The Hotel Cecil: Dark History and Elisa Lam Mystery

The Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles opened as a polished business-class property in 1924 and over the following century became known for a concentration of suicides, violent deaths, and two high-profile serial killer guests. Its 2013 association with the death of Canadian student Elisa Lam, whose body was found in a rooftop water tank, cemented its place in true-crime history. This article traces the building’s factual trajectory — from luxury hotel to affordable housing — by drawing on contemporary news archives, historical records, and the Cecil Hotel’s Wikipedia entry as a baseline reference.

Last checked: 2026-06-08

Location: Downtown Los Angeles, California · Current use: Affordable housing complex · Most famous incident: Death of Elisa Lam (2013) · Nightly rate (if available): From USD 39

Why did the Cecil Hotel shut down?

The Cecil Hotel never formally “shut down” in a single moment, but it ceased operating as a conventional hotel around 2017 after decades of financial decline and mounting crime association. The Great Depression of the 1930s hit the property hard, shifting its clientele from business travellers to longer-term low-income residents, a pattern that accelerated as the surrounding Skid Row neighbourhood became a concentration of homelessness and poverty, as documented by LAist.

By the 1950s and 1960s, the Cecil had earned the grim nickname “The Suicide” among residents, according to PBS SoCal — though the label reflected a small number of well-publicised incidents rather than a statistical anomaly for a large downtown SRO. In 2007, new owners rebranded part of the building as “Stay on Main,” a boutique hostel with a separate lobby, while other floors continued housing low-income tenants. The Ghost City Tours account notes that the property closed to regular guests around 2017 for extensive renovations, but the underlying economics — cheap nightly rates, a high-crime location, and a building that needed major capital investment — had been pushing toward a different use for years.

Financial decline and crime reputation

The Cecil’s original construction by hotelier William Banks Hanner cost about USD 1 million, featuring a marble lobby, stained-glass windows, and alabaster statuary, according to Discovery. That investment never fully returned. By the 1970s, the hotel was effectively a budget SRO trading on its Skid Row location, with nightly rates dropping as low as USD 39. The concentration of suicides and accidental falls in the 1930s through 1960s created a reputation that chased away mainstream travellers long before the Elisa Lam case or the Netflix documentary.

Conversion to affordable housing

On December 13, 2021, the building reopened as an affordable housing complex operated by the Skid Row Housing Trust, providing supportive housing for formerly unhoused residents. This conversion resolved both the building’s economic problem and Los Angeles’s desperate need for low-income units, though it also ended the Cecil’s life as a bookable hotel.
The bottom line: The Cecil stopped being a hotel because its location, building condition, and crime-adjacent reputation made it unviable as conventional lodging; converting it to supportive housing addressed a genuine urban social need.

What is the mystery of the Cecil Hotel?

The Cecil’s mystery is layered: it involves unexplained deaths, serial killer connections, and one deeply unsettling CCTV video that launched a thousand internet theories. The core of the modern mystery is the 2013 death of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian student whose behaviour on a security camera — pressing elevator buttons, stepping in and out, gesturing at something unseen — struck millions as inexplicable. Her body was found 19 days later inside a rooftop water tank, and the Travel Leaf reports that guests had complained about low water pressure and dark, foul-smelling tap water before the discovery.

The Elisa Lam case

The Los Angeles County Coroner ruled Lam’s death an accidental drowning, with bipolar disorder listed as a significant contributing factor. No evidence of sexual assault or physical trauma was found, per the Ghost City Tours summary of the coroner’s report. Yet the combination of the elevator footage, the water tank location, and the 19-day gap between her disappearance and discovery continues to generate alternative theories.

“The elevator footage is deeply strange. It shows Lam pressing multiple floor buttons, speaking in fragments, and waving her hands — behaviour consistent with a psychotic episode, but the public read it as something sinister.”

— Retrospective analysis, PBS SoCal

Connections to serial killers

Two known serial killers lodged at the Cecil during active crime sprees. Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” stayed in the mid-1980s while committing a series of home-invasion murders across Los Angeles, as reported by LAist and Wikipedia. Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer, stayed at the Cecil in 1991 and murdered at least three sex workers during his time in the city, according to Wikipedia. Both men used the hotel’s cheap rates