Twenty-one-year-old Vancouver student Elisa Lam was last heard from on 31 January 2013, after she checked into downtown L.A.’s Cecil Hotel - a 600-room building with a nine-decade history of scandal and tragedy. The next day, Elisa vanished. A search of the hotel yielded nothing. More than a week later, complaints by guests of foul-smelling tap water led to a grim discovery: Elisa’s nude body floating in a rooftop water tank, in an area extremely difficult to access without setting off alarms. The only apparent clue was a disturbing surveillance video of Elisa, uploaded to YouTube in hopes of public assistance.
As the eerie elevator video went viral, so did the questions of its tens of millions of viewers.
Was Elisa’s death caused by murder, suicide, or paranormal activity?
Was it connected to the Cecil’s sinister reputation?
And in that video, what accounted for Elisa’s strange behaviour?
With the help of web sleuths and investigators from around the world, journalist Jake Anderson set out to uncover the facts behind a death that had become a macabre internet meme, as well as a magnet for conspiracy theorists.
In poring through Elisa’s revealing online journals and social-media posts, Anderson realized he shared more in common with the young woman than he imagined. His search for justice and truth became a personal journey, a dangerous descent into one of America's quiet epidemics. Along the way, he exposed a botched investigation and previously unreported disclosures from inside sources who suggest there may have been a corporate conspiracy and a police cover-up.
In Gone at Midnight (2020), Anderson chronicles eye-opening discoveries about who Elisa Lam really was and what - or whom - she was running from, and presents shocking new evidence that may re-open one of the most chilling and obsessively followed true crime cases of the century. Gone at Midnight is an excellent and informative read, very well-researched and well-written.
About the author: Jake Anderson is a writer, filmmaker, investigative journalist, activist and web publisher. He runs the popular website The Ghost Diaries and is a contributing journalist for The Anti-Media and multiple alternative media outlets. He has been a featured guest on Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis, Spaced Out, Nocturnal Frequency, West of the Rockies, and Common Ground. Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, he is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and currently lives in Portland, Oregon and Albuquerque, Mexico.
Find more of his work at Theghostdiaries.com where he analyzes cold cases and unexplained mysteries. Follow him on twitter @OverTheMoonSF.
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