The black legend of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles has been shocking the city for years. Now, after the broadcast of the Netflix documentary on the disappearance of Elisa Lam, the legend has become even bigger.
Hotel Death or the suicide, as they know it in the punished neighborhood of Skid Row, in Los Angeles, at the now world-famous, Hotel Cecil. Skid Row, is a marginal neighborhood in the center of the city that has stood since 1927 when the hotelier William Amontona Hanner decided to build a monumental hotel to accommodate big businessmen, businessmen, and tourists with high purchasing power. Yes, it worked, just for a while. Then the Cecil Hotel became the crime hotel, the terror hotel.
Thanks to Netflix and its documentary series Crime Scene: Disappearance at the Cecil Hotel about the disappearance and death of Elisa Lam, the 21-year-old Canadian tourist who was found dead in 2013 in one of the hotel's water tanks, the viewer can not only follow step by step the strange disappearance, the erratic police investigation and the final resolution of Elisa Lam's case but can also enter the Cecil Hotel and discover that scary stories, ghost hotel stories are sometimes that they do exist.
To get an idea of what it is and has been, Cecil's past went on to inspire the fifth season of the FX series American Horror Story and has been the setting for a 2021 episode of Ghostbusters. There it is.
The documentary, released last February, tells the story of the disappearance of Elisa Lam. Lam was a young Canadian who decided to take her backpack and travel to the West Coast of the US. Very prolific on social networks, especially on Tumblr, Elisa Lam recounted her journey and her experiences until she arrived at the Cecil Hotel, actually, the Stay on Main Hotel, a division of the original hotel that the owners made to try to separate the gruesome from the Cecil and attract without scary stories and crimes to tourists.
One night Elisa Lam disappeared. Not a single clue, nothing at all, until the Los Angeles Police released a video with the latest images of the young woman. A shocking video that spread like wildfire and in which Elisa Lam was seen with erratic behavior gave rise to hundreds of theories about her disappearance. The strange video was for it, but what led hundreds of so-called Internet researchers to create dozens of criminal theories about what happened to Elisa Lam was the place where she disappeared, the Cecil Hotel.
The black legend of the Cecil Hotel
The black legend of the Cecil Hotel was not built overnight. When in 1924 three hoteliers, William Banks Hanner, Charles L. Dix, and Robert H. Schops, bet on building an impressive and magnificent hotel in downtown Los Angeles, it would not cross their minds at any time. that would end up becoming that hotel with 19 floors, marble, alabaster statues, and opulence. The idea was to attract businessmen and high-class tourists at a time when downtown Los Angeles was growing at astonishing speeds. Three years it took W.W. Paden, responsible for its construction, in building the 700 rooms that would accommodate, or hope to accommodate, the creme de la creme of the late 1920s. Its name is the Cecil Hotel.
In 1927 the Cecil Hotel opened its doors. His first years were as expected, movie stars, big businessmen, tourists with significant purchasing power... But the Great Depression came and the Cecil Hotel could no longer sustain itself with the clients for which it was born. It was then that its owners decided to lower prices and turn it into a long-stay hotel. In a short time, the Cecil Hotel went from being the great hotel, the great tourist bet in downtown Los Angeles, to become a sinister place where the most sinister of Los Angeles was housed.
Prostitution, drugs, alcohol, decadence... Skid Row became a lawless city where not even the Police dared to patrol. And Cecil is in the center. Many were the attempts to save a hotel that the city itself had swallowed. They tried to save him on many occasions, but Cecil was already a black legend full of suicides, crimes, serial murderers, and, of course, disappearances.
The 1940s were the years of greatest terror at the Cecil Hotel. Crime committed on Skid Row ended up leading to the Cecil Hotel. Even the famous case of the Black Dahlia, the name given to the still unsolved terrible crime of the young actress Elizabeth Short, also had a connection to Cecil. They say that days before the notorious murder of her, she was seen having a drink in the bar of the Hotel Cecil. The story of Elizabeth Short and those supposed drinks at Cecil's was one of many, one more of the strange events at the hotel.
The first deaths
The first suicide recorded at the Cecil Hotel was in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression. A tourist, W.K. Norton, who had checked into the hotel under another name, was found dead in his room after swallowing poison pills. A year later, 25-year-old Benjamin Dodich was found shot in the head. In 1934, Louis Borden, a sergeant in the US Army Medical Corps, slit his own throat after leaving several handwritten suicide notes.
In 1937, Grace Magro fell through one of her windows, leaving her body hanging on the power lines. It was never determined if it was a suicide or a crime. In 1939, Erwin Nablett, another Army officer, committed suicide by taking poison. In 1940, a teacher, Dorothy Seger, 45, ended her life in the same way. It was just the beginning.
The 1940s arrived and the Cecil was no longer the Hotel Cecil, the Cecil was already known throughout the city as El Suicidio. One night in 1944 they were staying at the 19-year-old Dorothy Jean Purcell Hotel with her boyfriend. In the middle of the night Dorothy got up, went to the bathroom, and gave birth to a baby who, according to her version, she believed had been stillborn. She threw him out the window and the newborn's body was found days later in an adjoining building.
The case of the Black Dahlia
And then, three years later, the body of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, was found very close to the Cecil Hotel. Her corpse was found dissected in two by a neighbor who at first thought it was a broken mannequin. The murder shocked the entire city, especially downtown Los Angeles. When they found her, her face had been cut from her lips to her ears and her heart, spleen, and intestines had been torn out.
The last person to see her alive was the receptionist at the time at the Hotel Cecil. At 10:00 p.m., on January 9, 1947, eight days before her body was found, the receptionist saw her as she left the bar, crossed the lobby, and went out into the street. Theories about who could have killed Elizabeth Short were endless. There were dozens of suspects, but the ones that sounded the most, such as the doctor George Hodel, always shared characteristics, close to Cecil.
The black legend grew and grew out of control at the same rate as deaths and suicides. In 1954, Helen Gurnee, 55, registered under another name at the Cecil Hotel, jumped from the seventh floor of the hotel. In 1962, 27-year-old Pauline Otten was staying with her husband at the Cecil Hotel. One night after a strong fight, Pauline locked herself in the bathroom of the room. She ended up throwing herself out of the window, landing on a pedestrian who was walking on the sidewalk. Both died instantly.
In 1964 another terrible crime marred the history of Cecil. Goldie Osgood, a 79-year-old retired telephone operator was found dead in her room. She had been raped, stabbed, and strangled with the bedroom rug. Nothing was stolen from her room. Within hours, the Police arrested Jacques B. Ehlinger, 29 years old. Several witnesses had seen him near where Goldie was going to feed the pigeons. He had bloody clothes. He had to close the case.
The arrival of a new decade did not improve the dark history of the Cecil. The crimes were the day-to-day of the hotel. The suicides continued and the horrifying deaths too. Like that of Jeffrey Thomas Paley in 1976. This 26-year-old bought a rifle, went up to the roof, and began firing 15 shots into the street. Luckily no one died, but Cecil was back in the spotlight.
