Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
publishing.
I turned back to the video.
Presently, the young woman became interested in something outside the elevator, as though she’d heard a noise or voice in the hallway. Her body language became nervous, hesitant, like someone who suspects there is something waiting for her but is afraid to look. Then she lurched out through the doors in the pose of a runner stretching her legs, peering down the hallway to the right of the elevator. Except for the small patch of carpet and wall directly in front of the doors, the camera could not observe this hallway, but whatever Elisa saw (or heard) caused her to retreat back into the elevator and back herself into the corner.
Several moments passed. Hands tucked in the pockets of her hoodie, Elisa ventured from her corner and stood at the threshold, peeking out the still-open doors as though checking to see if whoever had been there was still there. She hopped back out into the hallway and took a few playful steps to the left, back, and then to the front, where she waited, barely visible on the left side of the screen.
She returned to the inside of the elevator and leaned over the button panel again, proceeding to press nearly all the buttons again in rapid succession. The elevator doors remained open.
Elisa wandered back out into the hotel hallway. She lingered there for a moment and then began gesticulating, as if conversing with an unseen figure. She waved her hands around in strange, dreamy movements, fingers splayed.
Is she sleep walking? Possessed? Her behavior actually reminded me of how I’ve seen others (and presumably myself) behave on psychedelic drugs.
Finally, Elisa shoved off out of frame of the surveillance camera. After four or five long seconds, the elevator doors slowly closed. And that was the end.
Using some of our search engine tools, I checked the Alexa ranking, SEOmoz score and other metrics. The case was extremely popular. Viral, in fact. Elisa Lam’s disappearance was already being debated on several forums, including Reddit and Websleuths.
I perused the comment thread underneath the video and found a veritable hornet’s nest of frenzied civilian analysts proposing their explanations. There were quite a few people speculating that Elisa was on drugs. LSD, mushrooms, PCP, bath salts, and virtually every other illicit substance was invoked to explain her behavior. Someone even mentioned certain kinds of vitamins as being capable of making you dizzy and nauseated, and hence susceptible to confusion or paranoia.
Others developed detailed narratives as to what was happening in the hallway. Elisa had been drugged by someone who was stalking her through the hotel. Some sadistic psychopath was toying with her and triggering a different button panel down the hallway so that Elisa’s elevator couldn’t depart to another floor. This person followed her and probably killed her, according to one YouTube account.
“She is hiding from someone,” a commenter wrote, describing the inverse of the previous scenario, “and is trying to prevent them from using the elevator. If you look up a map of the layout of the hotel, there is a staircase to the left and I’m wondering if she tried going that way and they caught her.”
I wondered if that person had actually studied a schematic of the hotel.
Another user wrote: “She was obviously trying to get the doors to close . . . The murderer was probably trying to get her to go to the stairwell, so he could grab her.”
One commenter wrote that she was having a psychotic episode and that her murderer knew this. “I think her killer came across her during this episode, in the halls just outside the elevator. Possibly an employee and probably offered to help her but then felt bc of her mental state, he could take advantage of her and ended up killing her . . .”
The views and comments kept pouring in. I watched the video again, hoping to catch a detail, a nuance, an eerie face in the corner, a glitch in the matrix, a barely perceptible timeslip from one dimension to another—to give me something I can work with. Why were people instantly obsessed with this video?
The footage was blurry, almost smoky looking, and the timecode in the lower-left corner of the screen was inexplicably scrambled into what looked like alien Sanskrit. But other than that, and Elisa’s admittedly peculiar behavior, the video was pretty uneventful. A woman enters an elevator, a woman exits an elevator. Yet somehow the video had accumulated almost a million views in less than a week.
I looked it up. Exactly one week earlier the LAPD had held its press conference. Elisa was still missing without a trace.
I recalled a piece of advice sometimes given to people, particularly young women, who are trying to evade someone in a building. They are told to press multiple buttons of an elevator so that the pursuer doesn’t know what floor they will end up on. Is that what was happening here? I got chills imagining a stalker leaping into the stairwell and trying to intercept Elisa on the ground floor.
Other commenters delved into more fringe explanations. She was playing the Elevator Game, one user suggested; she had pressed a specific sequence of buttons in order to travel to different dimensions inside the elevator.
Another YouTuber discussed the creepy history of the Cecil Hotel. Dozens of people have committed suicide there, she claimed. Hotel guests have been murdered in cold blood. Sex offenders and serial killers rented rooms there. And the place is obviously haunted, she concluded.
I didn’t know about the sex offenders, but it was most certainly true that at least two serial killers had taken up residence inside the Cecil Hotel walls. Both Richard Ramirez, aka “The Night Stalker,” and Jack Unterweger, “the Austrian Ghoul,” called the place home during their respective killing sprees in the 1980s and 1990s. And there certainly had been decades of grisly deaths. Did that mean there was some nefarious disembodied consciousness possessing the hotel tenants?
I had been a bit unclear on why the video was pushing buttons inside so many people’s heads. But it was starting to make sense to me. I was beginning to feel the terror frozen in those pixels. It’s pretty simple.
She was hiding from someone. And now she’s missing . . .
Who was after her? I wondered, lost in thought. A stalker? A serial killer? An abusive boyfriend? A deranged hotel resident or employee?
“What about you?”
“Huh?” I looked up, startled.
My coworker was staring at me. “What are you getting for lunch, McFly?”
GOING VIRAL
My toolbar widget didn’t lie. Although it was only two weeks old, merely an embryo in the life cycle of a popular true-crime enigma, the Elisa Lam case was already red-hot. In time these numbers swelled to astronomical proportions. At one point, Google Analytics clocked 70,000 organic monthly searches for “Elisa Lam,” a stunning metric dwarfed only by the feverish social media activity surrounding articles, videos, and podcasts about the case, which Internet users shared by the millions on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and other networks.
I left work that day in a haze of unorganized thoughts.
I recalled a recent story in which police officers had deputized a psychic to help them find a missing woman. A couple years later, the CIA declassified hundreds of thousands of files about government experiments on ESP, which, among other things, showed that police agencies regularly use psychics to help with cold cases.
“All of the police officers said they had used a psychic in a case as described in the newspaper articles,” one report noted. “Eight of the officers said that the psychic had provided them with otherwise unknown information which was helpful to the case. In three of these cases, missing bodies were discovered in areas described by the psychic.”
I wondered if the LAPD detectives had hired a psychic to find Elisa. Did they have a medium squared away in some windowless precinct room conducting remote viewing sessions, wading through the quantum ether in search of Elisa’s red hoodie?
Even though I didn’t know Elisa, I found myself anxious about her case.
The Christopher Dorner case—the intensive manhunt