Netflix's latest true-crime series Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel delves into the complexities of the Elisa Lam case, which largely inspired season 5 of Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story. Now called Stay on Main, the Cecil Hotel is one of the oldest budget hotels in LA that provides affordable lodgings to tourists, travelers, and people in need of housing. On February 1, 2013, a guest by the name of Elisa Lam mysteriously disappeared without a trace, joining the lengthy history of bizarre happenings that took place within the hotel's walls. Approximately two years later, Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story: Hotel premiered with its take on the horrors of Elisa Lam's case and the Cecil Hotel.
Starring Lady Gaga as The Countess, the vampiric owner of Cecil Hotel stand-in, the Hotel Cortez, the series features a location filled with death and murder, as well as overdoses, drug addiction, sexual assault, suicide, serial killings, and more. While it may have been one of the most gruesome additions to the American Horror Story timeline, nearly every incident that took place in the series directly mirrored a true event that happened at the Cecil Hotel. Elisa Lam's case brought worldwide attention to the real-life horrors of the hotel, which prompted a wave of interest in retelling her story and documenting the horrors that have taken place on its grounds over the decades. Ryan Murphy was one such creator that grew interested in the case, and it served as inspiration for American Horror Story: Hotel.
The Elisa Lam case loosely inspired Murphy to create American Horror Story: Hotel thanks to the hotel's lengthy history of bizarre and violent events. Being that every season of the show is interconnected, the Cecil Hotel serves as the ideal location to further their connectivity. Elisa Lam's case and the Cecil Hotel served as one of the greatest inspirations for a season that could be interconnected in every way imaginable.
According to historical documentation on the Cecil Hotel, Beth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia, stayed there prior to her tragic and mysterious death in 1947. In American Horror Story: Murder House, she makes a brief appearance as a patient to Dr. Charles Montgomery (Matt Ross), creating an undeniable connection between the real hotel and the series. The most blatant source of inspiration, however, came from a nefarious serial killer who took up lodging in the Cecil Hotel in the midst of his crime spree.
Richard Ramirez, who recently received his own Netflix's original series titled Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, stayed at the Cecil Hotel in 1985. In American Horror Story: Hotel, he is one of the attendees at James March's (Evan Peters) Devil's Night dinner alongside Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, the Zodiac Killer, and Aileen Wuornos. While the connection between most of the serial killers in attendance was rather confusing, Ramirez's was clearly made to link his actual stay at the hotel with the fictional horror anthology series. Short and Ramirez are two of the biggest names that stayed at the Cecil Hotel that surely influenced Ryan Murphy, but the general hauntings and horrors that frequently took place in it were his general source of inspiration, as he depicts it as a location where spirits are trapped for all eternity to torment the living. With people going missing inside the walls of the hotel, drug overdoses killing guests, and suicides taking place, American Horror Story: Hotel can attribute its inspirations to the real-life events explored in The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.