Cecil Hotel, the cursed hotel

The Cecil Hotel inspired the fifth season of the TV series “American Horror Story“, but it is famous above all for having been the scene of murders, suicides, violence and various suspicious activities over the years.

The history of the Cecil Hotel

The Cecil Hotel seems to have been born with a dark aura. It opened in Los Angeles on 20 December 1924 as a luxury hotel with 700 rooms, but things soon changed. A few years later the Great Depression hit America, and the area where the hotel had been built became a rough neighbourhood. The Cecil itself became a haunt of homeless people, prostitutes, drug addicts and criminals, and over time the scene of crime and violence. By 1930, just a few years after it opened, there had already been 4 suicides there.

Violence, death and mysteries

Over the years, though, it was the scene of far more violent events, some of which went down in history. It was in the bar of the Cecil Hotel that Elizabeth Short, known as the “Black Dahlia“, was seen a few days before her brutal murder in January 1947. And it was at the Cecil Hotel that serial killer Richard Ramirez stayed in 1985, while Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger stayed there in 1991, a year before his arrest.

In 1944, 19-year-old Dorothy Jean Purcell was staying at the Cecil Hotel when one night she began having severe abdominal pains. She went to the bathroom where, to her great surprise, she gave birth to a son. She had not known she was pregnant and, thinking the baby was dead, threw him out of the window. She was not convicted because she was found to be insane, but she was committed to a psychiatric hospital.

In 1962 George Giannini was walking quietly along the pavement right in front of the Cecil Hotel. At that very moment Pauline Otton, 27, fell from a window of the hotel, where she was staying. The fall killed them both.

More recently, the hotel was the scene of the disappearance and mysterious death of Elisa Lam in 2013. The last images of the young woman alive were recorded by the cameras in one of the hotel’s lifts. They show her behaving in strange and unsettling ways. After she left the lift, all trace of her was lost. Her body was found 19 days later in one of the water tanks on the hotel roof. It was discovered after some guests complained about the strange taste of the water. The Los Angeles coroner ruled it an accidental drowning: Elisa had bipolar disorder and, according to police, that night she hid in the tank during a paranoid episode, believing she was in danger, and could no longer get out.

The ghost of the Cecil Hotel

In 2014 the latest (for now) unsettling event took place at the dark hotel. A young man took a photo of the hotel and later discovered that an ethereal figure could be seen leaning out of one of the fourth-floor windows. You can see the image in the video below. Could it be the spirit of one of the many people who have died at the hotel over the years?

The Cecil Hotel today

In 2011 part of the hotel was renamed “Stay On Main” in an attempt to leave its bad reputation behind. Renovations that began in 2017 were halted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and on 13 December 2021 the Cecil reopened, but no longer as a hotel: today it is an affordable housing complex.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Cecil Hotel (Los Angeles)