The Creepy Truth Behind 10 Urban Myths
1. There's Something In The Water
The Legend
During a stay in an old hotel (presumably one with never-ending twisty corridors and a spooky set of twins), guests start to complain about the dodgy plumbing. The water begins to spurt from the taps as a gross sort of brown colour, and there's a definite "funny smell" coming from somewhere.
Just as people are enjoying a nice bath, or refreshing glass of water, a horrible discovery is made in the hotel's rooftop reservoir tank. Cut to scenes of people spitting out fountains of water, leaping from their bathtubs and being violently sick all over the place.
The Truth
During the February of 2013, guests at the Cecil Hotel in LA had been complaining for a few days about the quality of the water. Despite this, however, many of them had continued to drink the black liquid spewing from their taps (for reasons best known to themselves).
After a few days of investigation, the body of Elisa Lam, a student at the University of Colombia in Vancouver, was recovered from a water tank on the roof of the hotel. Water contaminated by her decomposing body had been used in everything from candlelit baths to the coffee served in the hotel bar.
Weirder still, when the investigation was launched into the identity of the person in the tank, a curious bit of CCTV footage was discovered. It appeared to show Elisa Lam behaving very oddly. Lam gets into the hotel lift, but then appears to hide from an unseen presence, she begins pressing all of the buttons in the lift before getting out, talking and gesturing bizarrely at the air. This footage is thought to show Lam in the last few hours before she died.
With everything from demonic possession to stalking to mental illness cited as an explanation of Lam's behaviour and her tragic fate, this could be one of those instances when the truth is actually creepier than the myth.