The Girl in the Water Tank: The Death of Elisa Lam

2026-07-20 · Unexplained Deaths · 8 min read

On the last day of January 2013, a 21-year-old Canadian student named Elisa Lam walked into The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. She bought books and postcards for her family and talked with a manager, Katie Orphan, who later remembered her as warm and lively, the kind of customer who wanted to discuss what the people back home might like. Police would find those gifts neatly arranged in her hotel room. As far as anyone has since been able to establish, it was the last time a person outside the Cecil Hotel saw her alive. That same day, the daily phone calls she made to her parents in Vancouver, a fixed ritual of her solo trip along the California coast, stopped.

Lam was a student at the University of British Columbia and was travelling alone. She had come south to Los Angeles by Amtrak and was working her way back up the coast on a journey meant to end further north. For reasons of budget more than anything else she had chosen the Cecil, a faded downtown landmark on the edge of Skid Row. The building carried a heavy history: decades of suicides, violent deaths and at least a passing association with notorious residents. By 2013 part of it had been rebranded as a hostel called Stay on Main in an effort to leave that reputation behind.

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