Is Hotel Cecil cursed? Serial killers slept in LA building which saw 'Black Dahlia' drinking for the last time
In 1924, William Banks Hanner, Charles L Dix, and Robert H. Schops led the foundation of The Cecil Hotel, now The Stay on Main Hotel in Los Angeles, California. The three businessmen invested a total of $1.5 million to build the hotel, which included 700 rooms and a beautiful marble lobby with stained glass windows, potted palm trees, and alabaster statuary. The budget hotel opened its gate for guests in 1927. However, soon after its launch the world faced the great depression and, that’s when it started to turn into a “cursed” place, where several mysterious deaths and suicides took place. The hotel also hosted some of the world’s most gruesome serial killers.
According to reports, the first recorded death at the Cecil hotel happened in November 1931, when a man named W. K. Norton, 46, took poisonous capsules in his room. Almost a year after, in September 1932, another dead body was found inside a room. A maid at the hotel discovered the 25-year-old Benjamin Dodich’s body, who reportedly shot himself in the head. No suicide note was found near him. July of 1934 saw another suicide — it was 53-year-old Louis D. Borden, who reportedly slit his throat with a razor-blade. A suicide note was also recovered from his room in which he blamed his poor health for his tragic step.
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The suicide pattren reportedly changed three years later when in 1937, Grace E. Magro fell from the ninth-floor window. While telephone wires saved her that time, she succumbed at a hospital later. In September 1944, another bizarre thing happened at the Cecil when 19-year-old Dorothy Jean Purcell and her 38-year-old boyfriend Ben Levine checked-in. At the time, the teenager claimed that she did not know she was pregnant and delivered a baby boy in the bathroom, but ended up hurling the tot out of the window. The little one was later found on the roof of a nearby building. Purcell pleaded insanity and did not end up in jail.
From November 1947 to December 20, 1975, the hotel saw a number of deaths, along with other kinds of violence and disturbing occurrences. However, the most infamous case was of actress Elizabeth Short, known popularly as the "Black Dahlia". She was last seen drinking at the Cecil's bar days before her still-unsolved murder. Her dead body was mutilated and bisected at the waist by her mysterious killer. In addition, serial killers Richard Ramirez, aka Night Stalker, and Jack Unterweger, slept quietly at the hotel in 1985 and 1991 respectively. At that time, the Cecil was working as a single resident occupancy housing.
The latest mystery included in Cecil's history is the case of Elisa Lam, a young Canadian student, who was staying at the hotel in an area of Downtown Los Angeles known as Skid Row. The college student’s last “weird” moments were captured in the hotel’s surveillance camera that showed her behaving erratically in the elevator, which included pressing its buttons, walking in and out of the elevator, and apparently trying to hide from someone or something. Soon after that, she vanished and eventually, her naked body was discovered in a water supply cistern on the hotel roof.
The strange case of Lam is the subject of Netflix’s latest offering, 'Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel', which premieres on Wednesday, February 10, at 12 AM PST.
