The Haunted Cecil Hotel?

Er, what is "Vigilant Citizen" and how much reliance can we put on its information? It looks dodgy to me. Everyone who has commented on the story seems to have watched way too many horror movies.

 

'Normal' people are easily creeped out by the behavior of mentally ill people, because, well, they do creepy stuff like wave their arms around to no one in particular. Creepiness - check.

And everyone loves a good mystery. This case is 'unsolved' in that no one knows exactly what happened (never mind that most times no one knows exactly what happened). Uncertainty - check.

The woman died. Dead person thrill - check.

That's pretty much all you need to get your urban legend vibe on, and I think that's all that's going on here.

The reality angle, IMHO ...

Creepy behavior is explained by her being mentally ill. The coroner's report said she was bipolar. Nothing else about the elevator video is unexplained. The story states and we assume that she pressed all the elevator floor buttons, but did she really? Elevator doors will actually stand open if the open button is pushed, and they will commonly not go anywhere if no one tells them to do anything. Otherwise, malfunction is not wild speculation. It's an old, seedy hotel.

Mystery is really not that mysterious. How did she get in the 8 foot tank and close the door from the inside, etc.? Who knows? More significant is that there is no evidence to suggest that it was done by bigfoot, aliens, or ghosts bent on drowning Chinese native immigrant Canadian tourists. If the cops and coroner say they figure it was not murder, I don't find that terribly suspicious in and of itself. What's their angle otherwise, to protect bigfoot or suppress information about the reality of drowning fetish ghosts?

Lastly, dead girl is dead because that's what people do. This kind of thing is actually not uncommon, but it takes off as a story if you can serve up all the right ingredients like a creepy surveillance video of a creepy person at a creepy place.

Happy Halloween.

 

Yeah, I'm with Gaear on this. I don't comprehend what makes that video spooky, nor do I understand what makes the case so strange.

The attempt to make the hotel seem unusually associated with violence or death is overdone. Look at any hotel with a hundred + rooms, that has been open for 50 years or more, in a large urban area, especially a cheap hotel, and check how many fatalities are associated with it. Probably, many.

 

I think the elevator doesn't close because she hits the stop button the first time and then hits it again the next time she goes through the buttons.

Deranged ... not demonic.

 

On that note, I thought this was pretty funny: Six Ways To Tell If You're Staying in a Murder Hotel