The Witches of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite

The Mysterious Case of Elisa Lam

The Mysterious Case of Elisa Lam

There are mysteries that are so eerie and strange that they boggle the mind for days on end. The case of Elisa Lam is one of them. In February 2013, this 21-year-old student from Vancouver, Canada, was found dead inside the Cecil Hotel’s rooftop water tank in Los Angeles. The L.A. County Department of Coroner ruled the death “accidental due to drowning” and said no traces of drugs or alcohol were found during the autopsy. However, there is much more to the story than what is implied by police reports. The first piece of evidence that needs to be considered is an elevator surveillance tape that recorded Elisa’s behavior only a few moments before she lost her life.

The four-minute video posted on YouTube shows Elisa pressing all of the elevator buttons and waiting for it to move. Seeing that the elevator doors are not closing, starts behaving extremely bizarrely. Here’s the video.

Right after the events of the video, Elisa apparently gained access to the rooftop of the hotel, climbed to its water tank and, somehow, ended up drowning in it. Her body was found two weeks after her death, after hotel guests complained about the water’s taste and color. Incredible.

At first, Elisa enters the elevator and apparently presses all of its buttons. She then waits for something to happen but, for some reason, the elevator door doesn’t shut. She starts to look around, as if she is expecting (or hiding from) someone. At 1:57, her arms and hands start moving in a very strange matter (almost not human) as she appears to be talking to someone, something … or nothing at all. She then walks away. The elevator door then shuts and appears to start working again.

Seeing the surveillance footage, most people would conclude that she was under the influence of drugs. However, Elisa did not have a history of drug use and her autopsy concluded that no drugs were involved. When one looks at the context and the circumstances of this death, things become even more mysterious.

Cecil Hotel’s Dark History

Built in the 1920s to cater to “businessmen to come into town and spend a night or two”, Cecil Hotel was quickly upstaged by more glamorous hotels. Located near the infamous Skid Row area, the hotel began renting rooms on a long-term basis for cheap prices, a policy that attracted a shiftier crowd. The hotel’s reputation quickly went from “shifty” to “morbid” when it became notorious for numerous suicides and murders, as well as lodging famous serial killers.

“Part of its sordid history, involves two serial killers,  Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger.

Now on death row, Ramirez, labeled “the Nightstalker”, was living at the Cecil Hotel in 1985, in a top floor room.  He was charged 14 dollars a night.  In a building filled with transients, he remained unnoticed as he stalked and killed his 13 female victims. Richard Schave, said “He was dumping his bloody clothes in the Dumpster, at the end of his evening and returned via the back entrance.”

Jack Unterweger, was a journalist covering crime in Los Angeles for an Austrian magazine in 1991.  “We believe he was living at the Cecil Hotel in homage to Ramirez,” Schave said.

He is blamed with killing three prostitutes in Los Angeles, while being a guest at the Cecil.

In the 50’s and 60’s the Cecil was known as a place that people would go to jump out of one of the hotel’s windows to commit suicide.

Helen Gurnee, in her 50s, leaped from a seventh floor window, landing on the Cecil Hotel marquee, on October 22, 1954.

Julia Moore jumped from her eighth floor room window, on February 11, 1962.

Pauline Otton, 27, jumped from a ninth floor window after an argument with her estranged husband, on October 12, 1962.  Otton landed on George Gianinni, 65, who was walking on the side walk, 90 feet below. Both were killed instantly.

There was also a murder of one of the residents.  “Pigeon Goldie” Osgood, a retired telephone operator, known for protecting and feeding pigeons in a nearby park, was found dead in his ransacked room on June 4, 1964.  He had been stabbed, strangled, and raped.  The crime still remains unsolved.”

- Las Vegas Guardian Express, Elisa Lam, Morbid History Of Two Serial Killers Unfolds At “Cecil Hotel”

Elisa Lam’s case is yet another sordid addition to the hotel’s history and can lead us to ask: “What the hell is wrong with that place”?

The Movie “Dark Water”

The story of Elisa Lam is eerily similar to the 2005 horror movie Dark Water. Dahlia, the main protagonist of the movie moves into an apartment building with her young daughter Cecilia. Both of these names are relevant. Black Dahlia is the nickname given to Elizabeth Short, a woman who was the victim of a gruesome murder in 1947 – one that appeared to be particularly ritualistic. The case was never solved. According to LA Observed, it is rumored that Black Dahlia was at Cecil Hotel right before she lost her life.

“The Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, is alleged in at least one book to have hung out at the Cecil and drank at the bar next door before she disappeared in 1947, though cultural historians Kim Cooper and Richard Schave of Esotouric say that’s just rumor.”
- LA Observed, Serial Killer Central

In the movie, the daughter’s name, Cecilia, is, obviously, quite similar to the name Cecil Hotel.

After moving into her apartment, Dahlia notices dark water leaking from the ceiling in her bathroom. She ultimately discovers that a young girl named Natasha Rimsky drowned in the building’s rooftop water tank, which caused the water to turn black. The owner of the apartment building knew about this fact but refused to take action. Elisa Lam’s body was  in the water tank for over two weeks, causing hotel guests to complain about foul tasting “black water”.

The ending of the movie is also eerily relevant: The apartment buildings elevator malfunctions and the ghost of Cecilia’s mother braids her hair. Is Elisa Lam’s death one of those ritualistic murders that are synchronistically mirrored in a Hollywood movie?

Another Strange Coincidence

Shortly after the discovery of Elisa Lam’s body, a deadly outbreak of tuberculosis occurred in Skid Row, near Cecil Hotel. You probably won’t believe the name of the test kit used in these kinds of situations: LAM-ELISA. That is hardcore synchronicity.

No Foul Play?

LA authorities ruled in June 2013 that Elisa Lam’s death was accidental and that she was “probably bi-polar”. That being said, some questions remain unanswered. How did Elisa, who was obviously not in her right mind, end up in the hotel’s water tank, an area that is difficult to access? Here’s a news report describing the water tank area.

 As the reporter states in the video, the rooftop area is protected by an alarm system and the water tank is difficult to reach. How did Elisa reach that area? Also, how did she close the water tank lid?

As is usually the case for strange deaths, authorities have been incredibly secretive and non-transparent during this investigation. What truly happened here? Why are there so many strange coincidences? Why was Elisa Lam acting so strange in the elevator? Was there a ritualistic aspect to this death? Why is the Cecil Hotel a hotbed for these kinds of stories? Is there some paranormal stuff going on there involving dark entities? The mystery appears to be whole and authorities do not seem to be wanting to probe further. Maybe I should cite here the slogan that appears on Dark Water movie posters : “Some mysteries are not meant to be solved”.

Read more at http://vigilantcitizen.com/vigilantreport/mysterious-case-elisa-lam/#FZs5Pi7g3Eb2zD3o.99

Mountainstwin

(Source: nerium-oleander, via novemb)

Wolftea

Extraordinary creations By Wolftea

On the Black Sabbat

"I am that spawn of witch and demon

By time's mad prophets long foretold:
The unnamed fear of king and freeman,
I roam the lawless outland wold,
Couching amid the weeds and mould
With dire Alecto for my leman.
 

 

I am that hidden piper, playing
The Pan-like strains of malefice
That lure the lonely traveller, straying

Upon the crumbling precipice:
To filmed morass or blind abyss
His feet must follow, never staying.



I am that swart, unseen pursuer
Whose lust begets a changeling breed:
All women know me for their wooer:
Mine is the whisper the maidens heed
At twilight; mine the spells that lead
The matron to the nighted moor.




I am that messenger whose call
Convenes dark mage and banished lord
And branded witch and whip-flayed thrall,
To plot, amid the madness poured
On the black Sabbat's frothing horde,
The bale of realms, the planet's fall."



- Clark Ashton Smith/Cambion

Image from: Liber Chronicarum

The Three Mothers

The idea of "Three Mothers" comes from "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow", a section of Thomas de Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis. The piece asserts that just as there are three Fates and Graces, there are also three Sorrows. They include Mater Lacrymarum (Our Lady of Tears), Mater Suspiriorum (Our Lady of Sighs), and Mater Tenebrarum (Our Lady of Darkness). The attribute of each woman (tears, sighs, shadows/darkness) is a direct translation of her name from Latin. (Mater being the Latin word for "mother".)

 

Suspiria clearly derives its title from the woman delineated in de Quincey's work. However, Inferno's title does not reference Mater Tenebrarum. Thus, Argento's 1982 film Tenebrae is sometimes mistaken as the second installment in the trilogy.

The story of the Three Mothers begins at the dawn of the 11th century, when three sisters created the pernicious art of witchcraft on the coast of the Black Sea. In the years that followed, they wandered the world and amassed great personal wealth and power, leaving only death in their wake.

 

In the late 19th century the women commissioned E. Varelli, an Italian architect based in London, to design and construct three stately buildings. From these enchanted, bastion-like homes the Three Mothers "rule the world". According to Varelli's memoirs, entitled The Three Mothers by an anonymous colleague, the architect learned too late of the women's evil nature. (At least six copies of the book are known to have existed. Four may have been destroyed at the end of Inferno.) The residences he designed will become so corrupted that eventually the land they were built on will become pestilential. An unpleasant, bittersweet smell of evil already pervades the area surrounding Mater Tenebrarum's home.

Both Mater Suspiriorum and Tenebrarum have claimed that the Mothers are Death personified.

  

Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, is the oldest of the Three Mothers. Her given name is Helena Markos. She was also known as The Black Queen. The actress who portrayed Markos in Suspiria was uncredited. According to Jessica Harper, "the witch was a ninety-year-old ex-hooker Dario had found on the streets of Rome."

Markos, a Greek émigré, was exiled from many European countries and had written several books on a variety of arcane subjects. In 1895 she founded the Tanz Akademie ("Dance Academy" in German), a school for dance and the occult sciences, in the Black Forest outside Freiburg, Germany. The locals feared her, having intuited that she was a witch. As Markos' wealth grew so did suspicions about her true nature. To avert this unwanted scrutiny, she faked her own death in a fire in 1905. Control of the academy, which became solely a ballet school, was said to have gone to Markos' prize pupil. In reality, this was Markos herself. (The Akademie bears a plaque stating that Desiderius Erasmus once lived there.)

In Suspiria Markos is the Directress whose presence is concealed by her coven, headed by Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett). A young American, Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper), discovers the hidden chambers beneath the school after several pupils are killed by Markos' proxies.

In The Mother of Tears it is revealed that before the events of Suspiria Elisa Mandy (Daria Nicolodi), a white witch, sought to challenge Markos' evil might. The two battled in Freiburg, and Markos slew both Elisa and her husband. However, Elisa was able to weaken Suspiriorum into the hag-like state she appeared in Suspiria. According to Father Johannes (Udo Kier) in the third film, the battle left Suspiriorum "a shell of her former self". Elisa's daughter Sarah would later defeat Mater Lacrimarum in Rome.

Mater Lachrimarum, the Mother of Tears, is the most beautiful and powerful of the Three Mothers. Like Tenebrarum, her true name is unknown. Inferno suggest that her home in Rome, Italy may be located near No. 49 Via Dei Bagni - the Abertny Foundation's Biblioteca Filosofica - when Sara (Eleonora Giorgi) notices a strange smell in the air. In The Mother of Tears Lachrimarum's home is revealed to be the Palazzo Varelli.

In Inferno Lacrimarum attempted to spellbind Mark Elliot during a music lecture in Rome. According to Argento, Ania Pieroni did not return to reprise her role as Lacrimarum in The Mother of Tears because "she now has five kids!"

Lacrimarum is portrayed by Israeli actress Moran Atias in The Mother of Tears. The witch has been hibernating for centuries in Rome, and is awakened when Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) opens the urn in which her most powerful relic, a red tunic, is stored. As her minions wreak havoc on the city above, Lacrimarum hides below ground in the catacombs of her Palazzo, regaining her strength.

Mater Lacrimarum also makes a notable appearance in Kim Newman's novel Dracula Cha Cha (aka Judgement of Tears)

Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness/Shadows, is the youngest and most cruel of the Three Mothers. Her true name is not given; her home is located in New York City and was christened in 1910. The house's number is 49 and bears a plaque that states that Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff once resided there.

 

In Inferno the character is portrayed by Veronica Lazar. She masquerades as Professor Arnold's nurse for much of the film. At the climax, Mark Elliot (Leigh McCloskey) descends into the bowels of her home to confront her. He learns that Arnold is in fact the architect Varelli, and essentially Tenebrarum's slave. Tenebrarum's bloodlust would ultimately be her own undoing, as one of her victims, a maid, was inadvertently responsible for the house catching fire in the midst of her death throes.

Words and images via Werewolf

The Bell Witch Haunting

The Legend of the Bell witch is unique in it's authentication and it's wide acceptance as having truly occured. The activity which the Bell family experienced at the hands of the entity is validated by many witnesses. The Bell Witch is also the only entity known to have taken a life.

Those who witnessed the demonstrations knew that it had a wonderful power of intelligence, possessing great knowledge of men and things; a spirit that could apparently read minds, tell men's secrets, repeat sermons word for word and sing every song in the hymn book. It often assumed a pious character, enjoying religious discussions and quoting scripture with absolute accuracy.

The earliest written account of the happenings at Bell farm is at page 833 in the Goodspeed History of Tennessee, published in 1887 by Goodspeed Publishing.

The most famous account is recorded in what has come to be called the Red Book, the 1894 An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch of Tennessee by Martin Van Buren Ingram, which cites the earlier Richard William Bell's Diary: Our Family Trouble. Richard Williams Bell lists several witnesses, including General (later President) Andrew Jackson. However, no mention of the Bell Witch was ever made by Jackson in any of his letters, journals or papers.




The Black Book was written much later and it told a lot about the Bell Witch, and published in 1934 by Dr. Charles Bailey Bell, great-grandson of John Bell.

It started with John Bell in the 1800 who moved his family to a settlement in Red River, Robertson County,Tenessee. John Bell was a town Elder in the Bapist Church and was a prominent member of the community, owned a large plot of land and house.

One day, John encountered a strange animal in one of his corn fields. It had the body of a large dog, and the head of a rabbit. When he made to shoot it, the creature vanished. Later that night, the Bell family experienced sounds of someone "beating" the walls of their log house from the outside.

These sounds continued each night and became more frenzied and forceful. Although Bell and his sons would rush outside to catch the perpetrator, they would find the land deserted. It was then that Bell's children began to wake in the night, scared by sounds of rats gnawing at their beds, or having their bed covers ripped from their beds and tossed to the ground by an unseen entity.


Things continued to escalate from this point, and the Bell family was tormented by whispering voices behind them when they were alone, and sounds of an old woman singing. Betsy, the youngest daughter would have hand prints on her face and body, and said to have had her hair pulled and slapped by an invisible entity. John went to a neighbour for help, by the name of James Johnston.



The man stayed over at the Bell home with his wife, and in turn experienced the same disturbances.

The entity seemed gather strength over time to the point where it was loud and unmistakeable. It would sing, quote scripture and call out to the family jeering and shouting insults. Eventually the voice could be heard all over the Bell land.



The children could not go to the river, fields or cave to play without being taunted endlessly by the entity.

It continued to express its dislike for John Bell and vowed relentlessly to kill him.

John Bell's health began to rapidly decline. He would have episodes of uncontrollable facial twitching, and difficulty swallowing. By the fall of 1820, John was confined to his house, where the entity would pull of his shoes when he tried to walk or slap his face. Her loud, shrill voice could be heard all over the farm, cursing and chastising "Old Jack Bell," as she often referred to him.

John Bell breathed his last breath on the morning of December 20, 1820. Immediately after his death, the family found a small vial of unidentified liquid in the cupboard. John Bell, Jr. gave some of it to the cat, which died instantly. It was found that this same liquid had been administered to John Bell before his death.



John Bell's funeral was one of the largest ever held in Robertson County, Tennessee. As family and friends began leaving the graveyard, the entity laughed loudly and began singing a song about a bottle of brandy. It is said that her singing didn't stop until the very last person left the graveyard. The entity's presence was almost nonexistent after John Bell's demise, as if its purpose had been fulfilled.



The Entity is said to have promised to visit John Bell’s most direct descendant in 107 years. The year would have been 1935, and the closest living direct descendant of John Bell at that time was Nashville physician, Dr. Charles Bailey Bell. Dr. Bell himself wrote a book about the "Bell Witch," published in 1934. No follow-up was published, and Dr. Bell died in 1945.

To this day unexplainable phenomena occur at the Bell farm.

The faint sounds of people talking and children playing can sometimes be heard in the area, and it's not uncommon to see "candle lights" dance through the dark fields late at night.



There have been several theories to what really occured to the Bell family, one is that John Bell was abusing his daughter Betsy, and the legend of the witch was born of her fear and inability to express what was really happening to her. The movie "An American Haunting" is based on this theory.

"The Blair Witch Project" is also loosely based on the legend of the Bell Witch.

Others in Adams Tenessee still blame the Bell Witch for strange events and tauntings in the area.


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Over the River and Through the Woods...

 

They began to walk again, but they always came deeper into the forest, and if help did not come soon, they must die of hunger and weariness.

When it was mid-day, they saw a beautiful snow-white bird sitting on a bough, which sang so delightfully that they stood still and listened to it. And when its song was over, it spread its wings and flew away before them, and they followed it until they reached a little house, on the roof of which it alighted;

and when they approached the little house they saw that it was built of bread and covered with cakes, but that the windows were of clear sugar. "We will set to work on that," said Hansel, "and have a good meal.

"Nibble, nibble, gnaw,

Who is nibbling at my little house?"

                              

Maia Reim

"The old woman had only pretended to be so kind; she was in reality a wicked witch, who lay in wait for children, and had only built the little house of bread in order to entice them there. When a child fell into her power, she killed it, cooked and ate it, and that was a feast day with her.

Witches have red eyes, and cannot see far, but they have a keen scent like the beasts, and are aware when human beings draw near. When Hansel and Gretel came into her neighborhood, she laughed with malice, and said mockingly: "I have them, they shall not escape me again!"

From Hansel and Gretel, By The Brothers Grimm.

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