page_title: Death of Elisa Lam
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Death of Elisa Lam / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Cecil Hotel, 640 S. Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90014.
context_page_description: The body of Elisa Lam, also known by her Cantonese name, Lam Ho Yi, a Canadian student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was recovered from a water tank atop the Cecil Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles on February 19, 2013. She had been reported missing at the beginning of the month. Maintenance workers at the hotel discovered the body when investigating guest complaints of problems with the water supply.
  Her disappearance had been widely reported; interest had increased five days prior to her body's discovery when the Los Angeles Police Department released a video of the last time she was known to have been seen, on the day of her disappearance, by an elevator security camera. In the footage, Lam is seen exiting and re-entering the elevator, talking and gesturing in the hallway outside, and sometimes seeming to hide within the elevator, which itself appears to be malfunctioning. The video went viral on the Internet, with many viewers reporting that they found it unsettling. Explanations ranged from claims of paranormal involvement to bipolar disorder, from which Lam suffered; it has also been argued that the video was altered prior to release.
context_section_description: Lam, the daughter of emigrants from Hong Kong who opened a restaurant in Burnaby, just outside Vancouver, Canada, was a student at the University of British Columbia although she was not registered at the beginning of 2013.
  For her trip to California, Lam traveled alone on Amtrak and intercity buses. She visited the San Diego Zoo and posted photos taken there on social media. On January 26, she arrived in Los Angeles. After two days, she checked into the Cecil Hotel, near downtown's Skid Row. Lam was initially assigned a shared room on the hotel's fifth floor; however, her roommates complained about what the hotel's lawyer would later describe as "certain odd behavior," and she was moved to a room of her own after two days.
  Built as a business hotel in the 1920s, the Cecil fell on hard times during the Great Depression of the 1930s and never recaptured its original market as downtown decayed around it in the late 20th century. Several of Los Angeles's more notable murders have happened at or have connections to the hotel: in 1964, Goldie Osgood, the "Pigeon Lady of Pershing Square," was raped and murdered in her room at the Cecil, a crime that has never been solved. Serial killers Jack Unterweger and Richard Ramirez both resided at the Cecil while active. There have also been suicides, one of which also killed a pedestrian in the front of the hotel. After recent renovations, it has tried to market itself as a boutique hotel, but the reputation lingers. "The Cecil will reveal to you whatever it is you're a fugitive from," says Steve Erickson, a journalist who spent a night in the hotel after Lam's death.
  Lam had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression. She had been prescribed four medications—Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Seroquel and Effexor—to treat her disorders. According to her family, who supposedly kept her history of mental illness a secret, Lam had no history of suicidal ideations or attempts, although one report claimed she had previously gone missing for a brief period.
  In mid-2010, Lam began a blog named Ether Fields on Blogspot. Over the next two years, she posted pictures of models in fashionable clothing and accounts of her life, particularly her struggle with mental illness. In a January 2012 blog post, Lam lamented that a "relapse" at the start of the current school term had forced her to drop several classes, leaving her feeling "so utterly directionless and lost." She titled her post, "You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life" after a quotation from novelist Chuck Palahniuk. She used that quote as an epigraph for her blog. Lam worried that her transcript would look suspicious with so many withdrawals and that it would result in her being unable to continue her studies and attend graduate school. 
  A little over two years after Lam had started blogging, she announced she would be abandoning her blog for another she had started on Tumblr, "Nouvelle-Nouveau". Its content mostly consisted of found fashion photos and quotes and a few posts in Lam's own words. The same Palahniuk quote was used as an epigraph.
caption: The Cecil, where Lam spent her last week
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