Pod Insights The Why Files: Operation Podcast Strange But True: Toxic Lady, The Cecil Hotel, Farmhouse Murders About this episode Gather round, this happened. A nurse draws blood and collapses before she can speak. A Bavarian farmer finds footprints in the snow that only go one way. A hotel guest complains the water tastes sweet.
Three stories. Three cases that were investigated, closed, and never fully explained.
Gloria Ramirez turned a hospital trauma room into a chemical event that sent five people to intensive care. The Gruber family was killed one by one in their own barn — and the killer stayed for days.
Elisa Lam checked into a Los Angeles hotel and vanished. Nineteen days later, the guests found out why the water tasted wrong.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:39 AJ Gentile? Gather round. This happened in March 1922. A farmer in Bavaria walked outside and found footprints in the snow that came from the edge of the forest and led straight to his farmhouse. He followed them all the way to his door. Then he looked for tracks leading back. There were none. Someone had walked out of the woods, come to his home, and never left. Andreas Gruber told his neighbors about the footprints. He told them about the strange sounds in his attic at night, a newspaper nobody ordered, a set of keys that didn't belong to anyone in the family. One neighbor offered him a gun. He turned it down. Four days later, everyone in his house was dead.
1:28 AJ Gentile? Hinterkaifich is about an hour north of Munich, at the end of a dirt road that cut through dense forest. The name means "behind Kaifich," a tiny hamlet nearby. The farm was past the last house, past the last field, deep in the woods where the road ended, isolated. Andreas Gruber lived there with his wife Kozelia, their widow daughter Victoria, and Victoria's two children, seven-year-old Osnib Kozelia and two-year-old Josef. The family kept to themselves. Most of the people in the area avoided the place entirely. Andreas had been convicted of incest with his daughter Victoria in 1915. He served a year in prison. When Victoria gave birth to Josef in 1919, the paternity was an open secret in the village. The family's maid quit six months before the murders.
2:11 AJ Gentile? She told people the farmhouse was haunted. Footsteps were heard in the attic constantly. There was a feeling of being watched. She left and didn't come back. For six months, the family had no maid. Nobody in the village wanted the job. Then in early March, things got worse. Andreas found a broken lock on the machine room door. He searched the attic after hearing footsteps in the middle of the night. He found nothing, but the sounds continued. The night before the murders, Victoria left the farmhouse after a violent fight with Andreas. She was found hours later in the forest and came back to the farm. On March 31st, a new maid finally arrived. Her name was Maria Baumgartner. She was 44 years old, from the next town over.
2:53 AJ Gentile? Her sister walked her to the farm that afternoon, helped her settle in, and left before dark. Maria's sister didn't know about the footprints. She didn't know about the attic. She didn't know about any of it. But she was the last outsider to see anyone at that farm alive.
3:16 AJ Gentile? That evening, the family was lured to the barn one at a time. Andreas went first, then his wife Kazilia, then Victoria, then seven-year-old Kazilia. One by one, they walked in, and one by one, they were hit with a pickaxe. Each victim was hit in the head, but it wasn't sloppy. The blows were precise and measured. Whoever swung that axe knew what they were doing. The tool itself was unusual. Andreas had built it himself. He tied an iron blade around a handle and secured everything with bolts. And at the end, a single bolt that stuck out an inch and a half past the blade. He used it for killing pigs. Someone used it on his family.
3:56 AJ Gentile? The older Kazilia showed signs of strangulation along with seven blows to the skull. Victoria's skull had nine wounds. Andreas' face was unrecognizable. His cheekbones were exposed through torn skin. And seven-year-old Kazilia's jaw was shattered. The four bodies were stacked in the barn and covered with hay. The killer then crossed the yard to the house. Two-year-old Josef was asleep in his crib in Victoria's room. He was killed by a single blow to the face. Maria was in her room on her first night at a new job at a new farm. She was killed in her bed, multiple blows to her head. Both bodies were covered. Maria with her bed sheets and Josef with one of his mother's dresses. Six people dead, one weapon, one brutal night. But, the killer didn't leave.
4:41 AJ Gentile? For the next several days, someone lived in the Gruber farmhouse with six dead bodies. They even fed the cattle, they ate the family's food. They kept the fire burning in the fireplace. Smoke rose from the chimney, neighbors saw it from a distance. They assumed the Grubers were going about their usual routine. They had no idea, the farm was a bloodbath.
5:12 AJ Gentile? At 3:00 in the morning on April 1st, the night of the murders, a local farmer walked home past the forest by Hinterkaifig. He saw two figures standing at the tree line. When they noticed him, they turned away. The next day, two coffee sellers showed up to take an order. Nobody answered the door. Seven-year-old Kazilia didn't show up for school. She missed the next day too. Victoria missed choir practice on Sunday, she'd never missed choir. The following night, another man walked past the farm. He saw smoke coming from the oven. Someone came out of the house and aimed a lantern directly in his face, blinding him. He said the smoke smelled foul. Nobody ever investigated what was really burning in that oven. Mail piled up at the post office. A mechanic came on April 4th to fix an engine. He waited an hour, nobody showed.
5:55 AJ Gentile? He did the repair alone and left after four and a half hours. He never saw or heard anyone. That afternoon, a local farmer named Lorenz Schlittenbauer sent his teenage son and young stepson to check on the family. Schlittenbauer had been involved with Victoria. He claimed to be Josef's father. There was bad blood between the families. The boys came back and said they hadn't seen a soul. So, Schlittenbauer brought two neighbors and went to see for himself. They found all the doors locked. They broke through a gate to reach the barn. Inside, under the hay, they found four bodies. The two neighbors stopped. Schlittenbauer didn't. He walked straight to the front door of the house and unlocked it. For some reason, he had a key.
6:39 AJ Gentile? He went inside alone. Four bodies in the barn, a killer unaccounted for. And Schlittenbauer walked into that house like he knew exactly what he'd find. Over the next few years, Schlittenbauer said things about the murders that only one person could know.
7:03 AJ Gentile? Seven-year-old Kazilia survived for hours after the attack. She lay in the hay next to the bodies of her mother and grandparents in the dark. She tore out her own hair in clumps. By the time investigators arrived from Munich, 45 miles away, dozens of locals had already walked through the crime scene. They'd moved bodies. Somebody had cooked a meal in the kitchen. The scene was contaminated before the investigation started. The autopsies were performed in the farmhouse courtyard. Each body carried out from the barn one at a time. Police ruled out robbery. A large amount of cash was found untouched. Nothing was missing. One theory was that the victims had been drawn to the barn by restless livestock, but noise from the barn could be heard from inside the house. Someone made them go. Schlittenbauer was the primary suspect. He lived nearby.
7:48 AJ Gentile? He knew the property. He'd been involved with Victoria. The people with him during the discovery said he was too calm, and when asked why he entered the house alone with a potential killer still inside, he said he went to look for Josef. These answers were odd, but there was no physical evidence tying him to the crime. Over the years, Schlittenbauer made comments that raised suspicion, details only the killer would know. In 1925, a local teacher found Schlittenbauer at the demolished farm site. When asked what he was doing there, he said the killer's attempt to bury the bodies had been stopped by the frozen ground. Nobody asked him about burying the bodies. Nobody told him the ground was frozen. Over 100 suspects were investigated, even Carl Gabriel, Victoria's dead husband. He'd gone off to fight in the First World War.
8:32 AJ Gentile? He was reported killed at the Battle of Aris in 1914. His body was never recovered. After the Second World War, German prisoners released from Soviet captivity claimed a German-speaking Soviet officer had told them he was the Hentrich Iwek killer. The lead went nowhere, like all the others. There were six bodies, but no suspects. In 1955, after over 30 years of dead ends, the case was finally closed.
9:09 AJ Gentile? Less than a year after the murders, the farm was torn down. During demolition, workers found something in the attic: a second pickaxe, covered in dry blood. They'd found a penknife buried in the hay, evidence missed by every investigator who walked through. The hiding spots weren't random. The axe was hidden in a space above the kitchen with a false wall. You'd have to know the farmhouse well to know that space existed. The skulls of all six victims had been removed during the autopsies and sent to Munich for study. Somewhere during WWII, the skulls disappeared. The key physical evidence in Germany's most famous unsolved murder: gone. In 1927, five years after the murders, a stranger stopped a man on the road nearby. He asked questions about the killings.
9:53 AJ Gentile? Then he announced, loudly, that he was the murderer, and he ran into the forest. He was never identified. In 2007, police academy students reopened the case as a forensic exercise. They landed on a name, but living relatives threatened legal action. The name has never been released. A hundred and three years later, the case is still open, and a family is buried together in a plot. Six bodies without their heads, six people still waiting for justice.
10:45 AJ Gentile? Gather round. This happened in February 1994. Riverside General Hospital. The ER was quiet until paramedics burst through the doors with Gloria Ramirez. She was still conscious, but she was dying. Doctors swarmed her, and they thought it was a standard procedure, until they could open her shirt. An oily sheen covered her skin. It smelled like garlic. Not the smell of food, something sharper, almost metallic. A nurse drew blood, and the stench of ammonia hit the room. Then she saw something in the vial: tiny, tan-colored crystals floating in Gloria's blood. The nurse was confused. She looked up to speak, then her eyes rolled back and she hit the floor.
11:31 AJ Gentile? Then it started to spread.
11:44 AJ Gentile? It started with the nurse who drew the blood. She collapsed mid-sentence. Her face hit the floor before anyone could catch her. Dr. Julie Gorchinsky, the medical resident, knelt down to help. She thought the nurse had a panic attack, maybe stress, or maybe she skipped lunch. She went to check the nurse's pulse, and that's when she felt it. Heat was coming off of Gloria's body. Not fever heat, chemical heat, the kind that burns your nostrils before it reaches your lungs. Dr. Gorchinsky's throat started to close up. Her chest was tightening like there was a hand around her throat, and she knew what was in that air. Whatever killed Gloria was still in the room. She tried to stand, tried to back away from the gurney, but her legs gave out. She couldn't feel her feet.
12:27 AJ Gentile? She made it three steps toward the nurse's station, then she collapsed and started seizing on the floor.
12:34 AJ Gentile? The respiratory therapist was next. She bagged the patient, squeezed air into Gloria's lungs. Then her arms started tingling, then numbness in her chest, then nothing. She dropped where she stood. A few minutes in, the trauma room looked like a battlefield. Staff collapsed one by one, some unconscious, some convulsing, some crawling toward the door on their hands and knees. Nurses who stayed upright dragged the fallen ones toward the exit. Their own legs went numb a few feet in. They dropped their colleagues and then started to crawl. Pagers went off, unanswered. Monitors screamed on empty beds. The air turned into poison. It didn't smell like a hospital anymore. It smelled like a chemical plant.
13:16 AJ Gentile? The garlic hit first, then the ammonia, sharp enough to make your eyes water and your throat close up. The ER director knew what was happening. This was a mass casualty event. But the casualties weren't patients, they were his own staff. He grabbed the wall to stay upright. His own lungs started to burn. He made a call to evacuate. Nurses wheeled gurneys into the parking lot. IV bags were swinging from poles. Patients with broken bones, chest pains, lacerations, went out into the cold February night. Someone called 911 on the hospital. The hospital went into lockdown, and the staff sealed Trauma Room 1 with plastic sheeting and duct tape. They made it a containment zone. Inside, a skeleton crew stayed with Gloria.
14:00 AJ Gentile? They wore full hazmat gear: protective suits, respirators, face shields. They looked like astronauts. From the other side of the plastic sheeting, the rest of the hospital just watched. Doctors in scrubs, patients in gowns, nurses frozen in the hallway. All of them at a safe distance, watching their coworkers die. One nurse prayed. Patients were crying, but nobody moved closer. The crew inside the sheeting worked on Gloria. They pushed drugs into her body. They tried to restart her heart, but the poison worked too fast. Forty-five minutes after she arrived, Gloria Ramirez was dead. And whatever poison that room was still there.
14:56 AJ Gentile? The parking lot became a decontamination zone. Staff stripped off their scrubs and stood shivering in the dark while firefighters hosed them down, bagged their clothes as hazardous waste, and scrubbed their skin with chemical neutralizers. It looked like a nerve gas response. Twenty-three people reported symptoms that night. Five went to intensive care. Dr. Julie Korchinsky suffered the worst. She spent two weeks in the ICU. Her body shut down piece by piece. She developed hepatitis. Her pancreas shut down. She couldn't hold a fork to eat. But the worst damage was inside her bones. Doctors called it avascular necrosis. Her bone marrow died. The tissue that produces blood cells rotted from the inside out.
15:38 AJ Gentile? Whatever came out of Gloria's blood was potent enough to destroy tissue, cell by cell. The Riverside County Coroner's Office was terrified. They had a body that was a biological weapon and no idea what made it dangerous. They refused to perform a standard autopsy. Instead, they called in specialists and built a sealed examination chamber.
15:59 AJ Gentile? Three pathologists suited up in airtight hazmat gear and entered the chamber. They moved slowly, carefully, taking samples of everything. Blood, bile, lung tissue, liver, kidneys. Every sample went into a sealed container. Every container into a sealed box. One of the pathologists later said he held his breath the whole time. The air in the chamber felt thick. They expected to find something obvious: a pesticide, an industrial solvent, or a drug overdose. Something that explained how one woman's blood could take down an entire ER. They ran every toxicology test available. The results came back clean. No poisons, no heavy metals, no chemical weapons, no illegal drugs.
16:42 AJ Gentile? Just normal therapeutic levels of Tylenol and lidocaine. Standard medications for someone in her condition. The county didn't know what to tell the public. They didn't have any answers, so they lied. They held a press conference and announced that the hospital staff suffered from mass hysteria. They said the garlic smell was from medical equipment. They said the nurses fainted from stress, and the others followed suit. A psychological chain reaction. The medical staff was furious. Mass hysteria doesn't cause seizures. Stress doesn't cause bone marrow necrosis. Panic attacks don't land five people in intensive care for weeks. They knew what they experienced. They smelled the chemicals. They saw the crystals in the blood. They felt their lungs burning.
17:27 AJ Gentile? Several of the staff from that night on never worked in an ER again. Some developed chronic health problems. A few left medicine altogether. Then there was the investigator. The county coroner's office assigned their top investigator to the case. She was good at her job. Sharp, thorough. One month into the investigation, she killed herself. Her boss said she may have been under pressure from the case. He didn't say what kind of pressure. Meanwhile, Gloria's family demanded answers. They hired a private pathologist to do their own autopsy. When he arrived at the morgue, the county refused to release the body. They said she was too dangerous to handle.
18:07 AJ Gentile? For two months, Gloria Ramirez lay in a deep freeze while lawyers argued over her remains. When they finally released her, they took no chances. She didn't get a standard coffin. They placed her body in a sealed aluminum container and welded it shut. They told the family to never open it. Not ever.
18:28 AJ Gentile? Then they buried her body, deep underground. Just like they do with radioactive waste.
18:41 AJ Gentile? Gloria had cervical cancer. She lived in constant pain. Investigators traced it to dimethyl sulf oxide, a solvent people put on their skin in the 90s as a home painkiller. When paramedics gave her oxygen in the ambulance, the DMSO reacted. It converted into dimethyl sulfone. Dimethyl sulfone crystallizes at room temperature. The same beige crystals the nurse saw in the vial. Then the defibrillator shocks converted it again into dimethyl sulfate, a compound used in chemical warfare that destroys cells on contact and smells like garlic. Even trace amounts can be fatal. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore tried to recreate the reaction in a lab. They couldn't. Nobody ever did.
19:26 AJ Gentile? They tried every combination of temperature, pressure, and chemistry they can think of. The quantities involved made no sense. Far more DMSO than anyone would smear on their skin for pain relief. The math never worked. The reaction that killed Gloria Ramirez only happened once. At one time. The case went into textbooks as an unsolved toxicology puzzle. And 30 years later, nobody has an answer. The physical evidence is gone. They destroyed the blood samples. The syringe with the crystals got thrown away. And the body is buried deep underground. Gloria Ramirez entered history as "The Toxic Lady", "A Medical Curiosity", "A Cautionary Tale". But she was more than that. She was a mother of two.
20:09 AJ Gentile? She went to the hospital because she was scared and in pain. She went there for help. Instead, she became a biohazard. The hospital is still there. It changed its name, but the building stands. The ER is still open. Trauma Room 1 is still in use. Patients come in with broken bones and chest pains and lacerations, just like they did back then. And nurses wheel them right through that very same door. Most of the staff from 1994 have moved on. A few veterans remain, nurses and technicians who worked that night, who remember what happened, who never got the answers. They still work their shifts, they still walk those halls. But they don't use Trauma Room 1 for the six patients anymore. They say it doesn't feel right.
20:52 AJ Gentile? The aluminum container is still buried deep under Riverside. Nobody's ever broken the seal. Gloria's family never asked, and the county never offered. Whatever's left of her, whatever made her body a weapon that night, it's still down there. And nobody is brave enough to find out why.
21:29 AJ Gentile? Gather round. This happened on January 31st, 2013. A security camera inside an elevator at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles recorded two and a half minutes of footage that still hasn't been explained. A 21-year-old woman steps inside. She presses every button on the panel, every single one. Then she backs into the corner and waits. The doors don't close. She leans out, looks both ways down the hallway, and ducks back in. She steps out and begins talking to someone. Her hands moving in strange gestures, like she's explaining something urgent to a person who isn't there. She backs away slowly, then disappears down the hallway. The elevator doors close, then open, close again. No one is there. Nineteen days later, hotel guests started complaining that their water tasted sweet.
22:27 AJ Gentile? The Cecil Hotel opened on December 20th, 1924, on South Main Street in downtown LA. 700 rooms, marble lobby, crystal chandeliers, built for traveling businessmen and tourists. Within five years, the stock market crashed, and the Great Depression turned the neighborhood into Skid Row. The Cecil became a flop house, cheap rooms and drifters. A place where people went when they had nowhere else to go. The deaths started almost immediately. In the 1930s alone, six people jumped from the upper floors. A soldier fell from the top of the building. A telephone worker swallowed cyanide inside his room. In 1944, a teenage mother gave birth on one of the upper floors and threw the baby from the window. In 1962, a woman jumped from the ninth floor.
23:12 AJ Gentile? She landed on someone walking past the hotel. Both died on impact. In 1964, a retired telephone operator named Goldie Osgood was found dead in her room. She'd been raped, stabbed, and beaten. A suspect was picked up walking nearby in bloody clothes, but released. Nobody was ever charged. Then the serial killers moved in. In 1985, Richard Ramirez rented a room on the top floor for $14 a night. The Night Stalker. He killed at least 13 people across L.A. that summer. Home invasions, sexual assaults, mutilations. After each murder, he'd come back to the Cecil in the middle of the night, strip off his bloody clothes in the alley, and walk through the lobby in his underwear. The other residents saw him, nobody called the police.
23:56 AJ Gentile? At the Cecil, you minded your own business. Six years later, an Austrian journalist named Jack Unterweger checked into the Cecil Hotel. He said he was writing about prostitution in L.A. for an Austrian magazine. He was charming. He even convinced the LAPD to let him ride along with vice cops. The police had no idea they were taking Unterweger on scouting trips. Unterweger had already served 15 years in an Austrian prison for strangling an 18-year-old girl with her own bra. He was finally released. He said he was a changed man, but the only thing that changed was his address. He strangled three women in his room at the Cecil, same method every time. The hotel earned a nickname: Hotel Death. Then, in 2013, a 21-year-old college student from Vancouver checked in.
24:52 AJ Gentile? Alyssa Lam was a student, the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong. She was outgoing. She had a blog where she wrote about fashion and life. She called her parents every single day. On January 26th, she checked into the Cecil, recently rebranded as Stay On Main. The hotel wanted to attract younger travelers who wouldn't Google the building's history, and it worked. The Cecil may have had a new name, but it still had the same hallways, the same walls, and the same dark history. Alyssa was on a budget, so she was assigned a room with a few other students. But within two days, her roommates asked to have her moved. She was leaving notes on their pillows: "Go home, go away." She would lock her roommates out of the room, then ask them for a password to be let back in. The hotel moved her to her own room.
25:34 AJ Gentile? Alyssa was on five medications to treat bipolar disorder. If she stopped taking her meds, she would have episodes. A few days before she disappeared, she went to a live taping of Conan in Burbank. Security removed her for her disruptive behavior. On January 31st, the day she was supposed to check out, her parents didn't hear from her. They called the police. They flew to LA. Police searched the hotel with dogs. They went through the hallways, the stairwells, the roof. Nothing. The manager of a local bookstore was the only person who remembered seeing Alyssa that day. She was friendly, talkative, buying gifts for her family. Nobody else saw her leave the building. Two weeks later, the LAPD released the elevator footage. The video went viral. News outlets around the world picked it up.
26:18 Speaker 03 This surveillance video shows the UBC student acting strangely the night she went missing. Now let's take a look at the footage that is, by all accounts, quite bizarre. It shows 21-year-old Alyssa Lam acting erratically, getting into an elevator and pressing several buttons. At one point, she appears to hide and also gets in and out of that elevator a number of times.
26:39 Speaker 04 But then, the video takes a strange turn. She punches all of the buttons on the control panel, then waits. She steps in and out several times. She even appears to be gesturing in the hallway, although it's not clear if someone is there or not.
26:52 Speaker 05 This, take a look, is 21-year-old Alyssa Lam riding an elevator at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. So she peers out the doors, runs back in, and then presses several buttons. Strange behavior. But what happened afterward is even more bizarre.
27:10 AJ Gentile? For nineteen days after that footage was recorded, the C-SIL kept operating. Guests checked in and checked out. They slept in their rooms, they brushed their teeth, they drank from the tap. Then the complaints started. Low water pressure, water coming out of faucets, dark, almost black. Guests said it tasted strange, some said sweet, others said it smelled like something organic. On the morning of February 19th, a maintenance worker climbed to the roof to check the water supply. The C-SIL had four large tanks up there, each holding a thousand gallons. He found one of the hatches open, he looked inside. Alyssa Lam was floating face up in the water. She was naked, her clothes floated next to her, the same outfit from the elevator video, coated in sandy residue. Her watch and room key floated nearby.
27:54 AJ Gentile? Her body had started to decompose, she'd been in the water tank for nineteen days. The C-SIL had about 600 guests during that period. Every one of them had been drinking, showering, brushing their teeth, and cooking with water from a tank containing a decomposing human body. The coffee shop had been making coffee with it for almost three weeks. Health officials issued a do not drink order after the discovery, nineteen days too late. The tank was drained to remove her body. The coroner said she died from accidental drowning. Bipolar disorder was listed as a factor. There was no sign of physical trauma, no sexual assault, no drugs, no alcohol. It was an accident. That was the official answer. But there were problems with the official answer.
28:49 AJ Gentile? The roof access doors of the C-SIL were locked. An alarm was supposed to go off if anyone opened them. No alarm went off the night Alyssa disappeared. The water tank sat on elevated platforms. The only way up was a ladder bolted to the side. The hatches were heavy, designed to keep debris and animals out. Alyssa weighed about 115 pounds. She was found naked inside a sealed water tank. No one could explain how she got up there, opened the hatch, or got inside. The elevator footage has been watched hundreds of millions of times. Footage of Alyssa talking to someone. People still slow it down, frame by frame, looking for a shadow in the hallway, a second person just out of the camera's view, a hand reaching toward her. They never found anyone.
29:32 AJ Gentile? Then, there were the coincidences. At the time of Alyssa's death, a tuberculosis outbreak was spreading through Skid Row, just a few blocks from the Cecil. Health teams were screening homeless people within walking distance of the hotel. The test they used to detect TB was called "Lamb Alyssa." The same name, in the same order, deployed within walking distance of where her body was decomposing, in a water tank. In 2005, a horror film called "Dark Water" was released. Tenants of an apartment building noticed their water has turned dark and tastes foul. Someone traces the problem to a rooftop water tank, inside the body of a young girl who'd been reported missing. The plot of a horror movie played out in real life, eight years later, in the Cecil Hotel, in Hotel Death. Accident? Coincidence?
30:17 AJ Gentile? A building with a body count? Nobody was satisfied with the official answer, but nobody had a better one.
30:37 AJ Gentile? The coroner said "accident." The police closed the case, and the evidence supports it, but it takes some work to get there. The elevator footage is the reason this case went viral. It looks like a woman being stalked by something invisible. But if you watch it, knowing that Alyssa had bipolar disorder and had stopped taking her medication, it looks different.
30:56 AJ Gentile? The button pressing, the hiding, the conversation with nobody, these are symptoms. Psychomotor agitation, paranoid behavior, disorganized speech. The footage isn't a mystery, it's a medical event recorded on camera. The roof access is the other big problem. The doors were locked, the hatches on the tanks were heavy. A 115-pound woman getting into a water tank alone seems impossible. But investigators found that the alarm on the roof door had been broken for months, and the fire escape gave direct access to the roof from outside of the building. No locked doors required. The Cecil was not a secure building. People climbed to the roof all the time. The hatch was open, the lid wasn't locked, she could have lifted it. And most of the photos of the roof make it seem impossible that Alyssa could climb into
31:39 AJ Gentile? the tank, but there's one photo that people rarely see. Right next to the water tank was a ledge. She could have easily hopped from the ledge onto the tank. She was on the roof taking pictures, we know this. Maybe she was trying to get a better view. Why were Alyssa's clothes off? That could be something called paradoxical undressing. Hypothermic people can actually feel an intense but false sensation of heat. They start taking off their clothes even though they're freezing to death. This is most often found in hypothermia cases, and the water in the tank was cold. The medications in her system support the timeline. She'd been taking her meds inconsistently. Bipolar episodes can escalate quickly when medication is interrupted. Paranoia, risk-taking, altered perception of danger.
32:21 AJ Gentile? A water tank on a dark rooftop might not register as a threat to someone in that state. There's no evidence of foul play, no defensive wounds, no DNA from another person, no sign of sexual assault. Nobody on the hotel's cameras who shouldn't have been there. The coincidences are just coincidences. The TV test was named Lam-Alyssa decades before Alyssa Lam was born. Dark Water was based on a Japanese short story from 1996. These things line up the way things sometimes do when millions of people are looking for patterns. Maybe the coroner was right. A young woman in crisis, off for medication, wandering a building in L.A. A building that's the worst place for someone to lose touch with reality. A building where serial killers walk the halls in bloody clothes and nobody look twice. But that elevator footage is still out there.
33:04 AJ Gentile? She presses the buttons, she hides in the corner, she talks to no one, the doors won't close, and then she walks away. This case is probably solved, but something about it doesn't sit right. For nineteen days, the body of a dead girl floated in a hotel water tank. For nineteen days, hotel guests drank the strange-tasted water. And for nineteen days, none of the guests at Hotel Death thought to ask why.
33:41 AJ Gentile? Thank you so much for hanging out today. My name is AJ. This is The Y-Files and that was a campfire story. No debunking, no analysis, just a creepy story to scare you and the kids. And that one is true and unsolved. Now, if you had fun, I'd appreciate it if you can like, subscribe, comment, and share. That stuff really helps. And like most topics we cover here, today's was recommended by you, so if there's a story you'd like to see, go to theyfiles.com/tips or send us an email. We'd love to cover that story. And if you'd like to hear any of these campfire stories expanded into a full episode, there's a few I'd like to do, then definitely let me know. Remember, The Y-Files is also a podcast. You can take us on the road. I post deep dives into the stories we cover on the channel. I also post episodes that wouldn't be allowed on the channel. The podcast is called The Y-Files,
34:24 AJ Gentile? Operation Podcast, and it's available everywhere. And if you're listening on an audio platform, do me a favor, hit the thumbs up, or the like, or the follow, or whatever those buttons are. Those really do help. Now, if you need more Y-Files in your life, check out our Discord. We're about to hit 100,000 members over there. It's a lot of fun. It's a really supportive community. There's someone on there 24/7, and it's free to join. Speaking of 24/7, check out our 24/7, I'm plowing through the plugs. Speaking of 24/7, make sure you check out our 24/7 stream of The Y-Files backstage. Over there, we run episodes back to back with some fun content in between, and the live chat is super, super fun. Special thanks to our patrons who make this channel possible and make every episode of The Y-Files happen. Every episode is dedicated to our Patreon members. I could not do this without you.
35:06 AJ Gentile? And if you'd like to support the channel, keep us going, consider becoming a member on Patreon. For as little as $3 a month, get access to perks like videos early with no commercials, exclusive merch, and two private live streams every week, just for you to hear the whistle in my teeth. It's because I'm going too fast. The private live streams are a lot of fun. For members only, my webcam is on. Everyone on the team has their camera on. You can talk to all of us. Turn your camera on, jump up on stage, ask a question. It's a lot of, I think it's the best perk there is. Another great way to support the channel, grab something from the Y-Files store. That is shop at theyfiles.com. You'll find it. But if you're gonna buy merch, become a member on YouTube. YouTube members get 10% off every Everything in the YF house store forever. So if you're gonna spend forty bucks on t-shirts and festival mugs,
35:49 AJ Gentile? become a member on YouTube for three bucks, pays for itself. And that money goes to the team, that's me. Those are the plugs. I got through them as fast as I could. And that's gonna do it. Till next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.
36:19 Speaker 06 I played for Libya in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. Songs singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends. And it never ends. No, it never ends.
36:56 Speaker 06 I fear the crap cat and got stuck inside Mel's home with MKL truck. I'm being only too aware. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone? On a film set, were the shadow people there? The Rockwell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told. And his name was Cole. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ too. And the whippers on the beat all through the night.
37:37 Speaker 06 All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So the whippers on the beat all through the night.
38:02 Speaker 07 The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come To have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets circle to Project Stargate And what the dark watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The Black Knight satellite told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights when they change. And the wind blows up and we all through the night.
38:43 Speaker 07 All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So the wind blows up and we all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights when they change. And the wind blows up and we all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So the wind blows up and we all through the night.
39:22 Speaker 07 Girlie loves to dance. Yeah, girlie loves to dance on the dance floor. Because she is a camel and camels love to dance When the feeling is right on wasting time.
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Previous The Basement: Jeffrey Mishlove | Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness. It Filters It Next The Basement: Nerdrotic | From Folsom Prison to Millions of Subscribers Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated