LA’s skid row is a notorious hotbed of human
misery. hundreds of people with nowhere to go are forced to live on the streets, and
no part of this dismal place is more infamous than the Stay On Main Hotel. But it’s only
been called that since 2011. Once, it was known as the Cecil Hotel - They changed the
name to distance themselves from the establishment’s long history of murder, suicide, and mysterious
disappearances. Sadly for the managers and employees of this
cursed hotel, sometimes there’s just too much blood to ever be washed away. This is the insane but all-too-real story
of the Cecil Hotel, also known as “Hotel Death.” A tale so bloody and violent it’s
been the source of a Coen Brothers movie, a Stephen King novella, and an entire season
of American Horror Story. But the reality is even more gruesome than the fiction. From its earliest days, the hotel seemed like
a bad omen. The hotel was first opened between 1924 and 1927. Fifteen stories, seven hundred
rooms, and an opulent marble lobby. The three hoteliers that funded the venture - William
Banks Hanner, Charles L. Dix and Robert H. Schops - wanted the Cecil to be a classy place
for traveling businessmen and Hollywood tourists. But within five years of the hotel first opening,
America sank into the Great Depression, and the Cecil's dreams of class and refinement
sank with it. The place practically became a seedy boarding house for the poor, the desperate,
and criminals overnight, as the homeless population boomed to 10,000 people within a five mile
radius. Nobody respectable would even dream of staying there - it was the last refuge
of people running from something. The Cecil Hotel had already become a grim,
sleazy place to hang your hat. And then the deaths started. In 1927, while staying at the Cecil Hotel,
Percy Ormond Cook was having marital troubles. He and his wife were teetering on the edge
of divorce, and Cook’s wife was adamant that she’d take the couple’s child with
them. When Cool felt that the relationship couldn’t be salvaged, he checked into the
hotel, and checked out with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. The hotel’s first suicide,
but sadly, far from the last. In 1931, Manhattan Beach resident W. K. Norton
checked into the Cecil Hotel under the fake name “James Wily” for unknown reasons.
Several weeks later, he was found dead in his hotel room, having ingested capsules of
poison. To this day, we don’t know if his death was murder or suicide. The year after that, Benjamin Dodich was also
found dead in his room. Like Percy Cook, he’d committed suicide by shooting himself in the
head. Dodich never left a note, so the reason for him taking his own life at the Cecil is
lost to history. Three deaths in five years is already bad, but the deaths were about
to become more violent. In 1934, former Army Medical Corps Sgt. Louis
D. Borden checked into the Cecil Hotel. The Sergeant, who was 53 at the time, was experiencing
declining health and wanted to go out on his own terms. The Cecil was simply where he chose
to take a straight razor and slash his own throat, bleeding to death in his room shortly
after. In 1937, Grace E. Magro checked into the Cecil
Hotel, and was given a room on the ninth floor. She would later fall to her death from the
window of that room - landing on some telephone wires on her way down, and succumbing to her
injuries at a hospital hours later. In 1938, US Marine Corps fireman Roy Thompson
went the same way. He jumped to his death from the window of his room, his corpse crashing
down onto the skylight of a neighboring building and terrifying everyone underneath. In 1939
and 1940, two different people - Navy Officer Erwin C. Neblett and School Teacher Dorothy
Seger - would die from ingesting poison while inside the hotel. Things took a particularly grisly turn in
September of 1944, when Dorothy Jean Purcell and her boyfriend, Ben Levine, checked into
the hotel. What Dorothy Purcell didn’t know was that she was pregnant, and when she went
into labor during the night, she didn’t want to wake Ben up. Instead, she snuck into
the bathroom and quietly gave birth there. When her baby was born, Dorothy assumed the
infant was dead for reasons unknown - perhaps just sheer confusion and panic. But the infant
was definitely dead when Dorothy, in an almost trancelike state, threw it from the window. She was arrested, but declared not guilty
by reason of insanity. The Cecil Hotel has a funny way of messing with your head. Over the next fifteen years, the Death Hotel
experienced an astonishing five different deaths from people falling from its windows,
and many of them were clearly no accident. In November of 1947, Robert Smith died after
jumping from a seventh story window at the hotel. In 1954, San Francisco stationery firm
employee Helen Gurnee checked into the hotel under the false name “Margaret Brown.”
A few weeks later, she fell to her death from the seventh floor, landing on the hotel’s
marquee. Eight years later in 1962, Julia Frances Moore
jumped to her death from the eighth story, landing fatally on the second story interior
light well of the hotel. There was never any suicide note, and the only possessions on
her were a bus ticket from St. Louis, 59 cents in pocket change, and the details of a bank
account containing $1,800. However, Julia’s death would soon be overshadowed with one
of the strangest deaths ever logged at the hotel, occurring that same year. This death started as many others at the Hotel
did: With a desperate individual at the end of their tether. Pauline Otton and her estranged husband, Dewey,
were having an explosive argument in their hotel room on the ninth floor of the Cecil
Hotel. Dewey stormed out when the argument was over, leaving the 27-year-old Pauline
alone and in despair. In that moment, she decided to end it all, and jumped from the
window of her room. Tragic, but all too common for the Death Hotel. What was decidedly uncommon was the bad luck
of one George Gianinni, a 55-year-old local who happened to be walking below when Pauline
decided to end her life. George was struck with Pauline’s falling body at incredible
velocity, killing both of them instantly. It was such a brutal incident that police
first assumed that George had jumped too, but the fact his hands were in his pockets
and his shoes were still on his feet proved that he was just walking in the wrong place
at the wrong time. Suicide and accidental deaths are one thing,
but murder is another horrifying ballpark altogether. In 1964, a local woman named Goldie
Osgood - nicknamed “Pigeon Goldie” - checked into the Cecil Hotel. Goldie was a retired
telephone operator, and was well-liked in the local community. Her nickname, Pigeon
Goldie, was given to her because she adored feeding the local birds. But even the good don’t last long in the
darkness of the Death Hotel. A worker found Goldie dead in her room - she’d been beaten,
stabbed, and raped. A bag of birdseed and her favorite LA Dodgers cap were both laying
near her corpse. Shortly after Goldie’s body was found, a
man named Jacques B. Ehlinger was walking through Pershing Square, the place where Goldie
loved to feed the pigeons. He seemed dazed, and had blood on his clothes. He was arrested
and brought in on suspicion of killing Goldie, but he was later cleared of all charges. The
murder of Goldie Osgood remains unsolved to this day. Next came another two falling deaths with
one freaky commonality: Neither victim has ever been identified. In 1975, a woman checked
into the hotel under the name Alison Lowell. She was given room 327 on the twelfth floor,
and jumped to her death from its window. It was later found out that Alison Lowell was
an alias, and the true identity of the dead woman was never found. In 1992, an unidentified
African-American man was found dead on the sidewalk. Based on the gruesome state of his
corpse, police speculated that he either fell, jumped, or was pushed from the fifteenth floor
of the Cecil Hotel. To this day, he has never been identified. A number of darkly eventful things happened
between those last two deaths. It’s important to note that while the Cecil Hotel is a place
of great suffering, not everyone who it draws in is a tormented, innocent victim. In fact,
two of the Hotel’s most high profile guests are quite the opposite. During the 1980s, a man named Richard Ramirez
was said to have rented a room at the hotel for a number of weeks. Ramirez is better known
to many as The Nightstalker, a brutal rapist and serial killer who terrorized Los Angeles. Ramirez would break into people’s homes
and commit unspeakable atrocities against them when they thought they were safe. And
in case he wasn’t creepy enough already, he was a literal Satan worshipper. Ramirez
frequented LA’s skid row while cruising for victims, so the Cecil Hotel was a natural
place for Ramirez to want to stay. Some even speculate he committed part of his killing
spree while staying at the Cecil. In 1991, the Cecil Hotel became a stopgap
for another monstrous individual: Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger. Jack was a
particularly intelligent and insidious killer - he murdered a woman, was sent to prison,
and managed to leave jail and find success as a journalist and author as well as a supposedly
“reformed” criminal. In fact, Jack was still a psychopathic murderer, generally strangling
women to death with their own underwear. During Jack’s brief stay at the Cecil Hotel,
it’s possible he murdered as many as three women, perhaps even trying to emulate Ramirez’s
earlier crimes. All this just further added to the Cecil Hotel’s local infamy as Hotel
Death. But in 2013, there was one incident that changed
everything. An incident that turned the Cecil Hotel from a local shame to a horrifying worldwide
sensation, inspiring countless discussions, videos, podcasts, and documentaries since.
A sinister video was posted onto the internet... The video depicted a 21-year-old Canadian
tourist named Elisa Lam in an elevator at the Cecil Hotel. It’s a strange and frightening
watch. She appears to be afraid, paranoid, acting strangely. She presses the elevator
buttons in seemingly random orders. She looks out of the elevator doors, afraid, as though
something was chasing her. It was like something out of a horror movie. And the reason the footage went so viral is
that Elisa Lam had gone missing shortly after it was taken. The internet speculation machine exploded,
as the sordid history of the hotel went global. Was Elisa being chased by killers? Ghosts?
Demons? The evil forces of the Cecil Hotel itself? Some questions were answered when, a short
while later, people at the hotel complained about low water pressure and funny-tasting
tap water. When maintenance workers checked the water tank on the hotel’s roof, they
found Elisa’s decomposing, naked body inside. People had been drinking and bathing in this
contaminated water for days without even knowing it. Theories on Lam’s death ranged from murder
to the supernatural, but the most likely reason is arguably more tragic. Lam suffered from
bipolar disorder, and was under a huge amount of stress after deciding to drop out of college
and travel. It’s likely that Lam experienced a manic episode - explaining her strange behavior
in the elevator - which led to her climbing to the roof, accidentally falling into the
water tank, and drowning. The latest death to occur at the Cecil Hotel
happened in 2015, but if the pattern holds true, it won’t be the last. The body of
an unidentified 28-year-old man was found on the sidewalk outside the building. It’s
suspected by many that he fell to his death, but the LA County Coroner has yet to make
an official declaration on this matter. This brings the dark tale of the Cecil Hotel
to an end...for now. Is it an evil place, or just a place where evil things seem to
happen at unusually high rates? We’ll never know for sure. All we do know is that something
isn’t right about the Cecil Hotel. And those who check in often have very strange ways
of checking out... Now check out “Body Found In Hotel Water
Tank Used for Washing Hair and Brushing Teeth” and “Morgue Employees Reveal Things That
Would Scare Anyone” for more REAL tales of horror!
