Cecil Hotel manager explains why she never considered leaving despite seeing 80 death

The former manager of the infamous Cecil Hotel may have been well within her rights to leave, but it turns out the idea ‘never’ crossed her mind while working there.

Many of you may remember a recent documentary series called Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, which landed on Netflix a couple of years ago.

Directed by Joe Berlinger, it followed the eerie story of Elisa Lam's disappearance at Los Angeles' Cecil Hotel in 2013.

The Canadian student was seen on CCTV behaving erratically in the elevator just hours before she went missing, and was later found in the hotel's rooftop water tank.

Over the years, however, there have been numerous deaths, murders and suicides at the building, in turn creating something of a reputation for Cecil Hotel.

In the 1930s alone, a total of six people reportedly killed themselves, before a teenage mum threw her newborn baby out of the window in 1944, having not realised she was pregnant before giving birth to a boy in the bathroom.

Netflix

Two of the hotel's most famous guests were Richard Ramirez - who was known as 'The Night Stalker' - and Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger.

Ramirez killed 12 people in California during the mid-1980s, and had lived in a room on the hotel’s 14th floor before he was caught.

Unterweger, meanwhile, is thought to have killed three sex workers in LA while staying at the hotel in 1991, with the belief that he chose the Cecil Hotel as his temporary residence in homage to Ramirez.

Former manager Amy Price worked at the hotel between 2007 and 2017, during which time she estimated she had encountered a lot of death.

“I believe in the 10 years I was working there, there were about 80 deaths”, she said in the Netflix documentary, adding that she was dealing with ‘thousands’ of 911 calls.

Netflix

In an interview with the Metro back in 2021, Price admitted the never even considered leaving, despite being surrounded by so much mortality.

She said: “Never. Not at all.

“I had such a wonderful team that I worked with, and we were all committed to getting the job done and working together and we did that quite well.”

Price said wannabe detectives used to keep showing up at the hotel, adding: “It was like people just became obsessed,’ she explained. ‘The people that were checking in, they were there to do their own research. People just became obsessed.

“There was a time that I was sitting at my desk and somebody was climbing the exterior, attempting to climb up a wall.

“I look out my window and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this was absolutely insane.’”