Speaker 1: You're listening to the third and final part of Unexplained,
Speaker 1: Season seven, episode fourteen, If These Walls Could Scream. Twenty
Speaker 1: one year old at Lisa Lamb, visiting La from Vancouver,
Speaker 1: who was last seen at the Stay on Maine hostel,
Speaker 1: has been missing for almost three weeks. On the morning
Speaker 1: of February nineteenth, Sabrina Barr, a guest at the Cecil
Speaker 1: Hotel along with her husband Michael, where the Stay on
Speaker 1: Maine was located, got up from bed and went to
Speaker 1: take a shower. But when she turned the dial to
Speaker 1: release the water, only a few dribbles came out of
Speaker 1: the shower head. Turning it on full did nothing to help. Annoyed,
Speaker 1: she tried the taps at the sink again. There seemed
Speaker 1: to be something wrong with the pressure. She decided at
Speaker 1: least to try and brush her teeth after applying some toothpaste.
Speaker 1: She held her toothbrush under the water for a moment
Speaker 1: and then brought it up to her mouth. It was
Speaker 1: then that she noticed that water color seemed a little
Speaker 1: bit off. She put the brush in her mouth and
Speaker 1: spat the toothpaste out immediately. The water was putrid. By
Speaker 1: the time Sabrina called reception to complain they'd already had
Speaker 1: three similar calls that morning. Around the same time, maintenance
Speaker 1: worker Santiago Lopez was already on the case. Over in
Speaker 1: the bathroom of room seven twenty, he turned the taps
Speaker 1: at the sink and watched with revulsion as dark, discolored
Speaker 1: water trickled into the white ceramic basin below. Santiago packed
Speaker 1: up his tools and took the elevator to the fifteenth floor.
Speaker 1: From there, he made his way to the roof access door,
Speaker 1: and after disabling the fire alarm, he pushed open the
Speaker 1: door and stepped out into the cool morning air of
Speaker 1: the roof. Beyond, with the sounds of the morning traffic
Speaker 1: rising up from the streets below, Santiago climbed up the
Speaker 1: steps leading to the cistern platform containing the hotels four
Speaker 1: large water tanks. He squeezed through to the main tank
Speaker 1: at the back. There was a small wooden ladder tucked
Speaker 1: in behind it. He grabbed it and leaned it against
Speaker 1: the tank, then started to climb. All four cisterns were
Speaker 1: completely covered over by heavy metal lids, each with an
Speaker 1: access hatch cut into it one and a half foot
Speaker 1: square in size. Ordinarily, these hatches were left shut, but
Speaker 1: as Santiago near the top of the ladder, he was
Speaker 1: surprised to find that this one was open and there
Speaker 1: was something floating inside the tank. Santiago pulled himself over
Speaker 1: the hatch to get a closer look and recoiled in horror.
Speaker 1: It had just gone one in the afternoon when Detective
Speaker 1: Wallace to Nelly received a call from Lieutenant Cheryl mcquillie
Speaker 1: to let him know that a body had been found
Speaker 1: on the roof of the Cecil Hotel, the same roof
Speaker 1: his team had searched just over ten days previously. He
Speaker 1: arrived an hour and a half later, stepping out onto
Speaker 1: the roof under a light drizzle, to Nelly made his
Speaker 1: way up to the platform and to the top of
Speaker 1: the main water tank. Moments later, he was staring down
Speaker 1: through the hatch at the naked, floating body of a
Speaker 1: young female of Chinese descent. Her long jet black hair
Speaker 1: stretched out behind her head and waved gently in the
Speaker 1: dark waters. A marbling of liver mortars covered the abdomen,
Speaker 1: and much of the body had turned a pale green
Speaker 1: in color despite significant decomposition and skin slippage. To Nelly
Speaker 1: recognized the woman's face immediately as Elisa Lambs. For the
Speaker 1: next two hours, news helicopters circled overhead as La Fire
Speaker 1: Department nine worked to extricate the body from the cistern,
Speaker 1: Unable to lift it out of the small access hatch. Instead,
Speaker 1: the fire crew drained the tank before cutting a large
Speaker 1: hole out of the side of it. The body was
Speaker 1: finally pulled free shortly year before four o'clock in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: with a light rain continuing to fall. The body was
Speaker 1: carefully laid out under a forensic tent and inspected momentarily
Speaker 1: by detectives to Nelly and Sterns before it was placed
Speaker 1: in a black bag and taken to the Department of Coroner.
Speaker 1: Once the body was removed inside the tank, the fire
Speaker 1: crew discovered a Lisa's room key and her watch, as
Speaker 1: well as a pair of black shorts, a green shirt underwear,
Speaker 1: a red American Apparel hoodie, and a pair of black
Speaker 1: polka dot sandals. They were the exact same clothes that
Speaker 1: the woman was wearing in the unsettling lift footage from
Speaker 1: January thirty first, confirming that it was Alisa they had
Speaker 1: seen behaving strangely. Elisa's devastated family were informed of the
Speaker 1: discovery only moment before images of their daughter's body being
Speaker 1: taken from the water tank played out live and nationwide
Speaker 1: on the news. For Danelli and Sterns, although never wanting
Speaker 1: to presume anything, given the circumstances, it seemed likely that
Speaker 1: Elisa had been murdered and placed inside the water tank.
Speaker 1: An assessment of the scene was quickly initiated. Danelli ordered
Speaker 1: a dusting of the area for prints and anything that
Speaker 1: might contain DNA. Naturally, attention then turned to trying to
Speaker 1: imagine how Alisa got on to the roof in the
Speaker 1: first place, whether by her own accord or at the
Speaker 1: hands of someone else. If indeed, Elisa had been murdered
Speaker 1: and inc flactated before her body was placed in the tank,
Speaker 1: it was unlikely that she'd been carried up via one
Speaker 1: of the three fire escapes. All required scaling a final
Speaker 1: vertical ladder up the side of the building before squeezing
Speaker 1: through a small square hole at the top of it
Speaker 1: to reach the roof. Such a feat would require an
Speaker 1: inordinate amount of strength. The only other realistic possibility was
Speaker 1: that she was carried through the roof access door, but
Speaker 1: as chief Hotel engineer Pedro Tovar again insisted the door
Speaker 1: was locked and alarmed at all times, although of course
Speaker 1: there was no reason to rule out the possibility that
Speaker 1: any potential perpetrator could be a member of staff with
Speaker 1: keys to the roof. Alternatively, if she was murdered, Elisa
Speaker 1: may have made her own way to the roof, either
Speaker 1: willingly or under juress. It was possible, too that she'd
Speaker 1: made her way up alone, only to later be attacked unexpectedly.
Speaker 1: Such immediate theorizing was hard to resist, but for the
Speaker 1: diligent and methodical to Nelli, who was more than aware
Speaker 1: of any number of possibilities, such hypotheticals were pointless. All
Speaker 1: that mattered were the facts, and right then they had
Speaker 1: very little to go on. He also knew only too
Speaker 1: well that with Elisa's body likely to have been lying
Speaker 1: in the tank for over two weeks, and with no
Speaker 1: CCTV footage covering the roof, any vital evidence to the
Speaker 1: crime would have long since been washed or blown away.
Speaker 1: In the early afternoon, Elisa's body was delivered to the
Speaker 1: Herzburg Davis Forensic Science Center. The building perched just above
Speaker 1: Route ten on the eastern fringes of Los Angeles stands
Speaker 1: out monolithic and pristine amid a backdrop of soft rolling
Speaker 1: hills topped with desert shrubs and colorful suburban villas. Few
Speaker 1: motorists who passed the centre daily on their regular commutes
Speaker 1: would recognize the Squat five story building as one of
Speaker 1: the leading forensic science centers in the world. That afternoon,
Speaker 1: in one of its newly constructed labs, Elisa's body was
Speaker 1: carefully laid out on a service table by medical examiner
Speaker 1: Dr Ulay Wang around five thirty. Senior criminologist Mark Schuckart
Speaker 1: diligently took snippets of fingernail hair and pubic hair from
Speaker 1: the body, as well as a number of swabs, before
Speaker 1: bagging it all up along with Elisa's clothes for further analysis.
Speaker 1: They hoped the tests would help to determine whether Elisa
Speaker 1: had suffered any kind of physical or sexual assault before
Speaker 1: her death. Two days after Elisa's body was taken to
Speaker 1: the Morgue, doctor Wang conducted the autopsy in anticipation of
Speaker 1: finally discovering a cause of death, as detectives to Nelly
Speaker 1: and Sterns looked on incredibly. After three hours of procedure.
Speaker 1: The examiners drew a blank. There was no evidence of
Speaker 1: trauma whatsoever. No bones were broken, and there were no
Speaker 1: abrasions or bruises in evidence on the skin, and nothing
Speaker 1: was found to be obstructing the body's airways. Inside the stomach,
Speaker 1: they discovered the remains of tablets and capsules, suggesting that
Speaker 1: Elisa had been taking at least some of her medication
Speaker 1: shortly before her death. One startling discovery came when doctor
Speaker 1: Wang investigated the chest and abdominal cavity. Elisa's lungs were
Speaker 1: filled with water, suggesting she had been alive when she
Speaker 1: entered the water tank, but with no clear cause of death,
Speaker 1: doctor Wang had no choice but to mark it down
Speaker 1: as undetermined, prostrated by the findings of the autopsy to
Speaker 1: Nelly and Stearns, not to mention, Elisa's devastated family, who
Speaker 1: traveled down to retrieve their daughter's body, were left waiting
Speaker 1: on the toxicology report. Elsewhere, both maintenance worker Santiago Lopez
Speaker 1: and chief engineer Pedrotova were spoken to by the detectives,
Speaker 1: but promptly discredited as suspects, with no DNA or fingerprint
Speaker 1: evidence to suggest the involvement of unknown persons. The detectives
Speaker 1: were stumped as to how a Lisa Caud possibly have
Speaker 1: got inside the tank. When the toxicology results finally came back,
Speaker 1: they revealed no evidence of intoxication save for the smallest
Speaker 1: trace of alcohol, along with traces of two of the
Speaker 1: drugs that Elisa had been prescribed to help with her depression,
Speaker 1: ven la faccine, which commonly helps to ward off suicidal thoughts,
Speaker 1: and lamotro gene, used to prevent the onset of mania
Speaker 1: in patients who suffer from depression. Having analyzed the results
Speaker 1: of criminologist Mark chuckat swabs and clippings, it was determined
Speaker 1: that Elisa had not been the victim of a sexual assault.
Speaker 1: After another month of investigations, the LAPD detectives were left
Speaker 1: with only one explanation that Elisa, who the police knew
Speaker 1: had a history of mental health complications, had somehow climbed
Speaker 1: into the tank herself. On June nineteenth, twenty thirteen, Dr Wang,
Speaker 1: in agreement with detectives to Nelly and Stearns and the
Speaker 1: Los Angeles Coroner, broughed Elisa's death to be caused by
Speaker 1: accidental drowning, with her bipolar disorder, considered a significant contributing
Speaker 1: factor in a peculiar coincidence to the case. A few
Speaker 1: days after Elisa's body was discovered, Los Angeles County health
Speaker 1: officials were alerted to a serious outbreak of tuberculosis among
Speaker 1: the homeless population of skid Row, just minutes from the
Speaker 1: Cecil Hotel. Health workers eventually called on federal assistance from
Speaker 1: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order to
Speaker 1: stem the outbreak. The causative agent of TB is a
Speaker 1: bacteria known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, with its most common strain
Speaker 1: found in America being the type four Latin American Mediterranean strand,
Speaker 1: or LAMB for short. One popular and frequently used technique
Speaker 1: to detect the presence of antigens in the body a
Speaker 1: substance that causes the immune system to produce antibodies is
Speaker 1: known as an enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, better known by
Speaker 1: its acronym ELISA. The test kit specific to the type
Speaker 1: four strain of TB found in downtown LA around the
Speaker 1: same time of Elisa Lamb's death is known as the
Speaker 1: LAMB Elisa. Inevitably, due to the mysterious nature of Elisa
Speaker 1: Lamb's death. It has been poured over endlessly by internets
Speaker 1: Sluth's keen to offer all manner of theories as to
Speaker 1: how she died. Such attention was due in no small
Speaker 1: part to the questionable decision to release the peculiar footage
Speaker 1: taken from inside the Cecil building's elevator. Within hours, the
Speaker 1: clip was a creepy online sensation, going viral across the globe.
Speaker 1: In China alone. After being shared on the video hosting
Speaker 1: site Yuku, it was watched three million times, racking up
Speaker 1: forty thousand comments in just a week. Never before had
Speaker 1: an ongoing investigation sparked the public imagination in quite this way,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't long before the hotels troubled past became
Speaker 1: part of the conversation. Soon reports emerged of strange activity
Speaker 1: said to have been occurring there for years. One woman
Speaker 1: claimed that her father, who lived at the hotel in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, had often woken in the night with
Speaker 1: the sensation of being choked. Former staff claimed guests in
Speaker 1: the room in which retired telephone operator and full time
Speaker 1: resident of the Cecil, Goldie Osgood, was raped and murdered
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty four often complained of similar experiences. One
Speaker 1: couple had apparently checked into a room on the eleventh floor,
Speaker 1: only to find it in a state of complete disarray,
Speaker 1: with a woman in a white dress already staying in it.
Speaker 1: After complaining to the front desk, they were led back
Speaker 1: to the room, only to find it in perfect order,
Speaker 1: ready for their arrival, and the woman nowhere to be seen.
Speaker 1: In twenty fourteen, a young resident of Riverside County apparently
Speaker 1: photographed a ghostly apparition that appeared outside a window on
Speaker 1: the fourth floor. Numerous floggers and paranormal investigators have visited
Speaker 1: the Cecil Building in recent years, hoping to capture evidence
Speaker 1: of its apparent inner darkness. Some have pointed out that
Speaker 1: the fourteenth four where Elisa stepped into the elevator and
Speaker 1: was seen apparently conversing with someone, was the floor on
Speaker 1: which notorious serial killer Richard Ramirez once stayed, the inference
Speaker 1: being that maybe something of Ramirez still haunted the hotel's
Speaker 1: many narrow corridors and had somehow contributed to the young
Speaker 1: woman's death. Presumably, those making such claims were unaware that
Speaker 1: Ramirez was in fact very much still alive when Elisa
Speaker 1: Lamb died. Ramirez would die five months later after spending
Speaker 1: twenty eight years in prison. Whether or not a full
Speaker 1: account of the investigation into the Lamb case will ever
Speaker 1: be made public, it will remain intricately linked to the
Speaker 1: building in which it occurred. What I find interesting, however,
Speaker 1: in the absence of this explanation, is how easily we
Speaker 1: seem drawn not to those present in the hotel at
Speaker 1: the time, but to those who are no longer there.
Speaker 1: We seem unable to shake the sense that somehow, something
Speaker 1: of all that had happened previously within its walls was
Speaker 1: ultimately responsible for the horrifying event. Similarly, what spooked and
Speaker 1: inspired Stephen King so much during that terrifying night at
Speaker 1: the Stanley Hotel had nothing to do with what was
Speaker 1: present during his stay. It was because he and his
Speaker 1: wife Tabby were the only guests there. With the place
Speaker 1: due to close for the winter, the building was almost
Speaker 1: completely deserted. As King wandered the empty corridors and lifeless
Speaker 1: dining rooms, ringing with the silence of people's past, something
Speaker 1: in the emptiness bled into his mind. In classical mythology,
Speaker 1: everything from rivers and valleys to the forests and mountains
Speaker 1: were considered the domain of unseen and unnamed spirits that
Speaker 1: would have to be placated with shrines and offerings in
Speaker 1: order to bring good fortune. The ancient Romans termed these
Speaker 1: spirits genii loci or spirits of place. Today, the term
Speaker 1: unmoored from its theistic connotations, has come to signify something
Speaker 1: a little more abstract. Writer John Repian describes it as
Speaker 1: the echoes of people, of events, of ideas which have
Speaker 1: become imprinted upon a location for better or worse, the
Speaker 1: disquieting atmosphere of a former battlefield, the comfort and familiarity
Speaker 1: of a childhood home. And, in my personal opinion, nowhere
Speaker 1: are these so called spirits more noticeable than in ruined
Speaker 1: and abandoned urban archaeology. Nicholas Geyahlter's hypnotic twenty sixteen documentary
Speaker 1: Homer Sapiens. The filmmaker presents us with a series of long,
Speaker 1: locked off shots of nothing but abandoned buildings and empty,
Speaker 1: human scarred landscapes, accompanied only by atmospheric sounds. Flies buzz
Speaker 1: round a long, disconnected vending machine standing solitary in a
Speaker 1: wilderness of ferns. The interior of a crumbling, snow covered theater,
Speaker 1: ice melting from the rafters and dripping steadily into muddy
Speaker 1: puddles below. A deserted hospital ward with beds placed at
Speaker 1: odd angles, and the wind entering through an open window,
Speaker 1: blowing sheets of plastic about the floor. It is utterly captivating.
Speaker 1: Ruins of antiquity are not without their charm, but there
Speaker 1: is something especially evocative about this more recently abandoned detritus
Speaker 1: of human existence, mesmerizing in its sense of being both
Speaker 1: familiar and modern, yet distant and strange. I've always been
Speaker 1: fascinated by such places at first. There is something profoundly
Speaker 1: unsettling about old and decaying structures, and how the unhuman
Speaker 1: elements of the natural world claim them with such utter disinterest.
Speaker 1: What unsettles is their temporality. To paraphrase social and cultural
Speaker 1: geographer Tim Adenza, who's written extensively on the evocative power
Speaker 1: of ruins, writing in his book Industrial Ruins Spaces, Aesthetics
Speaker 1: and Materiality in two thousand and five, they present as
Speaker 1: manifestations of passing time, holding us between life and death,
Speaker 1: confronting us with the inevitability of our own obsolescence. Despite
Speaker 1: their modern familiarity. There is the distinct impression that you're
Speaker 1: in fact looking at an ancient artifact from a once
Speaker 1: great but lost alien civilization, only to realize with Osymandian
Speaker 1: horror that that civilization is ours. To observe these places
Speaker 1: is to be left with the uncanny sense of being
Speaker 1: haunted by our future mortality through echoes of the past.
Speaker 1: Tim Adenzer points out that the eighteenth century fashion for
Speaker 1: depicting ruins in art and the construction of follies, grand
Speaker 1: ornamental buildings with no purpose other than to stir the
Speaker 1: spirit was, as he says, allied to a sense of melancholia,
Speaker 1: which saw ruins as symbolic of the inevitability of life passing.
Speaker 1: These ventures were also heavily emblematic of the sublime in
Speaker 1: their attempts to conjure a sense of quote magical forces
Speaker 1: that remain unseen. But for Tim Adensa and myself, however,
Speaker 1: it is something a little closer that grips. While conducting
Speaker 1: research for The Unexplained Book, I visited some of the
Speaker 1: most entrancing abandoned places I've ever seen in the British Isles.
Speaker 1: From the eerily deserted air base at arif Rendelsham and
Speaker 1: the magnificent desolation of Alford Ness to the interstitial scrublands
Speaker 1: of Middlesbrough's industrial past. In Middlesbrough, I walked along the
Speaker 1: train line from the site of German Heinrich Richter's Second
Speaker 1: World War plane crash, who, along with Carl Eden, who
Speaker 1: some believe might have been Richter reincarnated, was the subject
Speaker 1: at the first chapter of the Unexplained Book. From there
Speaker 1: I moved past the towering structures of the vacant Dorman
Speaker 1: Long Steel Works that have since been demolished, to the
Speaker 1: Grange Town signal box where Carl Eden was so tragically murdered.
Speaker 1: In each these places, I was spellbound by the magnetic
Speaker 1: presence of absence. Like every deserted office, disused theatre, or
Speaker 1: empty hotel lobby or these places tell a story they
Speaker 1: confront us with. As Tim Edinzer again wrote in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: weird vistages of the past, unfathomable artifacts, cryptic signs and
Speaker 1: unfamiliar textures that we can't help but try and piece together.
Speaker 1: And once we see beyond the obsolescence of a disused space,
Speaker 1: something else begins to emerge. Ghosts. This is true for
Speaker 1: any sight of past human activity, but the ones that
Speaker 1: are constructed by humans are especially evocative because they're composed
Speaker 1: from a language that we understand. As tim Adenser notes,
Speaker 1: these places are full of signs of the past that
Speaker 1: can be intuitively grasped, even if their true significance is
Speaker 1: ultimately evasive and elusive. When we go into a derelict
Speaker 1: building or disused space, as we intuit their previous uses,
Speaker 1: much like a film projector, our minds will conjure the
Speaker 1: past back into these places right before our eyes. Like
Speaker 1: Stephen King, perhaps it's almost impossible not to sense the
Speaker 1: ghostly movements of absent presences, as tim Adenser puts it,
Speaker 1: for example, across a once bustling but now vacant factory floor,
Speaker 1: or feel the vague linger of previous guests as we
Speaker 1: make our way down an empty hotel corridor, or indeed
Speaker 1: to hear distant, faint strains of music and feel the
Speaker 1: soft feet and flow of long vanished revelers as we
Speaker 1: step a disused ballroom. Because these are the traces of
Speaker 1: ourselves that we leave behind anywhere we go. Whether you
Speaker 1: believe in self aware, autonomous ghosts and spirits or not,
Speaker 1: it is hard not to at least think of the
Speaker 1: spectral echoes of those whose pasts we retrace as we
Speaker 1: move through all the many different spaces we share. As such, paradoxically,
Speaker 1: it isn't really the presence of the spirits of place
Speaker 1: that haunt us, but their absence, And as long as
Speaker 1: we have the clues with which to construct them, there
Speaker 1: will always be ghosts around, just waiting for us to
Speaker 1: help them emerge. This episode was written by Richard McLain smith.
Speaker 1: Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard
Speaker 1: McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music,
Speaker 1: are also produced by me Richard mclinsmith. Unexplained. The book
Speaker 1: and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show,
Speaker 1: is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon,
Speaker 1: Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores. Please subscribe to
Speaker 1: and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and
Speaker 1: feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or
Speaker 1: ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps
Speaker 1: you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
Speaker 1: You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com
Speaker 1: and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained pod and
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