THE CECIL HOTEL
DISPELLING THE FICTIONS
I think by now that anyone with an interest in the Cecil Hotel has likely watched the documentary on Netflix. Contrary to the way that it was advertised to suck people into it, the documentary was not about the supernatural aspects of the hotel or, really, not even about true crime. Sure, it might be possible that someone preyed on Elisa Lam when she was in a compromised state, but most likely, her death was the result of mental illness. What is a crime is the way that mental illness remains a stigma in our country today and how Elisa would have survived her stay at the Cecil if not for the fact that no one realized what was happening with her.
What is also a crime is the way that conspiracy theorists and the so-called "internet sleuths" were allowed to dominate her story for so long. That's not to say that ordinary people can't have useful ideas or helpful leads for professionals in the law enforcement fields, but it's dangerous when conspiracies and poor, shoddy research is allowed to do the damage that was done in the Elisa Lam case. Ignoring facts and refusing to believe experts ran rampant in this case and literally prevented it from being solved for years. That was tragic – if not a crime.
But the armchair detectives were not the only ones to blame. We can also blame the "click-bait" websites and poorly researched television shows, and YouTube channels that hindered the solving of the case. By implying that Elisa Lam's story was somehow supernatural, or blaming police cover-ups and official corruption, and attacking people who coincidentally stayed at the Cecil and seemed an easy target, the Elisa Lam story became something it wasn't.
And that's what bugs me the most. As a chronicle of supernatural history, the Cecil Hotel has more than enough reason to be haunted – and based on the accounts, likely is.
But how many times have we seen this over the years? I've written about a lot of them, like the Myrtles Plantation. With help from a friend, David Wiseheart, I exposed the false story of "Chloe," the murderous slave, back in 2003. My story has been reprinted countless times but, thanks to bad research, it continues to appear over and over again in online forums and even on television shows. Another good example of this is the story of the Congelier Mansion in Pittsburgh (see MORBID CURIOUS NO. 1) – a house that never existed and a ghost story that was pure myth. And the list goes on.
And that brings us back to the Cecil Hotel. As I said there, are plenty of mysterious deaths and suicides that have occurred in the building to present a good case for it being haunted:
* January 1927: Percy Ormond Cook shot himself in his room at the Cecil.
* November 1931: W.K. Norton kills himself with poison.
* September 1932: Benjamin Dodich shoots himself in his room.
* July 1934, former Army Medical Sergeant Louis D. Borden cut his own throat with a straight razor.
* March 1937: Grace E. Magro jumped – or fell, her cause of death was never determined – from the ninth floor.
* January 1938: Marine fireman Roy Thompson took what police called a "suicide leap" from the 14th floor of the Cecil.
* May 1938: Navy officer Erwin C. Neblett checked into the hotel, took a large dose of poison, and then died soon after at an emergency hospital.
* January 1940: Schoolteacher Dorothy Sceiger was discovered in her room at the Cecil after swallowing poison. Still alive, she was rushed to the Georgia Street Receiving Hospital, but she succumbed to the poison a short time later.
* September 1944: Dorothy Purcell threw her baby boy to his death from an upper-floor window at the Cecil. Purcell claimed she believed that the baby was stillborn and threw him out of the window. The newborn's body landed on the roof of the building next door. Purcell was charged with murder and tried for the crime. In January 1945, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
* In 1947, Robert Smith jumped to his death from a window on the hotel's seventh floor.
* In 1954, Helen Gurnee also jumped from the seventh floor to her death.
*In 1962, Julia Moore jumped from an eighth-floor window to perish on the sidewalk below.
* October 1962, Pauline Otton plummeted to her death from the ninth floor of the Cecil, killing an elderly man strolling on the sidewalk below.
* Violence occurred again on June 4, 1964, when a hotel staff member found "Pigeon Goldie" Osgood dead in her room. Osgood, a retired telephone operator, was a resident at the hotel and was known locally for her daily trips to the park to feed the pigeons, hence the nickname. The hotel room had been ransacked. Investigators who were called to the scene determined that she had been raped, stabbed, and beaten to death. Her murder was never solved.
* In 1975, an unidentified woman jumped from the twelfth floor of the building. She registered as "Alison Lowell" when she checked into the hotel, and authorities were never able to discover her real identity.
* In 2015, an unidentified man was found dead in front of the building. His body was in horrible condition, so it was presumed that he fell to his death, though no official cause of death was determined.
And these are the deaths we know about. There are likely others, from suicide, overdoses, and natural deaths, that were never reported in the newspapers.
The Cecil was also the home for two different serial killers in the 1980s and 1990s. In the mid-1980s, Richard Ramirez, who became known as the "Night Stalker," preyed on Los Angeles women, breaking into their homes and brutally raping and killing them. He received 13 death sentences after being found guilty of his crimes.
In 1991, Austrian journalist Johann Unterweger became a long-term resident of the Cecil Hotel when he was assigned to write an article about prostitution in America. Unterweger had already been convicted of murder in Austria in 1974 but was released after 15 years in prison --- and after convincing the authorities that he was reformed.
Spoiler alert – he wasn't.
In L.A., he went back to his old habits and murdered three of the sex workers that he was writing about. He was arrested in 1992, convicted of murder, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 1994. On the night of his sentencing, Unterweger hanged himself in his cell.
And then, of course, there is the other bit of bad research that has seeped into the Cecil's history – as though it wasn't tragic enough.
There has been a lot of effort to link the Cecil Hotel to the Black Dahlia (see my book, FALLEN ANGEL). In January of 1947, Elizabeth Short's brutal murder became the first major crime to galvanize the city of Los Angeles after World War II. Her case became highly publicized due to the graphic nature of the crime, which included her corpse having been mutilated and bisected at the waist.
Beth spent her early life in Medford, Massachusetts, and Florida before relocating to California, where her father lived, seeking fame in the Hollywood film industry. She acquired the nickname of the "Black Dahlia" after her death, thanks to her nightly prowls through the bars of Hollywood while dressed all in black. After the discovery of her body, the Los Angeles Police Department began an extensive investigation that produced over 150 suspects but yielded no arrests. To this day, Beth's murder remains unsolved.
In 2015, when researching the Cecil Hotel for a television piece, a writer claimed that in 1947, Beth Short was rumored to have been seen drinking at the Cecil's bar just a few days before her murder.
It isn't true.
The researcher found this bit of information in a newspaper article from 1995 that claimed Beth was "seen in the bar in the Cecil Hotel with a girlfriend and two sailors." It also said that the hotel and bars on that same block were favorite hangouts for the Black Dahlia "during the week before she was killed."
A little research would have disproved this easily. According to the LAPD, the last place that Beth was ever seen alive was at the Biltmore Hotel on January 9. She was not seen again until her body was found in an empty lot on January 15. There are no records of Beth Short ever being at the Cecil.
And, in fact, she could not have been hanging out in bars along that block in the weeks before her murder either. We know that she was in San Diego during that time – not at the Cecil or anywhere else in L.A.
But since the Black Dahlia murder is an integral part of Los Angeles legend and lore, it made the story of the Cecil Hotel even better by including her in it – even though even basic historical research would have revealed it wasn't true.
I'll get down off my soapbox now, but I do hope that, if you bothered to read this, it will make you more cautious in the future about what you see on the internet or in your favorite conspiracy blog. I know that a lot of this stuff is exciting and entertaining, and we may ask, "what’s the harm in a good story, even if it’s not true?”
I think you could ask the family of Elisa Lam that question, and you wouldn’t care for the answer you’d get.
