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Much like other mysteries that have plagued the minds of true-crime fanatics around the globe, Elisa Lam’s 2013 death continues to fascinate—and remains the catalyst of wild internet conspiracy theories thanks to Netflix’s latest docu-series, Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel.
The streaming service’s documentary has, once again, fuelled internet sleuths to further speculate about Lam’s mysterious death, after her body was found in the water tank on the roof of Los Angeles’ Cecil Hotel.
While her death was eventually ruled an accidental drowning, those fascinated by the case have posed a number of possible explanations for what really went down following the events of her disappearance.
The most recent? Many have noted eerie correlations between Lam’s death, and the unsettling viral video of Lam in the hotel’s lift, to that of a Japanese horror film, Dark Water.
Dark Water is a 2002 Japanese horror film that was adapted into an American version starring Jennifer Connelly and John C. Reilly in 2005. In both films, based on Koji Suzuki’s short story “Floating Water”, a mother and daughter—named Dahlia and Cecilia—find dark water leaking from their bedroom ceiling. They soon discover that the apartment above theirs has flooded and the family who used to live there disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Dahlia eventually finds the body of the little girl who once lived in the apartment above and discovers she’d been abandoned by her parents and drowned after accidentally falling into the building’s water tower.
Many have pointed out that the film’s most basic plot points mimic that of Elisa Lam’s death, with LAPD being led to the roof of the Cecil Hotel after guests complained of black-tinted—or dark water—coming from their taps.
Others also noted that Dark Water’s trailer shows multiple scenes where the elevator buttons in the apartment complex appear to malfunction, similar to the viral footage of Lam acting strangely in the hotel elevator that initially made her case worldwide news back in 2013.
The CCTV footage—which has millions of views—shows the 21-year-old student acting incredibly erratic, showing her jumping in and out of the elevator seemingly hiding from someone, with online theories suggesting everything from alien abduction to ghosts as the cause of her bizarre actions.
Another one of the wild, and very peculiar, theories to arise from Lam’s death came when a tuberculosis outbreak plagued Los Angeles, specifically the homeless community that lived around the Cecil following her death. The test that was created was, quite hauntingly, Lam’s name backwards: LAM-ELISA, which stood for Lipoarabinomannan (LAM) Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA), according to Decider. Conspiracy theories speculated that Lam was used as some sort of biological weapon, especially considering she was a student at the University of British Columbia, which has a highly reputable tuberculosis research centre. This theory has since been debunked, with the autopsy report showing Lam did not exhibit any signs of tuberculosis.
Eight years on and Lam’s case continues to inspire television and film, including How To Get Away With Murder, where a character’s dead body was found in a water take, and most recently, American Horror Story: Hotel, which was set in a hotel with a reputation similar to that of the Cecil. Creator Ryan Murphy even noted Lam’s viral elevator surveillance footage as something that inspired the AHS series, telling Entertainment Weekly: “There was a surveillance video that went around two years ago that showed a girl getting into an elevator in a hotel that was said to be haunted. And she was never seen again.”
You can watch Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel now on Netflix.
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