Season 07 Episode 14: If These Walls Could Scream (Pt.3 of 3)

take a shower. But when she turned the dial to release the water, only a few dribbles came out of the shower head. Turning it on full did nothing to help. Annoyed, she tried the taps at the sink again. There seemed to be something wrong with the pressure. She decided at least to try and brush her teeth after applying some toothpaste. She held her toothbrush under the water for a moment and then brought it up to her mouth. It was then that she noticed that water color seemed a little

bit off. She put the brush in her mouth and spat the toothpaste out immediately. The water was putrid. By the time Sabrina called reception to complain they'd already had three similar calls that morning. Around the same time, maintenance worker Santiago Lopez was already on the case. Over in the bathroom of room seven twenty, he turned the taps at the sink and watched with revulsion as dark, discolored

water trickled into the white ceramic basin below. Santiago packed up his tools and took the elevator to the fifteenth floor. From there, he made his way to the roof access door, and after disabling the fire alarm, he pushed open the door and stepped out into the cool morning air of the roof. Beyond, with the sounds of the morning traffic rising up from the streets below, Santiago climbed up the steps leading to the cistern platform containing the hotels four

large water tanks. He squeezed through to the main tank at the back. There was a small wooden ladder tucked in behind it. He grabbed it and leaned it against the tank, then started to climb. All four cisterns were completely covered over by heavy metal lids, each with an access hatch cut into it one and a half foot square in size. Ordinarily, these hatches were left shut, but as Santiago near the top of the ladder, he was surprised to find that this one was open and there

was something floating inside the tank. Santiago pulled himself over the hatch to get a closer look and recoiled in horror. It had just gone one in the afternoon when Detective Wallace to Nelly received a call from Lieutenant Cheryl mcquillie to let him know that a body had been found on the roof of the Cecil Hotel, the same roof

his team had searched just over ten days previously. He arrived an hour and a half later, stepping out onto the roof under a light drizzle, to Nelly made his way up to the platform and to the top of the main water tank. Moments later, he was staring down through the hatch at the naked, floating body of a young female of Chinese descent. Her long jet black hair stretched out behind her head and waved gently in the

dark waters. A marbling of liver mortars covered the abdomen, and much of the body had turned a pale green in color despite significant decomposition and skin slippage. To Nelly recognized the woman's face immediately as Elisa Lambs. For the next two hours, news helicopters circled overhead as La Fire Department nine worked to extricate the body from the cistern, Unable to lift it out of the small access hatch. Instead, the fire crew drained the tank before cutting a large

hole out of the side of it. The body was finally pulled free shortly year before four o'clock in the afternoon, with a light rain continuing to fall. The body was carefully laid out under a forensic tent and inspected momentarily by detectives to Nelly and Sterns before it was placed in a black bag and taken to the Department of Coroner.

Once the body was removed inside the tank, the fire crew discovered a Lisa's room key and her watch, as well as a pair of black shorts, a green shirt underwear, a red American Apparel hoodie, and a pair of black polka dot sandals. They were the exact same clothes that the woman was wearing in the unsettling lift footage from January thirty first, confirming that it was Alisa they had

seen behaving strangely. Elisa's devastated family were informed of the discovery only moment before images of their daughter's body being taken from the water tank played out live and nationwide on the news. For Danelli and Sterns, although never wanting to presume anything, given the circumstances, it seemed likely that Elisa had been murdered and placed inside the water tank. An assessment of the scene was quickly initiated. Danelli ordered a dusting of the area for prints and anything that

might contain DNA. Naturally, attention then turned to trying to imagine how Alisa got on to the roof in the first place, whether by her own accord or at the hands of someone else. If indeed, Elisa had been murdered and inc flactated before her body was placed in the tank, it was unlikely that she'd been carried up via one of the three fire escapes. All required scaling a final vertical ladder up the side of the building before squeezing through a small square hole at the top of it

to reach the roof. Such a feat would require an inordinate amount of strength. The only other realistic possibility was that she was carried through the roof access door, but as chief Hotel engineer Pedro Tovar again insisted the door was locked and alarmed at all times, although of course there was no reason to rule out the possibility that any potential perpetrator could be a member of staff with

keys to the roof. Alternatively, if she was murdered, Elisa may have made her own way to the roof, either willingly or under juress. It was possible, too that she'd made her way up alone, only to later be attacked unexpectedly. Such immediate theorizing was hard to resist, but for the diligent and methodical to Nelli, who was more than aware of any number of possibilities, such hypotheticals were pointless. All that mattered were the facts, and right then they had

very little to go on. He also knew only too well that with Elisa's body likely to have been lying in the tank for over two weeks, and with no CCTV footage covering the roof, any vital evidence to the crime would have long since been washed or blown away. In the early afternoon, Elisa's body was delivered to the Herzburg Davis Forensic Science Center. The building perched just above Route ten on the eastern fringes of Los Angeles stands out monolithic and pristine amid a backdrop of soft rolling

hills topped with desert shrubs and colorful suburban villas. Few motorists who passed the centre daily on their regular commutes would recognize the Squat five story building as one of the leading forensic science centers in the world. That afternoon, in one of its newly constructed labs, Elisa's body was carefully laid out on a service table by medical examiner

Dr Ulay Wang around five thirty. Senior criminologist Mark Schuckart diligently took snippets of fingernail hair and pubic hair from the body, as well as a number of swabs, before bagging it all up along with Elisa's clothes for further analysis. They hoped the tests would help to determine whether Elisa had suffered any kind of physical or sexual assault before

her death. Two days after Elisa's body was taken to the Morgue, doctor Wang conducted the autopsy in anticipation of finally discovering a cause of death, as detectives to Nelly and Sterns looked on incredibly. After three hours of procedure. The examiners drew a blank. There was no evidence of trauma whatsoever. No bones were broken, and there were no abrasions or bruises in evidence on the skin, and nothing

was found to be obstructing the body's airways. Inside the stomach, they discovered the remains of tablets and capsules, suggesting that Elisa had been taking at least some of her medication shortly before her death. One startling discovery came when doctor

Wang investigated the chest and abdominal cavity. Elisa's lungs were filled with water, suggesting she had been alive when she entered the water tank, but with no clear cause of death, doctor Wang had no choice but to mark it down as undetermined, prostrated by the findings of the autopsy to Nelly and Stearns, not to mention, Elisa's devastated family, who traveled down to retrieve their daughter's body, were left waiting

on the toxicology report. Elsewhere, both maintenance worker Santiago Lopez and chief engineer Pedrotova were spoken to by the detectives, but promptly discredited as suspects, with no DNA or fingerprint evidence to suggest the involvement of unknown persons. The detectives were stumped as to how a Lisa Caud possibly have

got inside the tank. When the toxicology results finally came back, they revealed no evidence of intoxication save for the smallest trace of alcohol, along with traces of two of the drugs that Elisa had been prescribed to help with her depression, ven la faccine, which commonly helps to ward off suicidal thoughts, and lamotro gene, used to prevent the onset of mania

in patients who suffer from depression. Having analyzed the results of criminologist Mark chuckat swabs and clippings, it was determined that Elisa had not been the victim of a sexual assault. After another month of investigations, the LAPD detectives were left with only one explanation that Elisa, who the police knew had a history of mental health complications, had somehow climbed

into the tank herself. On June nineteenth, twenty thirteen, Dr Wang, in agreement with detectives to Nelly and Stearns and the Los Angeles Coroner, broughed Elisa's death to be caused by accidental drowning, with her bipolar disorder, considered a significant contributing

factor in a peculiar coincidence to the case. A few days after Elisa's body was discovered, Los Angeles County health officials were alerted to a serious outbreak of tuberculosis among the homeless population of skid Row, just minutes from the Cecil Hotel. Health workers eventually called on federal assistance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order to

stem the outbreak. The causative agent of TB is a bacteria known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, with its most common strain found in America being the type four Latin American Mediterranean strand, or LAMB for short. One popular and frequently used technique to detect the presence of antigens in the body a substance that causes the immune system to produce antibodies is known as an enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, better known by

its acronym ELISA. The test kit specific to the type four strain of TB found in downtown LA around the same time of Elisa Lamb's death is known as the LAMB Elisa. Inevitably, due to the mysterious nature of Elisa Lamb's death. It has been poured over endlessly by internets Sluth's keen to offer all manner of theories as to how she died. Such attention was due in no small part to the questionable decision to release the peculiar footage

taken from inside the Cecil building's elevator. Within hours, the clip was a creepy online sensation, going viral across the globe. In China alone. After being shared on the video hosting site Yuku, it was watched three million times, racking up forty thousand comments in just a week. Never before had an ongoing investigation sparked the public imagination in quite this way, and it wasn't long before the hotels troubled past became

part of the conversation. Soon reports emerged of strange activity said to have been occurring there for years. One woman claimed that her father, who lived at the hotel in the nineteen sixties, had often woken in the night with the sensation of being choked. Former staff claimed guests in the room in which retired telephone operator and full time resident of the Cecil, Goldie Osgood, was raped and murdered

in nineteen sixty four often complained of similar experiences. One couple had apparently checked into a room on the eleventh floor, only to find it in a state of complete disarray, with a woman in a white dress already staying in it. After complaining to the front desk, they were led back to the room, only to find it in perfect order, ready for their arrival, and the woman nowhere to be seen.

In twenty fourteen, a young resident of Riverside County apparently photographed a ghostly apparition that appeared outside a window on the fourth floor. Numerous floggers and paranormal investigators have visited the Cecil Building in recent years, hoping to capture evidence

of its apparent inner darkness. Some have pointed out that the fourteenth four where Elisa stepped into the elevator and was seen apparently conversing with someone, was the floor on which notorious serial killer Richard Ramirez once stayed, the inference being that maybe something of Ramirez still haunted the hotel's many narrow corridors and had somehow contributed to the young

woman's death. Presumably, those making such claims were unaware that Ramirez was in fact very much still alive when Elisa Lamb died. Ramirez would die five months later after spending twenty eight years in prison. Whether or not a full account of the investigation into the Lamb case will ever be made public, it will remain intricately linked to the

building in which it occurred. What I find interesting, however, in the absence of this explanation, is how easily we seem drawn not to those present in the hotel at the time, but to those who are no longer there. We seem unable to shake the sense that somehow, something of all that had happened previously within its walls was

ultimately responsible for the horrifying event. Similarly, what spooked and inspired Stephen King so much during that terrifying night at the Stanley Hotel had nothing to do with what was present during his stay. It was because he and his wife Tabby were the only guests there. With the place due to close for the winter, the building was almost completely deserted. As King wandered the empty corridors and lifeless dining rooms, ringing with the silence of people's past, something

in the emptiness bled into his mind. In classical mythology, everything from rivers and valleys to the forests and mountains were considered the domain of unseen and unnamed spirits that would have to be placated with shrines and offerings in order to bring good fortune. The ancient Romans termed these spirits genii loci or spirits of place. Today, the term unmoored from its theistic connotations, has come to signify something

a little more abstract. Writer John Repian describes it as the echoes of people, of events, of ideas which have become imprinted upon a location for better or worse, the disquieting atmosphere of a former battlefield, the comfort and familiarity of a childhood home. And, in my personal opinion, nowhere are these so called spirits more noticeable than in ruined and abandoned urban archaeology. Nicholas Geyahlter's hypnotic twenty sixteen documentary

Homer Sapiens. The filmmaker presents us with a series of long, locked off shots of nothing but abandoned buildings and empty, human scarred landscapes, accompanied only by atmospheric sounds. Flies buzz round a long, disconnected vending machine standing solitary in a wilderness of ferns. The interior of a crumbling, snow covered theater, ice melting from the rafters and dripping steadily into muddy

puddles below. A deserted hospital ward with beds placed at odd angles, and the wind entering through an open window, blowing sheets of plastic about the floor. It is utterly captivating. Ruins of antiquity are not without their charm, but there is something especially evocative about this more recently abandoned detritus of human existence, mesmerizing in its sense of being both familiar and modern, yet distant and strange. I've always been

fascinated by such places at first. There is something profoundly unsettling about old and decaying structures, and how the unhuman elements of the natural world claim them with such utter disinterest.

What unsettles is their temporality. To paraphrase social and cultural geographer Tim Adenza, who's written extensively on the evocative power of ruins, writing in his book Industrial Ruins Spaces, Aesthetics and Materiality in two thousand and five, they present as manifestations of passing time, holding us between life and death, confronting us with the inevitability of our own obsolescence. Despite

their modern familiarity. There is the distinct impression that you're in fact looking at an ancient artifact from a once great but lost alien civilization, only to realize with Osymandian horror that that civilization is ours. To observe these places is to be left with the uncanny sense of being haunted by our future mortality through echoes of the past.

Tim Adenzer points out that the eighteenth century fashion for depicting ruins in art and the construction of follies, grand ornamental buildings with no purpose other than to stir the spirit was, as he says, allied to a sense of melancholia, which saw ruins as symbolic of the inevitability of life passing. These ventures were also heavily emblematic of the sublime in their attempts to conjure a sense of quote magical forces that remain unseen. But for Tim Adensa and myself, however,

it is something a little closer that grips. While conducting research for The Unexplained Book, I visited some of the most entrancing abandoned places I've ever seen in the British Isles. From the eerily deserted air base at arif Rendelsham and the magnificent desolation of Alford Ness to the interstitial scrublands

of Middlesbrough's industrial past. In Middlesbrough, I walked along the train line from the site of German Heinrich Richter's Second World War plane crash, who, along with Carl Eden, who some believe might have been Richter reincarnated, was the subject at the first chapter of the Unexplained Book. From there I moved past the towering structures of the vacant Dorman Long Steel Works that have since been demolished, to the Grange Town signal box where Carl Eden was so tragically murdered.

In each these places, I was spellbound by the magnetic presence of absence. Like every deserted office, disused theatre, or empty hotel lobby or these places tell a story they confront us with. As Tim Edinzer again wrote in twenty thirteen, weird vistages of the past, unfathomable artifacts, cryptic signs and unfamiliar textures that we can't help but try and piece together. And once we see beyond the obsolescence of a disused space,

something else begins to emerge. Ghosts. This is true for any sight of past human activity, but the ones that are constructed by humans are especially evocative because they're composed from a language that we understand. As tim Adenser notes, these places are full of signs of the past that can be intuitively grasped, even if their true significance is

ultimately evasive and elusive. When we go into a derelict building or disused space, as we intuit their previous uses, much like a film projector, our minds will conjure the

past back into these places right before our eyes. Like Stephen King, perhaps it's almost impossible not to sense the ghostly movements of absent presences, as tim Adenser puts it, for example, across a once bustling but now vacant factory floor, or feel the vague linger of previous guests as we make our way down an empty hotel corridor, or indeed to hear distant, faint strains of music and feel the soft feet and flow of long vanished revelers as we

step a disused ballroom. Because these are the traces of ourselves that we leave behind anywhere we go. Whether you believe in self aware, autonomous ghosts and spirits or not, it is hard not to at least think of the spectral echoes of those whose pasts we retrace as we

move through all the many different spaces we share. As such, paradoxically, it isn't really the presence of the spirits of place that haunt us, but their absence, And as long as we have the clues with which to construct them, there will always be ghosts around, just waiting for us to help them emerge. This episode was written by Richard McLain smith. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music,

are also produced by me Richard mclinsmith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.

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