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But why didn't the lift move off?
'coz it is a run down hotel, and it was probably faulty. Also there is a speeded up version of this video, as there is some suggestion that it has been slowed down (for whatever reason) and if you look at that the behaviour of the lift doesn't seem that strange. Plus when she is randomly jabbing at the buttons (remember she is not wearing her glasses) it could well be that she keeps pressing the "door open" button.
 
She was probably pressing the 'door hold' button instead of the button for her floor, plus jabbing it again when she returned to the buttons. It says in the article:
Inside the elevator, I stood by the panel and pushed the “door hold” button. Nearly two minutes elapsed — 1:54 to be exact — before the heavy doors finally slid closed
 
Terribly sad, but it's completely consistent with a paranoid/schizophrenic panicking, running up the stairs to the roof (we run up instinctively if the face of danger) and hiding in the first thing she saw, a water tank. Poor girl.

Pretty much what I was trying to say. You said it much better.

Sounds a little odd, but I was watching someone suffering from a psychosis on a police investigation centre cctv last week. With no sound, a person's actions, and interactions with apparently nothing seem very odd indeed. I was very much reminded of the Elisa Lam footage.
 
Terribly sad, but it's completely consistent with a paranoid/schizophrenic panicking, running up the stairs to the roof (we run up instinctively if the face of danger) and hiding in the first thing she saw, a water tank. Poor girl.

Did she have a history?

Although you could say her behavior is consistent with paranoid schizophrenic you would expect a build up of incidents that would have stood out among her family and friends. She may be responding to visual hallucinations.

Did they get any evidence of drugs? A powerful mind-altering drug might do it.
 
Did she have a history?

Although you could say her behavior is consistent with paranoid schizophrenic you would expect a build up of incidents that would have stood out among her family and friends. She may be responding to visual hallucinations.

Did they get any evidence of drugs? A powerful mind-altering drug might do it.
She had a history of and was on medication for bi-polar disorder.
 
Pretty much what I was trying to say. You said it much better.

Sounds a little odd, but I was watching someone suffering from a psychosis on a police investigation centre cctv last week. With no sound, a person's actions, and interactions with apparently nothing seem very odd indeed. I was very much reminded of the Elisa Lam footage.

Sometimes, though, the mentally disturbed can more easily be drawn into other realities, and can more easily see unquiet spirits - if one believes in such things, one would consider that as a possibility. I surely do not like the sound of that hotel.

I don't know how she could have opened the water tank, and closed it on herself - that seems beyond one person's strength. I suspect the involvement of others, although that in itself is not much of an explanation.
 
Sometimes, though, the mentally disturbed can more easily be drawn into other realities, and can more easily see unquiet spirits - if one believes in such things, one would consider that as a possibility.

Yep, it is a possibility. For me, it's a very slim one, but it's there.
 
I don't know how she could have opened the water tank, and closed it on herself.

We have no idea that she did close it in on herself. It was found closed/locked but somebody else may have done this at a later time. A working passing by, thinking "hey, that should be closed, I'll do it now"...remember she was in there for quite some time.
 
"But why didn't the lift move off?"

Looks like she is hitting mainly the buttons beneath the floor selections - probably 'door open' or even 'call attendant'. Shame no-one answered the poor woman's call.
 
She had a history of and was on medication for bi-polar disorder.

Which makes it even more odd that no trace of medication was found in her system. There should have been something, no? Meds can stay in the system a long time, so even if she'd gone off them, there would have remained some trace for quite a while, wouldn't there? According to witnesses, she hadn't been behaving strangely before the elevator incident.

I did see a body language analysis of the video (and this is dependent on the speed of the video being slower than the one released by police) that says her body language is not consistent with fear, but with flirtation, and that she may have been playing a flirtatious game with someone who is outside of the camera's view. Depends on the validity of body language analysis, I suppose.

To me, she does look like she is playing a sort of hide and seek. The movements look far more strange as a higher speed, but slowed down (to what is said by video analysts to be the correct speed) it looks like something else. This brings up the question as to why the video would have been speeded up in the first place, but I can't think of a good answer for that one...
 
Which makes it even more odd that no trace of medication was found in her system. There should have been something, no? Meds can stay in the system a long time, so even if she'd gone off them, there would have remained some trace for quite a while, wouldn't there? According to witnesses, she hadn't been behaving strangely before the elevator incident.

1. From the article "The report went on to mention Lam’s bipolar disorder, and the fact that she took medications for this condition. Those medications were listed, as well as the dosages prescribed, but “limited sample availability” prevented the examiner from determining which drugs and what quantities were in her system at time of death." So nothing to say that she had or had not taken her meds. The fact was she was on meds, and they were found in her room. There is also the possibility she had not taken them which could have led to her psychotic episode.
2. How would people know what was 'normal' and what was not? From the description of the hotel, all sorts of people stopped there, so this wasn't your average hotel where odd things would probably have been picked up on more.
3. As for her playing hide and seek, then she could well have been in a psychotic state. Was the ultimate hide and seek, hiding in the water tank?
 
I thought they had found traces of medications? Firstly venlafaxine and bupropion, a combination which suggests her depression had been difficult to treat. Included is some lamatrogine and quetiapine, a mood stabiliser and anti-spychotic which is also used to treat bipolar.

This is a modern combination, no lithium for example.

No traces of illegal substances were found. No evidence of assualt.

I'm with Loq, looking at the way she is moving her hands and hiding I think she is having a psychotic episode, her body langauage to me does not look like she is having fun.

If not that it could have been something rare and caused by the combination of medications, Neurolpetic Malignant Syndrome or Serotonin Syndrome? That might account for her confused state, mabye she was having trouble controlling her temp and jumped in the water?

We will never know.
 
Which makes it even more odd that no trace of medication was found in her system.

Maybe the fact she was not taking her medication at the time would point towards her being in a vulnerable state of mind.
 
I thought they had found traces of medications?

There's the rub. As with any story that hits the internet there is masses of "evidence" and "expert" opinion floating about. So much so that in the capacity we are in it's pretty much impossible to be sure of the "true" facts.

So yes, we will never know- as you said. Very sad. I just hope that somewhere, and somehow, she managed to find some peace.
 
A purported ghost photo taken at the Cecil Hotel in January of last year ..

http://abc7.com/archive/9409571/

cecilhotelghost.jpg
 
My first thought on that photo(other than, 'oh wow, I've never seen such a clear ghost picture before :rolleyes: ) was that it was a reflection from the window that the photo was taken through. Couple that with paraeidolia (or however it's spelled - I'm too lazy to google it) and hey presto, another crapghost picture.
 
My first thought on that photo(other than, 'oh wow, I've never seen such a clear ghost picture before :rolleyes: ) was that it was a reflection from the window that the photo was taken through. Couple that with paraeidolia (or however it's spelled - I'm too lazy to google it) and hey presto, another crapghost picture.
I'm most of the way with you on your opinion, I'd just like it to be real if I'm being honest .. :creepy:
 
Watching that video she just looks to me as if she's not quite all there. I saw a guy walking along the road just yesterday waving his arms about and talking to himself and he didn't look drunk or anything. There's a guy around here who wears a smart suit and looks as if he's returning from work at some office but he shouts and waves his arms about as he walks along the road.
I don't see anything paranormal in that vid, just an unbalanced woman and a crappy old lift.
It's a strange name and the fact they used TB testing kits with the same name is pretty freaky though.
 
I've been following this cheery tale for a while now and have found an interesting theory. The same time Elisa Lam was booked into the Cecil Hotel, there was also a small outbreak of TB amongst the downtown homeless in that area. The medication used to treat these people is called Lam Elisa. She would have probably been booked into the hotel at reception as Lam, Elisa so did some government type get nervous and assume her name was too much of a coincidence and that 'Elisa Lam' was someone who knew TB was being tested on the homeless?. Was she silenced?.

http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/the-mysterious-case-of-elisa-lam.54943/#post-1375702

http://www.mmrp.org/projects/clinic...-medical-devices/rapid-antigen-detection.html
I like how you think.
 
I like how you think.
Thanks although to be completely honest, I found the Lam Elisa coincidence online discovered by someone else. If I were to get carried away though, she was an undercover investigator, tipped off that the government were going to test a TB outbreak on the homeless, that arrogantly chose the fake name Elisa Lam .. so 'they' bumped her off. It would make a good plot point in a book anyway :creepy:.
 
My first thought on that photo(other than, 'oh wow, I've never seen such a clear ghost picture before :rolleyes: ) was that it was a reflection from the window that the photo was taken through. Couple that with paraeidolia (or however it's spelled - I'm too lazy to google it) and hey presto, another crapghost picture.
My mind constructs it as a woman dressed in grey with long black hair facing away from the camera and standing on the window ledge .. I'm not sure what to make of the black shape behind her right shoulder.
 
Thanks although to be completely honest, I found the Lam Elisa coincidence online discovered by someone else. If I were to get carried away though, she was an undercover investigator, tipped off that the government were going to test a TB outbreak on the homeless, that arrogantly chose the fake name Elisa Lam .. so 'they' bumped her off. It would make a good plot point in a book anyway :creepy:.
Yes,it would be a book I would read too.lol
 
Brain Scratch attempt to debunk the elevator footage ..

Thanks so much for posting this! How interesting! I never heard of Brain Scratch before either.
 
Brain Scratch attempt to debunk the elevator footage ..


That's an interesting video. I've not followed this story closely so plenty of anomalies I wasn't aware of.

I didn't know the elevator footage had been edited. Here's a version someone's edited as per the timeline shown on the footage so it's sped up to normal. There's 54 seconds missing.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="
" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
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