My father was an avid reader, but his choice of reading material often left a little to be desired. He loved the tabloids, and there were always copies of the National Enquirer, Weekly World News, and National Star around the house. While he never gave many indications that he bought into the conspiracy theories that were those publications’ stock and trade, he seemed to enjoy reading about them.
Being the late-60s, the dominant conspiracy theory of the day revolved around the assassination of President Kennedy. One especially “spooky” article I remember detailed the weird coincidences between the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations: both names have seven letters; both were elected to Congress in ’46 and later to the presidency in ’60; both assassins, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, were born in ’39 and were known by their three names, composed of 15 letters; both vice presidents were Southern Democrats surnamed Johnson. Rather than a conspiracy, though, what the article demonstrated to me was if you go looking hard enough for coincidences, you can find them. With sufficiently diligent research, I’m sure the Enquirer could have come up with a similar list of coincidences between James Polk and Millard Fillmore, but who would have read that?
Occasionally, though, coincidences pile up one on another to the extent that even the most practical and rational observer finds themselves asking, “What’s going on here?” The recent Netflix true-crime show “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” tells the story of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Vancouver student who disappeared during a trip to Los Angeles. The case made national headlines in 2013 when the police released bizarre video footage from an elevator surveillance camera. She appeared to be interacting with someone who was not there, frantically pushed all of the floor buttons, and made odd dance-like movements before disappearing out of view.
Further examination of surveillance footage indicated that she had never left the hotel that night and, although a room-by-room search was conducted, nothing was found of her … until guests started complaining about low water pressure and a funny smell. A hotel maintenance man dispatched to the rooftop found her floating naked in one of the water tanks.
The case became a viral sensation, with dozens of self-proclaimed “web sleuths” scouring the internet for clues to Elisa’s demise. They deconstructed the elevator video second-by-second, poured over related video clips, parsed every word of Elisa’s social media posts, performed extensive Google searches on the most trivial details, and even physically visited the hotel.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the effort put into their sleuthing, they uncovered some extraordinary coincidences. At the same time Elisa went missing, an outbreak of tuberculosis impacted downtown Los Angeles, and the staff of the hotel was tested. The test for tuberculosis is called the LAM ELISA test. If you enter the ZIP code of the corporate address of a bookstore she visited the day before she disappeared into Google Maps, it pulls up not only the town where she lived but, if you zoom in, the cemetery where she is buried. The Japanese film “Dark Water,” released in 2002, is about a young mother who moves into a haunted apartment building, has a spooky experience in the elevator, and discovers that the resident from the unit above hers died by drowning in the apartment’s water tank. Oh, and the victim’s outfit in the film is almost identical to the one Elisa is wearing in the elevator footage.
While those revelations may have run tingles down the sleuths’ spines, it was difficult to make any legitimate connections between them and the case. Then they happened upon a YouTube video by an obscure “death metal” performer that called himself Morbid, detailing his stay in the Cecil Hotel. Further examination of his YouTube channel showed music videos featuring themes of torture and death. (Themes of suffering and dying from a death metal musician, what are the odds?) One showed a girl being pursued through the woods and brutally murdered. Another referenced death by drowning. This was enough to convince many of the sleuths that he must be involved in Elisa’s murder. They bullied him, filed complaints to get him banned from YouTube and other social media, and sent him death threats. They destroyed what, admittedly modest, career he had as a musician, for no good reason. The video he posted of the Cecil Hotel was taken nearly a year before Elisa’s death. He was in a recording studio in Mexico, with a dozen witnesses, during the entirety of her time in Los Angeles.
Ultimately, the mystery turned out to have a simple explanation. Elisa had a history of mental illness and was on medication for bipolar disorder. The number of pills she left behind indicated she had gone off the meds during her trip. The odd behavior in the elevator was a dissociative episode. She may have seen the movie “Dark Water” and was unconsciously replaying it in her troubled mind or was perhaps fleeing some imaginary threat and thought the water tank would be a good hiding place. While we will never know exactly what transpired in those final frantic hours of her life, it is clear that all the coincidences were just that.
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