The infamous Cecil Hotel, where at least 16 people have died, recently reopened here's its history and what it's like today

The Cecil Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles, California, is not famous because of its near 100-year history or its beautiful Beaux-Arts lobby, but rather because it has been the scene of tragedies and deaths many times over. It was popularly called "America's Hotel Death," according to Esquire.

The hotel has undergone many revamps throughout the years, but it reopened in December 2021, repurposed as low-income housing: Hotel Cecil Apartments in partnership with the Skid Row Housing Trust.

Insider spoke to the Trust and to content creator Peet Montzingo, who lives across the street from the Cecil and who took a tour of the building, to find out what it's like today.

Here's an eerie history of The Cecil Hotel and what the building is like now.

The Cecil Hotel was designed by Loy Lester Smith and built by hotelier William Banks Hanner. It reportedly cost over $1 million to construct then, which would be over $21.2 million today, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Beaux-Arts 14-floor, 700-room building on Main Street between 6th and 7th streets in Los Angeles, California, was intended to be a glamorous destination for international businessmen and middle-class tourists.

But after the Great Depression hit in 1929, the hotel's prosperity plummeted into despair. It rented out cheap rooms for both short- and long-term stays, and in this new hostel-style setup, tenants had single rooms but shared bathrooms with other guests. The low-cost rooms, along with the hotel's proximity to Skid Row, earned the Cecil a reputation for being home to sex workers, people down on their luck, and crime.

The string of violence and deaths that plagued the hotel's guests started with its first recorded suicide on January 22, 1927.

According to a story in the Los Angeles Sunday Times the following day, former real-estate dealer Percy Ormond Cook shot himself in the head in a hotel room after he was unable to fix his relationship with his estranged wife and son. He died that same night.

W.K. Norton was found after ingesting poisonous pills in 1931. Army Sergeant Louis D. Borden slit his throat with a razor in 1934. Roy Thompson of the Marine Corps jumped from the building and landed on the skylight of another building in 1938.

Many deaths at the hotel have been cited by records as "fell from building" and weren't necessarily ruled as suicides. These could have been suicides, but they could have also been accidental.

The list includes Grace E. Margo (1938), Robert Smith (1947), Helen Gurnee (1954), Julia Frances Moore (1962), Alison Lowell (1975), and two unidentified men in 1992 and 2015.

In September 1944, 19-year-old Dorothy Jean Purcell gave birth to a boy in the bathroom and threw the newborn from the building.

Purcell, who was staying with an older companion, said she didn't know she was pregnant and when she gave birth, she thought her child was stillborn. A coroner later found that the baby was alive before his mother threw him.

She was arrested but at her trial, she was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. Purcell was admitted into a hospital for psychiatric treatment.

One of the most famous murder mysteries of all time likely didn't happen in the Cecil, but it might have had ties to it.

Twenty-two-year-old aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, who became known after her death as the "Black Dahlia," went missing on January 9, 1947. Her mutilated, naked body was found six days later in a vacant lot in the Leimert Park area, about 5 miles from the Cecil. Throughout the investigation, rumors and reports suggested she either stayed as a guest at the Cecil in the days prior and/or was seen at the hotel's bar, Insider previously reported. However, those claims were disputed by some and remain unconfirmed.

Her murder shocked the nation and her case has remained unsolved.

In 1962, 27-year-old Pauline Otton jumped from the ninth floor after writing a note to her husband, UPI reported at the time. She then accidentally struck 65-year-old George Giannini who was on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Both instantly died on impact.

The next known murder at the hotel was in 1964. "Pigeon Goldie" Osgood was a 59-year-old local woman known for feeding pigeons in Pershing Square near the hotel.

She was found dead in a hotel room after being sexually assaulted, strangled, and stabbed. While a person was initially arrested, he was later ruled out as a suspect, according to Vocal Media.

The investigation came to no avail, with the killer free and case unsolved.

The 1980s brought serial killer and Satanist Richard Ramirez, famously known as "The Night Stalker," to the hotel. During his killing spree, he stayed on the 14th floor and paid $14 a night to room there, according to the 2021 Netflix documentary series "Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel," and he was undetected as a murderer for many months.

Ramirez terrorized Los Angeles from around June 1984 to August 1985, sexually assaulting and murdering people. He was said to dump his bloodied clothes in the hotel's dumpster and walk up to his room naked.

It wasn't until his mugshot from a previous arrest was released that he was found and caught on August 31, 1985. Ramirez was convicted of at least five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, and 13 murders. He was sentenced to be killed by gas chamber but 24 years later and still on death row, Ramirez died while undergoing treatment for cancer on June 7, 2013, a coroner found, CNN reported.

Jack Unterweger killed a woman in Austria and was arrested in 1976. Although he was sentenced to life in prison, the state believed he became a reformed man and released him on parole in 1990, according to Biography.com.

He became a minor celebrity and writer, and he traveled to Los Angeles to write a magazine piece about sex workers. But between 1990 and 1991, Unterweger killed three sex workers by strangling them with their bra straps, the Los Angeles Times reported. During this time, he was rooming at the Cecil.

After being caught and arrested, he was found guilty of at least nine murders, including the three women in LA. He was serving time in an Austrian prison when he took his life in 1994.

In 2003, then-owners John Deluca and Dale Lohrer renovated the hotel's lobby and common areas. Then in May 2007, they sold the property to Fred Cordova. At this time, the hotel had 600 rooms. Cordova had more plans to revamp it to give the Cecil a clean slate, which led to the concept and opening of Stay on Main in 2011.

Stay on Main was marketed as a budget hostel for young tourists, but it didn't completely replace the Cecil Hotel. Instead, the building was divided into three separate uses: Floors two and three were for long-term low-income tenants, floors four through six were for Stay on Main, and the remaining top floors were for The Cecil Hotel.

Many travelers weren't under the impression that they were actually staying at The Cecil Hotel since booking sites listed Stay on Main as a separate entity. The hostel and hotel also had separate entrances and lobbies.

Stay on Main had cosmetic renovations like bright orange paint and new employee uniforms. However, while the hostel helped compartmentalize its guests from the image of the Cecil, the guests had to share common elevators with the tenants.

In "Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel," then-manager Amy Price said that between 2007 and 2017, the hotel had to call the police multiple times a day. She also said she believed there were over 80 deaths during her time working there alone.

One of the most famous deaths tied to The Cecil Hotel is that of 21-year-old British Columbia native Elisa Lam. The traveling student checked into the hotel on January 26, 2013, and was originally staying in a hostel-style room with roommates. However, there were complaints made about her behavior so she was moved into a single room.

Then on January 31, Lam was declared to be missing after her parents didn't hear from her on her checkout date. The police investigated her disappearance, looking through the items she left behind, searching the hotel, reviewing security footage, and interviewing employees.

While the hotel didn't have cameras on every floor (including the fifth floor where Lam stayed), police eventually found one notable piece of footage of her in the hotel elevator. In it, she clicked nearly all the floor buttons and the doors wouldn't close. Her behavior and movements seemed odd, and she looked like she was hiding or conversing with an unseen person outside the elevator.

While the doors stayed open, Lam walked in and out to the hall before eventually walking away. There was no footage of her leaving the hotel.

While police hoped releasing the footage would help, Lam's behavior led to a string of conspiracy theories online about the hotel being haunted, as shown in "Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel."

Police found through Lam's very public blogging life that she was suffering from depression and bipolar disorder, which may have explained her behavior and disappearance.

Weeks later, hotel guests began complaining about the water pressure and its taste. A hotel employee then found Lam's body floating in a closed water tank on the roof. Her death was ruled as an accidental drowning, without physical trauma, suspected foul play, or drugs in her system.

However, the details surrounding Lam's story remained murky and the public had questions over how she got up to the roof without guests or workers noticing her, how she didn't trigger any emergency exits, and how she closed the water tank. The police believe she climbed out of her fifth-floor room and up the fire escapes until she reached the roof.

After this, The Cecil Hotel saw an uptick in bookings, apparently from people who were intrigued by its history and reputation.

After Lam's death, The Cecil Hotel inspired the fifth season of Ryan Murphy's "American Horror Story" anthology TV series. It included its usual core cast and starred Lady Gaga.

In "American Horror Story: Hotel," the Hotel Cortez was built in the 1920s, had an art-deco design, and many drug-addicted guests, much like the Cecil Hotel. But the most obvious parallels to the Cecil were the inclusion of the characters Black Dahlia and Richard Ramirez.

In a 2015 panel for the Television Critics Association, Murphy cited his inspiration for the season, saying, "A girl got in an elevator in a downtown hotel. She was never seen again," according to People, an apparent reference to Lam's footage and death at the hotel.

In 2014, the property was sold to New York City hotelier Richard Board for $30 million. Then in 2016, Simon Baron Development acquired it as the owner and developer, and it was announced that the hotel would undergo a gut renovation with plans to become an upscale boutique hotel with co-living rental units.

In February 2017, Los Angeles' city council declared it a "historic-cultural monument," or landmark. Later in 2017, the hotel closed, mostly abandoned apart from renovation crews and guards who were on the property on and off. Plans fell through on it becoming a luxury hotel and it wasn't known what the Cecil would become or if it would reopen.

Content creator Peet Montzingo moved into an apartment across the street from The Cecil Hotel, which had been closed since 2017. He didn't know much about the Cecil when he moved, but it's since become a major part of his life.

With four large windows facing the front of the hotel, Peet often filmed YouTube and TikTok videos of what he described as eerie, unexplainable activity. According to his footage, balcony doors would unexpectedly open and shut, curtains would move, and room lights would turn on. In addition, he said he's seen many apparitions and shadows in the hotel's windows.

"The first thing I ever saw was a man on a balcony smoking a cigar. It was at 2 a.m. and it looked like he was looking at me," Peet told Insider. "I ran from one side of my apartment to the other to see if his head followed me and it in fact did."

Peet theorized it may have been a figment of his imagination, a homeless person who entered, or even a ghost.

Another time, Peet said he saw a silhouette of a person hanging on the top floor of the hotel.

"I didn't call the cops because the hotel was closed so I didn't want it to come across like I was delusional," he said. In a video, he said the shadow was gone a few hours later.

Lisa Rios, project manager of communications at the Skid Row Housing Trust, which now manages the building, said four people lived in the building between 2017 and 2021, but that they weren't aware of a death occurring there at that time.

After years of recording the hotel's happenings and attempting to gain access, Peet said a guard finally let him in at nighttime on July 11, 2021 — something that building management didn't clear, according to the Skid Row Housing Trust.

In his YouTube video footage of the experience, the lights are on and it appears to be in the middle of a renovation.

"I did notice on the top three floors that the further you went up, the scarier it felt," Peet said, adding, "Every guard I talked to – even if they don't believe in paranormal stuff – agreed that they sense strange things on the top floors."

Peet even visited Ramirez's room, room 1419.

"I definitely felt like I was being watched, which was freaky. As soon as I left his room, I heard this weird wind howl. It was very eerie," Peet said.

When asked if he thinks the hotel is haunted, Peet took a few moments to consider. "I think it's a mixture of bad energy, being haunted, and the unfortunate events that have happened there. I think it's a hybrid," he said.

The Cecil opened its doors for the first time to the Discovery+ show "Ghost Adventures" in 2020. In a two-hour special that aired on January 4, 2021, host Zak Bagans and a team of paranormal investigators explore the hotel.

Capturing odd visual and audio recordings along with experiencing "physical afflictions," the team came to the conclusion that the dark energy of the past is still affecting the hotel today, according to the Travel Channel.

Then in the 2021 Netflix limited series "Crime Scene: A Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel," released on February 10, 2021, the hotel cooperated again to give a look into its past. The four episodes primarily focus on Lam's case. Hotel staff like then-manager Amy Price, police, and investigators were interviewed about the case.

Peet said he had issues with the documentary and its depiction of Skid Row, which he says is about a mile away from the hotel today. The Skid Row Housing Trust said the traditional Skid Row boundary does include the Cecil Hotel.

Simon Baron, the owner and a for-profit developer, had new plans after his boutique hotel plans fell through. It was to collaborate with the Skid Row Housing Trust, the current property manager, to make the building fully dedicated to affordable housing.

Through "adaptive reuse" — a process that helps repurpose a building at costs much lower than creating a new building — The Cecil Hotel was able to renovate for $75 million instead of $300 million, according to LAist.

On December 14, 2021, Cecil Hotel Apartments opened. The 600 units range between 160 and 175 square feet and the common areas include bathrooms and kitchens, which is similar to the hotel's earlier days. It also offers guarded entry and case management services on-site.

The rooms are exclusively available to rent by low-income Los Angelenos who earn between 30% and 60% of the area's median income of $24,850 annually. With rent ranging between $900 and $1,200 a month, tenants can use Section 8 housing vouchers to help pay.

Peet attended the Cecil Hotel Apartments' ribbon-cutting ceremony, which he believed was open to the public and press, but he was promptly escorted out. He thinks the guard recognized him from his videos.

"They just came up to me and kicked me out. I got threatened and I don't really understand why exactly that was," Peet said.

The Skid Row Housing Trust said the event was invite-only, including "elected officials, community partners, and credentialed press."

Peet thinks the hotel's entrance is now in the back of the building, since the front — still seen with Cecil Hotel signage — is locked and covered with paper. He also said he's seen multiple ambulances and firetrucks pull up to the hotel.

Since it opened almost four months ago, Peet said the hotel's activity has been low-key and he doesn't believe it's near its 600 renter accommodations yet. The Trust says they're in lease-up, meaning the period from launching throughout the first year where the business is growing and not yet at at least 90% occupancy, according to Rent Vision.