Most Famous Unsolved Mystery

In January 2013, Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian student, set off on a solo trip across the West Coast.

The first few days, she regularly contacted family and updated social media. She looked and sounded content.

However, things took a turn for the worse on January 26th when Lam arrived in Los Angeles and checked into the Cecil Hotel.

Originally, she was supposed to share a room with a few others, but her roommates complained she was behaving oddly, so she was forced to change rooms.

Then, on January 31st, Elisa Lam disappeared.

Her posts on Facebook and Tumblr abruptly ceased.

Her daily calls to her parents stopped without explanation.

To speak in cliché, it seemed Lam had fallen off the face of the earth.

Initially, there were no clues, no evidence. Hotel staff reported that Lam had been alone that day, but in good spirits.

Other than that, nothing.

Her face was on fliers across the city and her parents flew out to help the investigation.

Soon however, a strange video surfaced, a creepy piece of elevator footage that appeared to be the last time Lam was seen alive.

It is an eerie video. From the start, Lam is behaving strangely and acting erratic.

She seems agitated, wary, glancing around her as if she is being followed. When the door doesn’t close, she glances out several times, looks both ways and darts to the elevator walls, cowering out of sight, but eyes still fixed on the hallway.

Throughout the four-minute video, Lam hops on and off the elevator several times.

She frantically pushes buttons and puts her hands on her ears. She moves her hands in creepy, almost arcane motions and bows back and forth slightly.

As the doors close again, Lam walks out.

This is the last time she was seen alive.

It went viral quickly, people dubbed it as having a horror movie like feel.

The video took on an even more sinister quality several weeks later; hotel residents began to complain of low water pressure, and strange-tasting, discolored water.

In February, a worker was sent to check out the hotel’s water tanks, which lie suspended 10 feet over a heavily secured area with alarm systems in place.

When they were opened, Elisa Lam’s waterlogged corpse was found, three weeks after her disappearance.

This was peculiar by itself. Lam would have had to have gruelingly hauled herself up to the tank, undress, and then plunge herself in along with her stuff.

It’s inarguably a weird, creepy case, but what is perhaps most horrifying is some of the parallels it draws to both real life and pop culture.

One of the most talked about coincidences, is the similarities between Lam’s death and the 2005 horror movie Dark Water.

The film is about the death of a young girl named Natasha, who was drowned in an apartment’s rooftop water tank, similar to Lam’s.

Also unusual is the outbreak of tuberculosis following Lam’s death. The name of the test used for diagnosing the disease is called LAM-ELISA.

Even the Cecil hotel has its own mystery. It has a history of murder and suicide, and has hosted two serial killers.

The police, after four months of investigation, ruled it an accidental drowning with bipolar depression (which she was known to have) as a significant condition; however, people have called into question the legitimacy of this.

Why did it take four months to come to the conclusion?

Why were authorities so evasive and obscure about Lam’s death in general?

Several theories have been proposed, ranging from demonic possession to psychedelic drug use, and from mental breakdown to a potential stalker.

By every definition, it is creepy.