American Horror Story: The Cecil Hotel
By: Josh Dean
Tags: Conspiracy Theory, Big Stories Matter, Internet

Judging by her blog, her Tumblrs, and her Instagram, Elisa Lam was smart and funny, often sarcastic, and interested in many of the things that attract other intelligent, curious women her age — literature, architecture, photography, and especially fashion. Like so many of us, Elisa’s problems seemed to mostly lie within, and she wasn’t afraid to say as much online, for whoever happened to find her there. Her Tumblr, which she called Nouvelle/Nouveau, alternates between light and dark, between anger and optimism, between heavy quotes about loneliness and identity and things chosen (I assume) because she found them funny.

It is pointless to draw any assumptions about a person from the images she grabbed from other websites and collaged on a page, but it felt good to be laughing at things that Elisa selected precisely because they were funny.

This person, viewed through a very tiny virtual window that features only a few lines of her own writing, and no pictures of her own, was somehow more alive and three-dimensional than any version of Elisa Lam I’d found so far.

Until the fall of 2012, when she noted that she was “much more active on tumblr,” Elisa kept another blog which, though infrequently updated, seems like an honest and raw account of her feelings: Frustration, disappointment, confusion, and a fair amount of self-loathing. Elisa felt that she ate poorly and didn’t exercise enough. She considered herself lazy and was worried about what she’d do with her life. In other words, she felt the kinds of things we all feel at 21. But Elisa had bigger, realer issues, too.

Depression haunted her, and it seemed to flare up in 2012, causing her to miss classes again. In three years, Elisa writes, she completed only three courses and was officially still a first-year student. Meanwhile, her peers were moving on, and that reality cast her further adrift. She slept during the day and was up at night, online, reading about fashion and posting to social media, where there’s always someone to talk to.

Her penultimate post, written on April 4, 2012, is titled “Worries of a twenty something” and is particularly painful to read in retrospect.

I spent about two days in bed hating myself. Why don’t I simply do the things that I know will make me feel better? It isn’t rocket science. It isn’t that difficult. Get out of bed. Eat. See people. Talk to people. Exercise. Write. Read.

The post from there is no less self-excoriating, a public airing of the qualities Elisa most hates in herself that finishes with these lines: “The only thing that does make you different is that you’re a complete utter failure and have depression so la dee da that makes you special. Why aren’t so proud of that? Oh it’s special because people can pity you and you can manipulate them with their pity and use them to just weedle (sic) out more time. But you don’t do anything. God I hate you so much.”

That last line stopped me.

It was the point at which my exploration into Elisa’s online persona in search of her actual person ceased to feel like journalism and started to feel like voyeurism. Without access to any humans who’d known her, I was fishing around in collections of her thoughts, many of them dashed off in her most vulnerable moments. I felt a little sick.

That was when I noticed that the post had 48 comments. It seemed like a lot for a student’s blog. I clicked.

The first was left by a concerned reader, offering help, written 10 weeks after the post itself. But the next 47 were all written after her death, and the first one — posted March 1, 2013 at 2:52am—restored my belief that chasing Elisa’s Internet ghost was a worthy exercise, after all.

Here’s that post, in full: