Monthly mystery Budget deal

If the walls of Stay On Main could talk, what would they say?

When guests at the budget Stay On Main hotel in LA said their water ‘tasted funny’, a maintenance worker was sent to look inside the water tanks.

What he discovered shocked him to the core. The body of Elisa Lam, 21, was decomposing inside the tank.

History

How she got there remains a mystery, but the authorities later ruled Lam’s death as accidental drowning.

Shortly after the discovery, video footage emerged of her acting strangely in the lift. She was pressing all the buttons and waving her arms. Some said she was possessed.

As a result, journalist James T Bartlett delved into the hotel’s past. After finding a history of accidents, suicides and crime going back to the 1930s, he speculated whether it was cursed or a haven for negative forces.

Not guilty

Since its opening in 1924, there have been at least 15 deaths at Stay On Main, which weren’t from natural causes. These include the death in 1938 of Roy Thompson, who took a ‘suicide leap’ from the hotel’s top floor.

Then in 1944, Dorothy Jean Purcell, 19, threw her newborn son from a window. The girl didn’t know she was pregnant and had the baby on her own. Although charged with homicide, she was later found not guilty by reason of insanity. In 1962, after a row with her husband, Pauline Otton, 27, jumped from her room, landing on George Gianinni, 65, who also died.

Sleep tight…

As well as these deaths, two killers, Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger, stayed at the hotel. Ramirez went on a killing rampage in LA and San Francisco in the 1980s, while Unterweger murdered prostitutes in several countries, including the US.

We’ll never know how Elisa Lam ended up in the hotel’s water tank. But she was thought to suffer from bipolar disorder, which could explain her strange behaviour and also why she may have got in the water tank on her own.

In February this year, the hotel was granted historic status by the LA city council. With business booming, it’s obvious that despite its sinister past, there’s no shortage of people who have a good night’s rest while staying at Stay On Main.