17:05Josh Clark:It wasn't a hunk of poop. It was all right.

17:08Chuck Bryant:Okay. But maybe let's take a break and I'll email Joe and tell him I'm sorry ahead of time.

17:14Josh Clark:All right. And we'll be right back.

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18:50Chuck Bryant:One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Knock, knock, knocking at the door. Five, six, who is it? Five, six, who is it? It's Cowie and Elliot. It's Cowie and Elliot.

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19:24Chuck Bryant:so uh okay we're so we're the cecil hotel starts to get a pretty pretty not a great reputation even around town i read a article on kcet.org which i guess is a pbs station in socal And they said that local residents started to refer to the Cecil as the suicide. That was the name of the hotel for people around there. And it just kind of like, it just kept going. Like every time, you know, maybe a couple of years would pass without some high profile death in the hotel. And then it would happen again. And it would just reaffirm everybody's ideas that that place just wasn't quite right. There was something wrong with it, almost like it was a magnet for that kind of tragedy, you know?

20:13Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, I think most major cities have had at least one of these hotels that just sort of is inexpensive, maybe in the wrong part of town, and has a reputation sometimes for lurid activities and checking in and not checking out. And this was L.A.'s, and L.A. for sure had more than one. Sure. It did not help their reputation in the 1980s when Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. the Night Stalker and one of the more sensational serial killers in American history, he stayed there for a while and lived there and apparently brought body parts back to the Cecil Hotel. I said Cecil like I'm British. Cecil Hotel from some of his victims to ingest there.

21:02Josh Clark:And that's certainly like super creepy.

21:05Chuck Bryant:Wait, did you say ingest? I hadn't come across that. Did he eat that victim's eyeballs?

21:11Josh Clark:I think so.

21:12Chuck Bryant:Wow.

21:13Josh Clark:And other, he wasn't like, I don't think he was Dahmer level, but he was known to eat some body parts. He has a, there's a great documentary on his, his case too. Yeah. It's super disturbing.

21:26Chuck Bryant:Yeah. That's on Netflix as well, I think. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken. But one thing I hadn't realized before that I ran across when I was researching some of his stuff was how he was caught. It's just absolutely triumphant.

21:39Josh Clark:It was a mob of people in a neighborhood.

21:42Chuck Bryant:In East L.A. Yeah, it was great. He was spotted. He saw himself on the front page of the newspaper and just instinctively started running, tried to carjack a woman, hit her, was seen hitting her, and an older man basically ran over and helped the woman, pulled Richard Ramirez out of his car, and the woman whose car it was, husband came over and started beating him and he tried to get away and just an increasingly large mob chased him and would beat him and he'd get away some more and they'd chase him down and catch him again and they finally pinned him down and waited for the cops to come. That's how he was caught.

22:21Chuck Bryant:It's so great.

22:23Josh Clark:Caveat that, I'm not down with mob justice, but a group of people finding a serial killer on the street and like subduing him, I'm way okay with that.

22:33Chuck Bryant:No, I totally am. In this particular instance, like I'm all fine with that kind of justice for sure.

22:39Josh Clark:Yeah, and a badge of honor for East L.A. because the entire city of Los Angeles was, I mean, it was a scary situation there in the 80s.

22:47Chuck Bryant:I can imagine. That's where Cheech Marin was born, according to that one song of his.

22:53Josh Clark:That's right.

22:54Chuck Bryant:Yep. So the Night Stalker, he was not the only serial killer that checked in there. He actually inspired just a few years after he was convicted in, I think, 1989, I think like in 92, maybe 93, there was another serial killer named Jack Unterweger who was Austrian, who had already been convicted, I think, when he was like 19 or early 20s of killing a woman by strangling her with her own bra and went to prison. He was very, very smart, very charming. He used this to basically get early parole. He convinced the public that he was actually reformed and apparently was held up as like a great example of how, you know, the prison system could rehabilitate someone.

23:45Chuck Bryant:And it was just a complete false fabrication. He was basically posed as a true crime journalist, like he reinvented himself as that. went to LA and other parts. He went to Europe, traveled through Europe a little bit too, but also ended up in LA to do research on his true crime novels. Went along on ride-alongs with the LAPD and ended up using that to scout victims. He killed three sex workers. And the whole time he was staying at the Cecil Hotel. And they think probably as an homage to Richard

24:20Josh Clark:Ramirez or at least a connection to him you know yeah so that I mean at this point like the reputation for the hotel it's not the kind of thing that uh is going to appear online you know 15 years ago when young people like Elisa Lam are searching for an inexpensive place to stay and sadly that's exactly what happened was a Canadian traveler she was 20 21 years old was on her way kind of up the West Coast traveling by herself. Her parents were a little unnerved by her traveling by herself. So she was, you know, asked to check in every day, which she was doing. And at the time it was, you know, they had kind of dorm style rooms, kind of youth hostel style rooms where you had bunk beds and a shared bathroom.

25:08Josh Clark:And so you could stay there. It was a traveler's hotel. And if you, you know, I hate to say it, but if you didn't know much about L.A., you may end up at the Hotel Cecil because you could stay there for like 75 bucks a night or something like that.

25:22Chuck Bryant:Yeah. From what I could tell, Stay on Main did a really good job of making their, you know, using their website to their advantage and making it seem like this is a really hip happening spot. And I mean, in some ways they were, they were kind of like just a little ahead of their time because apparently that area around Skid Row and downtown LA is like the hippest spot to live in now again. But at the time, it was still really, really skid row-y, basically. Yeah.

25:54Josh Clark:It could be dangerous.

25:56Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And I think it still is, but I think it's just becoming more and more gentrified and it's becoming, I guess, less dangerous in that sense. But at the time when Elisa Lam showed up in 2013, it was, you know, it was a dangerous place to be, but this particular spot was just full of, you know, especially European kids on basically budget holidays staying in LA, basically in hostels. And I know originally she was put into a room with a couple other girls that I think were traveling together, but she was traveling alone. So it was very hostile and not hostile with an E. well yeah there's an E but it's in a different place than you'd expect youth hostel-y it was very youth hostel-y like she was put in a room with other people at first

26:45Josh Clark:yeah LA didn't have a lot of that I remember there was a youth hostel in Venice that for some reason I always wanted to stay there when I lived in LA I was like I'm going to go down and stay in that hostel one night because the beach was so the beach was really far when you lived on the east side and you kind of never went over there much unless someone came to town and wanted to go to the beach. Oh, that makes sense. Sure. And I was broke back then, so it could have been a little staycation.

27:11Chuck Bryant:Did you ever do it? Nah. No.

27:14Josh Clark:It's one of those things you think about late night, and then you wake up the next day and you're like, nah.

27:20Chuck Bryant:You blew all your money on Taco Bell instead?

27:23Josh Clark:Oh, man. I miss Taco Bell. Do you?

27:26Chuck Bryant:I don't.

27:28Josh Clark:I mean, I didn't need it that much, but I haven't had it in years.

27:31Chuck Bryant:I've had too much, I think, was my problem.

27:34Josh Clark:Okay. Was that the deal? By the way, side note, speaking of weird late night foods, we had a guy on our front door camera the other day come in the middle of the night and leave a package, and we were like, what is this? We went out the next day, and it was a bag full of crystals.

27:54Chuck Bryant:Wow.

27:54Josh Clark:But also creepy. And I think it was a delivery, like a DoorDash or something.

27:58Chuck Bryant:Oh, crystals. I thought you meant like amethyst or quartz.

28:01Josh Clark:No, no, no. I mean, tiny square sliders.

28:03Chuck Bryant:Yeah, he had the wrong address. I think so. Either that or your daughter has mastered the telephone by now.

28:11Josh Clark:It was really weird. And, of course, the first thing I did was feel terrible that someone's late night munchies didn't get satisfied.

28:19Chuck Bryant:Did you eat them the next morning just as a homage? Oh, God, no.

28:22Josh Clark:No, no, no.

28:23Chuck Bryant:No?

28:23Josh Clark:You don't like crystals?

28:25Chuck Bryant:Or was it because it was sitting there overnight?

28:27Josh Clark:Both. I never was into crystal for some reason.

28:30Chuck Bryant:Man, I like crystals.

28:32Josh Clark:It was the thing. I just was, I don't know why. I think I was just a Waffle House guy.

28:37Chuck Bryant:I'm fine with Waffle House, too. The big problem with crystals, though, Chuck, I'll tell you, is their fries are probably the worst fries of any fast food location. They're the most bland. Somehow, if you just bit into a raw potato, it would be less bland and tasteless than if you ate a crystals fry.

28:57Josh Clark:Yeah. I don't know how to do it. And if you're from the other places in the country, White Castle is sort of an analog to Crystal. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, this is not an episode of the Doughboys. This is stuff you should know. And back to Elisa Lam. She was supposed to be there for about, I think, four days and check out on February 1st and did not get in touch with her parents like she had been doing each day. Yeah. she had been seen shopping for books at a nearby bookstore and then bought some books. And this is one of the things in the documentary, like, you know, they didn't really have any footage of her with any other people inside the hotel before her disappearance.

29:43Chuck Bryant:Well, she was also reported to be constantly by herself too by people who saw her.

29:47Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, she was traveling alone. So that makes sense. But she did get handed off. There were two gentlemen that handed off a kind of a large-ish box to her on camera in front of the hotel. And, of course, the Internet sleuths are like, who are these guys? What was in the box? And apparently in the box were these books that she got because she had spoken with the book seller about the size of them. And, boy, I don't even know if I can carry these. And I think had them delivered to the hotel or whatever. So kind of nothing to see here. and another example of how annoying this case can be with people online speculating like wrong stuff.

30:26Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah. Can be a little annoying for sure. But yes, so she was she was alone traveling alone. I think she started out in San Diego or at least her last stop had been San Diego. Her next stop was going to be Santa Cruz. And yeah, her parents have been like, OK, you need to call us every single day. and she had been pretty faithfully until that February 1st came and went with no call. And I believe they pretty much immediately contacted the hotel and the LAPD and said, hey, you know, our daughter hasn't checked in. Can you see what's going on? I don't know if they did it on February 1st or not, but in pretty short order, the LAPD determined that she was just gone.

31:11Chuck Bryant:She was nowhere to be found and that there was some suspiciousness going on for sure.

31:17Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, they did a thorough inspection. They went to her room. They had found that the hotel had gathered all her stuff and bagged it and was holding it in storage, which was regular protocol when someone doesn't check out and just leave stuff. Nothing shady going on there. They checked around the hotel in the alleyways and sidewalks. They checked up on the roof. They didn't find anything. and things got really strange, and I guess we should take another ad break here, but things got really strange when the hotel sent them footage from inside the elevator of the Cecil Hotel. And we'll get to that right after this.

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32:47Josh Clark:I refuse to make a dish without them. McCormick has been and is an essential in the kitchen. Now McCormick's new line of signature seasonings make bringing fresh inspiration and endless versatility to everyday dishes easier than ever. There's the everyday essential, garlic and olive oil, the savory sweetness of caramelized onion, and globally inspired flavors like the herby with a touch of heat chimichurri, and chili garlic that elevates everything from ramen to stir fry to even grilled meats. Try the chimichurri blend to make your steaks delicious. Each signature seasoning is crafted by flavor experts to make every dish more delicious.

33:32Josh Clark:When you want to make your best, it's got to be McCormick. Find your favorite at mccormick.com. Warning, the following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups. A, B, C, D. In the morning, brush your teeth. A, E, C, D. In the morning, brush your teeth. E-F-G-H Hurry up and don't be late E-F-G-H

34:00Chuck Bryant:Hurry up and don't be late

34:03Josh Clark:Lingo Kids, only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Lingo Kids! Everything kids love. Download now for free.

34:18All right, Chuck.

34:20Chuck Bryant:So Elisa Lam is now known to be missing. She left her stuff behind at the Cecil Hotel and she didn't check out. She didn't call her parents as she usually did. And she's officially a missing person. Within a couple of days, I think maybe February 6th, the police held a press conference and explained what was going on to the public and basically asked for everybody's help. And if anyone had any info, you know, where did she go? Where is she? How is she doing? Is she OK? Um, and I guess I don't, I didn't see anything about any, get any crazy leads or anything like that. Um, it doesn't seem to have really kind of captured the public's interest at first.

35:05Chuck Bryant:And I saw there's this guy named Josh Dean who's written, uh, several, uh, articles on, on the Elisa Lam disappearance. And, um, I believe one of the, one of the ones that he wrote kind of pinpoints why there wasn't a huge public interest in the first like week or even two of her case. It was because Christopher Dorner had gone on his rampage against the LAPD, basically declared war on the LAPD and was killed in I think the mountains of San Bernardino in a standoff, like right when Elisa Lamb went missing. So not only was the public's attention on this, especially in LA, the LAPD's attention was definitely on that as well.

35:49Chuck Bryant:So Elisa Lam was kind of like this faint little chirp in this huge maelstrom at the time.

35:56Josh Clark:Faint chirp in a maelstrom?

35:58Chuck Bryant:It's the best I could come up with on short notes. It's amazing.

36:00Josh Clark:Are you kidding me?

36:01Chuck Bryant:No, thanks.

36:02Josh Clark:You just made that up?

36:03Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah, I did. You like it?

36:06Josh Clark:Yeah, but I just have the feeling that next time I'm into your house, it's going to be like, that's going to be carved into your desk or something. Right. It's on a t-shirt. Right.

36:15Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

36:16Josh Clark:That you make Momo wear that T-shirt every day.

36:19Chuck Bryant:That's right.

36:20Josh Clark:Yeah, and the other big reason was until this footage actually came out of the elevator car, then that's when the public's attention really caught hold.

36:33Chuck Bryant:That changed everything.

36:34Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, there's no way around it. It's a very sort of unsettling, and I remember when this happened, before any of the facts of the case were kind of out, I remember looking at this video and it is very unsettling and it does appear to be very creepy and that a young woman gets on an elevator very kind of casually presses all the center buttons on all the floors. I think they determined she was on the 14th floor and sort of pressed all the floors on the way down. Elevator doesn't do anything. The doors don't shut. She moves to the back corner and sort of standing there. She goes and she looks outside of the elevator both ways a couple of times in the hallway and then kind of retreats back quickly.

37:20Josh Clark:At one point, she steps out into the hallway and appears to be gesturing towards somebody. She's at least making hand gestures to the right down the hallway.

37:30Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and they're unusual hand gestures. They're not like the normal hand gestures you might make. They're not at all subtle or casual or almost even like, you know, you might not even realize you're using your hands when you're talking sometimes. These are more gesticulations than just mere gestures. You know what I mean?

37:50Josh Clark:Yeah. And, you know, there's no doubt. And eventually she kind of leaves around to the left and exits to the left. And the door stays open for a while before it shuts. But there's no getting around the fact that having known nothing and knowing that this person disappeared, this young woman, and that you see this, it seems very suspicious. And creepy. Admittedly creepy. I don't even think it looks that creepy. It looks to me like that she is trying to get away from someone and is afraid someone has followed her or is gesturing at a person who she feels threatened by. It's what it looks like to me.

38:25Josh Clark:I know other people online talk about otherworldly spirits, and like you said earlier, she's conjuring spirits with her hands. Like I just – that never occurred to me. It just looked like she might be in some kind of peril and was trying to get away from someone. Right.

38:43Chuck Bryant:But that's creepy in and of itself, you know?

38:46Josh Clark:Yeah, I just mean not creepy in like a supernatural like what's going on here way. No, I think the thing that really, when it really turns creepy to me is when she turns around and hides in the corner of the elevator.

38:59Chuck Bryant:Like, she's hiding. And then the second part that's genuinely creepy is when she, like, leans out and, like, looks both ways and then kind of jumps back into the elevator. It's just, I mean, it's really hard not to kind of put yourself in her shoes. And she's clearly frightened at that. Yeah. And to see somebody frightened like that, it's, that's creepy.

39:20Josh Clark:And you're waiting on someone to enter the elevator, but that never happens. And with the internet sleuthing, you couldn't really make out the time code very well. And so all the people online are like, well, why can't you make out the time code and the timestamps? Like, what would degrade that and not the rest of it? And then they think they decoded it, and there's almost a full minute missing. and the Hotel Cecil edited out a portion clearly before they sent it to the cops. And they interviewed the woman, and you're talking about the manager, and she was like, no, of course we didn't edit anything out.

39:58Josh Clark:We were horrified by this disappearance. We just sent him everything we had.

40:02Chuck Bryant:Right. Plus, I'm sure also that most of the employees that stay on Main know exactly how to edit video out before handing things over to the cops anyway. Well, it is L.A. That's true. That is a good point, actually.

40:15Josh Clark:But I don't buy it. I think it is what it was, which was a person in an elevator who was having some mental issues. And we'll get to that in a second. And I think it's sort of like the easiest explanation of the video, at least, to me, seems to be the most accurate.

40:37Chuck Bryant:All right. That's what I buy. That's how I buy it, too. So that video was released on February 13th, and now all of a sudden the public is taking notice. She becomes an internet meme almost overnight with people watching and analyzing that video, like you were saying. And yet they still can't find her. No one has any idea where she is. It's been two weeks now since she went missing. There's videos out there. The entire internet is on the case now. And it wasn't until a couple days, I think two days after the video came out, Chuck, that one of the guys, one of the custodians of the Cecil Hotel, of Stay on Main, I should say, was asked to go check on the water supply on the roof because the Cecil Hotel used gravity-fed water.

41:31Chuck Bryant:They had four 1 ,000-gallon tanks on the top of the roof. And when you open the tap, the water would come pouring down from those tanks into your room and out the faucet. And some of the tenants, I don't know if it was just the hotel or some long-term tenants, but they were complaining that the water pressure had suddenly gotten really low and that the water that was coming out had a strange odor and taste and weird kind of color to it. And so they dispatched the custodian to the roof and he went and checked. And I think as he was approaching the main water tank, I think tank number one, he noticed that the hatch was open and in very short order made the grisly discovery of Elisa Lamb's body.

42:20Josh Clark:Yeah, he was kind of like the super. He was a maintenance guy. His name is Santiago Lopez, and he's in the documentary too. I don't think he saw the hatch because the hatch is on top of the tank, but he went to go, and he said it was a routine thing, if there was any kind of water issue, was to climb the ladder to the tanks and go look and see what was going on because there's probably a clog or something. and he saw her body naked about a foot below the water, just sort of suspended there. And when they interviewed this guy in the documentary, it's really sad. He was sort of at the center of a lot of this with interviews and he was speaking through, I guess not through a translator, but through subtitles.

43:05Josh Clark:But he was clearly still very upset about this and it scarred him to see this woman floating in the tank And he knew immediately who it was and called down to the hotel manager who we've been talking about and said, you know, she's she's up here in the tank. And, you know, the cops came. They found her clothes, which were determined to be the same clothes she was wearing in the elevator video, kind of at the bottom of the tank. They had sunk. and you know immediately the new mystery is not what's going on in this video although you know that played a part because they were still trying to figure that out as far as foul play goes but was how she made it in here and and why she made it in there yeah because she she it was like the

43:52Chuck Bryant:hatch is not easy to get in or out of they had to like cut her out of the they did cut a hole in the bottom of the tank so they could access it, right? They couldn't just pull her back out of that hatch. So that's kind of weird in and of itself. She's also nude. That also kind of added to the mystery of the whole thing. And then also the coroner, when he made his toxicology report available, he basically said he wasn't able to find any conclusive results because there wasn't enough blood to take a sample from, you know, she just kind of permeated the water in that her blood had. And it wasn't, you just couldn't like take a water sample and be like, oh yeah, there's no, you know, there's no drugs in here or anything like that.

44:42Chuck Bryant:So all of that combined really kind of just took that mystery, you know, that people had been primed to start thinking about with that video and then just blew it through the roof. You know, I mean, the water being, you know, going to other people's taps in the hotel and, you know, Lisa Lamb basically being a part of that water really kind of solidified her legendary status or the legendary status of her mystery, I think, in people's imagination. Anybody who comes across that case can't help but like let the mind wander in that respect.

45:16Josh Clark:Oh, for sure. I mean, the idea of drinking water and bathing in water with a decomposing body. I mean, the body had, was in a pretty, pretty rough state of decomposition at that point. They did do, obviously in the autopsy, they didn't find any signs of foul play. There were no, obviously no like obvious wounds. There were no internal wounds. There was no strangulation. They, they pretty much said this doesn't look like foul play at all. The one, one of the mysteries was how she got up there because you, if you want to go just through the regular staircase to the rooftop, and this is not a rooftop that you, you know, doesn't have like a rooftop hangout area or whatever.

45:59Josh Clark:Although people, you know, there was plenty of graffiti and beer bottles and drug needles. And so people would make their way up there. But if you go through the regular door, it's one of the alarm doors, which would trigger downstairs and all throughout the lobby. That never came on, and you have to have a key to disable it, but there is a fire escape entry with a ladder, basically, for the last story. It's a little precarious, but she could have just simply gone out the window to the fire escape and climbed up the ladder and then up the ladder to the tanks. It's not, you know, it's a little, it would be a little bit of a scary trip up that ladder, I think.

46:40Josh Clark:Yeah. But considering what happened, she she clearly was was not in a good place mentally. So I think that's completely believable.

46:48Chuck Bryant:That journalist, Josh Dean, went in, I think, 2015 to see the seesaw himself. He had gotten obsessed with the case. So he went and kind of investigated it in person. And he quickly found that open window was still open and the fire escape was easily accessible. And in the I think one of his articles is called American Horror Story, which is a reference to what I think the hotel season of American Horror Story was based on or inspired by Elisa Lam's disappearance. But there's a picture that he took of that ladder leading from the fire escape on the 15th or 14th floor up to the roof. And all you see is up like you just see the ladder and then above it is sky.

47:38Chuck Bryant:But after reading about it, your imagination just thinks of like the 15 stories behind you, like as you're looking up this ladder. It's one of the most unsettling pictures I've ever seen if you read the text that surround it. But he said by his judgment, an average person could easily make it up that ladder, especially if you don't look down. He said if you're carrying a body or another person, you could not do it. He said it just would be too difficult. And, you know.

48:10Josh Clark:It's one of those straight up vertical ladders on the side of the building.

48:13Chuck Bryant:Yeah. But if you were in a manic state, as a lot of people believe Elisa Lamb was, you could probably make it up that ladder pretty quickly. And you wouldn't even necessarily consider looking down. And all of a sudden you'd be on the roof. And after you were on the roof, it would be a fairly easy proposition to get into one of those tanks, especially I think she weighed about 115 pounds and was about five feet, four inches. So it was possible for her to get into one of those tanks through that hatch. But either she was too scared to come out conceivably or she couldn't get out when she wanted to get out and tired of treading water because the water would have been about eight feet deep and drowned after a while.

48:58Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, they did. I think the police dogs did pick up her scent near that window. So that seems to be what happened. And, you know, this is one of those cases where the more I read, like all I could feel was despair about this poor woman having what looked to be some sort of medication related manic episode, maybe scared, maybe thinking someone was following her and trying to get away and going at great lengths, going to great lengths to maybe hide somewhere like inside of a water tank. I don't know why her clothes were off or why her clothes ended up in the tank. I'm not saying any of this makes sense, but it is something that could happen.

49:42And all I can think about is what an awful place that she must have been for something like this to have happened.

49:49Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and I mean to kind of back up the mental break theory, which is what I buy. That's where I put my stock. she remember I said she was originally put in a room with a couple other girls she didn't know at the stay on main they complained about her behaving strangely so she was moved to her own private room apparently she went to a taping of the Conan O 'Brien show and was escorted out because she was behaving strangely and then detectives also found she was on four different medications for bipolar one disorder and depression. And the LAPD, based on the prescription dates on the bottles and then the number of pills that were left and the instructions on the bottles, the LAPD were able to determine that she hadn't been following the dosage recommendations or taking her pills or medication.

50:53Chuck Bryant:So if you put all of that together and then also that, um, people taking their clothes off as part of a psychotic episode happens, it's been documented. Um, you like, there's no, there's no pieces missing on the table. Like she could have gone out on that fire escape, gone up the ladder. Like there's nothing that is, well, yeah, but then there's this really big thing that remains unexplained. Like it explains absolutely everything. And then suddenly it kind of makes all the other stuff like government mind control or ghosts or whatever seem just kind of gross, you know?

51:27Josh Clark:Totally agree. I believe her parents brought a lawsuit against the hotel that was eventually dismissed, if I'm not mistaken. And it just remains a very, very sad situation and a sad case. And it is very annoying when you get online and everyone thinks that there are spirits being conjured and all this wacky stuff. It's just not the case.

51:50Chuck Bryant:Not the case indeed. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, that's it for the Cecil Hotel and the Lisa Lamb RIP. And since I said RIP, that means it's time for a listener mail.

52:05Josh Clark:I'm going to call this follow-up to Y2K. Oh, yes. and this is something that we actually had in our notes that we I guess just kind of failed to bring up yeah

52:17Chuck Bryant:I mean you had it in your notes as well

52:20Josh Clark:yeah the 2038 problem we got a lot of emails about this and we're not going to fully probably explain to everyone's satisfaction how it works but hey guys just got done listening to the Y2K podcast which brought back an interesting range of memories of living through that time In case you weren't aware, there's something called the Unix Y2K problem that still exists, but is slowly being fixed by smart people behind the scenes. Thank goodness. The majority of computers in the world run Unix-based operating systems, not Windows or Mac OS. And unless these systems are patched at 3.14 on January 19th, 2038, their clocks will roll over to think it's midnight January 1st, 1970.

53:06Chuck Bryant:Yes.

53:07Josh Clark:The cause is basically the same in the early versions of the OS. Only had so much memory allocated to time representations, but more modern versions now have this fixed. And hence computers aren't susceptible once they're updated or upgraded. Although not all systems can be easily updated. And that is from a bunch of people, but specifically from Ph.D. Alan Chalker.

53:30Chuck Bryant:That's great. Thanks, Alan, to everybody who wrote in. I was like, oh, man, I meant to include that. But apparently Unix represents time as the number of seconds from the epoch date, which is some date in 1970. And then eventually it's going to have more seconds than it can represent in the number of digits, so it'll just roll back over like he was saying, which is pretty neat. Come on, Unix. Pretty cool. But also I'm glad to hear that there are smart people working on that because we got 17 years. Man, you guys take it easy. Take a weekend, you know? Sure. Go sit in your house and social distance from everybody.

54:08Josh Clark:That's right. We also got a lot of emails just from people that some people whose parents helped rewrite code or were heading up projects rewriting code. And it was pretty cool. We got a lot of emails about that when you struck a chord.

54:21Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it was a good idea, Chuck. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Alan and everybody else did, you can send us an email.

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