![hotel california real story hotel california real story](https://thoughtcatalog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/1920px-Cecil_Hotel_L.A.jpg)
What made the Lam case even more spooky was the fact that it took place in a hotel that already had a reputation for being one of the most haunted locations in the city. Some of her last moments were captured on a hotel surveillance camera, as the young woman entered an elevator behaving erratically shortly before she vanished. She was found over a month later floating in the rooftop water tank of the hotel after guests had complained of foul-tasting water. The showrunner is referring, of course, to the mysterious case of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Canadian student who went missing from the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles in January of 2013. "We were really inspired by the idea of this hotel surveillance video that showed a girl getting into an elevator in a haunted hotel and who was never seen again," Murphy told the audience at the show's TCA panel this summer. However, that doesn't mean that everything about the fictional setting is made up. And, while there are hotels named "Cortez" in the world - including ones in Bolivia and Mexico - this one is very much a fabrication: There is no Hotel Cortez in L.A. Most of the action of AHS's fifth season will take place within the confines of the Hotel Cortez in Los Angeles, California. "It's much more dark," he teased back in June, calling it "a little bloodier and grislier I think than anything that we’ve done before." But how realistic will the season be? Is AHS: Hotel based on a real hotel? When American Horror Story: Hotel opens its doors this Wednesday night, viewers will be privy to the darkest iteration of FX's horror anthology since Season 2's claustrophobic Asylum - according to showrunner Ryan Murphy, at least.