Well, this is incredibly creepy and very sad.
After guests at LA's Cecil Hotel complained of low water pressure, maintenance workers found the body of 21-year-old Canadian Elisa Lam at the bottom of one of four cisterns on the roof of the historic hotel. Yes, the same water that hotel guests drink and bathe in.
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"The moment we found out, we felt a bit sick to the stomach, quite literally, especially having drank the water, we're not well mentally," hotel guest Michael Baugh, 27, said. However, public health officials said the water in the building was not going to make anyone sick. Still, the hotel relocated most of their guests, but 11 rooms remained occupied. Because WTF PEOPLE??? The people who stayed behind had to sign waivers and were provided with bottled water.
Lam, of Vancouver, British Columbia, traveled alone to Los Angeles on Jan. 26, and was last seen by a hotel worker on Jan. 31.
The above hotel surveillance footage from days before she was found show Lam pushing multiple elevator buttons and sticking her head out the doors, looking in both directions. Anyone else have the shivers?
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To up the creepiness even more, to get to the tanks, you have to get through a locked door and disable an emergency alarm. Plus, a ladder is needed to climb up the tank.
And, in the final bit of terror:
The Cecil Hotel was built in the 1920s and refurbished several years ago. The hotel is on Main Street in a part of downtown where efforts at gentrification often conflicts with homelessness and crime. It had once been the occasional home of infamous serial killers such as Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker, and Austrian prison author Jack Unterweger, who was convicted of murdering nine prostitutes in Europe and the U.S., the Los Angeles Times reported.
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Although, what hotel built in 1920 hasn't been home to a serial killer or two?
RIP Elisa Lam, and here's hoping the police figure it out. That, and from now on I'll be filtering my drinking water 15 times, setting it on fire, and then dousing it in hand sanitizer before I take the first sip.
