The Cecil Hotel

A downtown Los Angeles hotel known above all for the 2013 death of guest Elisa Lam, which the coroner ruled an accidental drowning.

In 2013 Elisa Lam, a guest at the Cecil, was found dead in a water tank on the hotel roof. CBS Los Angeles reported in 2016 that the police and the county coroner in Los Angeles both found she had drowned by accident. The sources differ on when the finding came. Wikipedia says the coroner's office issued it on 21 February 2013 and listed bipolar disorder as an important contributing factor. Snopes says the confirmation came in June 2013 from Lt. Fred Corral in the coroner's investigations division, who called the death accidental and named bipolar disorder as a major condition.

Snopes lists questions still open when the forensic investigation closed: where she was found, inside a tank that was hard to reach, and her behaviour before her death.

Netflix's 2021 docuseries Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel retold her case and billed the hotel as a place whose dark name grew when she vanished. In February 2017, Wikipedia says, city council members voted to make the building a Historic-Cultural Monument, as representative of American hotels of the early 20th century and for its architect's standing.