1. Dark Water - Elisa Lam's Mysterious Death
Now, I can honestly say that 2005's Dark Water was slightly less than a blip on my radar screen. It was a remake of a Japanese movie about a ghost. The Ring and The Grudge were enough for me to watch the originals, even if there were subtitles. However, I have always been a fan of Jennifer Connelly and was surprised to see her in what I assumed to be just another crappy, American remake. The movie follows the story of a divorcee in a custody battle while simultaneously moving herself and child to a dilapidated apartment for the promise of a better school system. After moving in, she notices a leak in her ceiling and asks the landlord if the apartment above her has an problems. Turns out, there was a family that lived there a month prior and now, upon further inspection, the apartment is completely flooded with black water. SPOILER ALERT FROM THIS POINT ON - As it turns out there's a young girl's body in water tank on the roof. After the discovery, Connelly's character submits to the ghost of the girl's wishes and dies for the sake of her own child, to spend eternity playing mom to the ghost child. The estranged father, Kyle, collects their daughter and returns to the haunted apartment to get her belongings. There's some elevator malfunctioning, and his daughter acts very strangely, and then they leave. The end. Now, this story is not based on any actual events - from what my research shows. However, a story from February of this year is both alarmingly and eerily similar. A Canadian tourist named Elisa Lam, who was visiting Los Angeles, was found dead in a water tank on top of the Cecil Hotel after having been missing for weeks. Believe it or not, it isn't incredibly easy to get into a water tank, especially one on top of a popular building in a very popular city. There are so many stories that are attached to the Cecil Hotel - I could fill an entire article on them alone, but this one in particular comes with footage and eyewitness accounts. There is a video circulating of security footage from one of the elevators in the Cecil Hotel the night Elisa Lam went missing. On the tape, you can see her enter the elevator, press all of the buttons and wait. The elevator remains stationed, doors open, and Elisa starts investigating the situation by getting off, getting back on, getting off again, and so on and so forth. Then, she appears to be talking to someone outside of the elevator, but no one else is present on the tape. As she approaches to re-enter the elevator, she stops and starts to move in a very... inhuman sort of way. It's hard to explain, really, but she looks almost as though she's possessed. She then gives up on the elevator and walks off screen. Within seconds, the elevator goes back to working normally. It is presumed that after her experience with the elevator, she somehow managed to access the roof where she somehow managed to open the door without triggering the alarm. After which, she somehow managed to climb into one of the four water tanks and then somehow managed to close the tank, trapping herself inside where she wold later perish. The reason I keep stressing "somehow" is because of the fact that it is so unbelievable rare for an alarmed door not to trigger. On top of which, it was only after hotel guests complained about the COLOR and smell/taste of the water coming out of the faucets, that the fire department used specialized tools to open the water tank where they found her body. It is still a mystery how Elisa Lam died and all of the bizarre coincidences surround her death. Makes you want to reconsider staying at the Cecil Hotel when visiting LA, if nothing else.