Speaker 1: Picture this. You've just traveled for hours. Maybe you were
on a cramped flight where your knees were just jammed
into the seatback. Or maybe you've been staring at highway
white lines for six hours straight.
Speaker 2: Oh that highway hypnosis. It's real, It.
Speaker 1: Is so real, and you are just you're tired. You
walk into a lobby that smells like that specific mix
of industrial lemon cleaner and maybe some stale coffee.
Speaker 2: I know that smell. Every single mid range hotel has
that exact same smell.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Walk up to the desk, you smile, You hand
over a credit card, You get your key card, that
little plastic rectangle, and you head up the elevator. You
walk down this long, silent hallway, the carpet just dampening your.
Speaker 2: Footsteps, total silence except for the ice machine humming somewhere
down the hole.
Speaker 1: Always. You find your number, slide the card, beep, green light.
Speaker 2: You open the door, and the air conditioning is just
humming that low, constant drone. The sheets are crisp, tucked
in so tight you could probably bounce a quarter off them.
It's a perfectly neutral, controlled and it's designed to be forgotten.
Speaker 1: Exactly. You lock the door, flip that little dead bolt,
maybe put the chain across, throw your bag on the bed,
and for a moment you are completely anonymous. The world
outside just stops existing.
Speaker 2: It's a bubble.
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be safe, it's supposed to be a
predictable transaction money for shelter. But what happens when that
predictability shatters? What happens when the hotel isn't a sanctuary
but a trap?
Speaker 2: And that is the unsettling question we are tackling today. Yeah,
because for the vast majority of us, a hotel is
just a pause button on life, a place to sleep
between meetings, or you know, vacation spots. But for the
people we are discussing today, the hotel wasn't a pause.
It was a full stop.
Speaker 1: Or worse, a vanishing point. Yeah, welcome to thrilling threads.
I am your host, and I am ready to pull
at the loose ends of reality until the whole sweater
just unravels.
Speaker 2: And I'm here to help see where those threads might
lead and perhaps try to understand why they were cut
in the first place. Though I have to warn you
some of these threads lead to play that well logic
has a really hard time following.
Speaker 1: Today we are on a mission. We are looking at
ten specific accounts of hotel mysteries. These are just ghost stories,
though I guess one of them technically fits that bill
later on it does. Yeah, these are cases where the
physical reality of a hotel, the logs, the cameras, the
electronic locks, all of it just failed to explain what
happened inside. We're talking about guests who checked in but never.
Speaker 2: Ever checked out, identities that just evaporated into.
Speaker 1: Thin air, and locked rooms that held secrets so baffling
they still don't make sense years or even a century later.
Speaker 2: It is a mixture of true crime intrigue, the psychology
of disappearing, and the inherently eerie nature of these transient spaces.
We're going to be looking at the timelines, the forensic details,
and those stubborn, enduring questions. It just will not go away.
Speaker 1: We really need to move past the headlines on these
and look at the mechanics of these disappearances. So make
sure your door is dead bolted, check the closet. Let's
unpack this.
Speaker 2: Where are we starting. I have a feeling I know.
Speaker 1: We have to start with the one that I think
defined the genre of Internet mystery for a whole generation. Yeah,
we're going to downtown Los Angeles. The Cecil Hotel.
Speaker 2: Later rebranded as stan Maine in a rather desperate and
I think ultimately failed attempt to distance itself from its
checkered past. And checkerd is putting it so mildly.
Speaker 1: Mildly is the word. I mean, that place has a
history that reads like a horror anthology, even before twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, you have Richard Dramirez, the nightstalker who stayed
there during his killing spree. Jack Underwager, the Austrian journalist
and serial killer, he stayed there too. Some people even
connect it tangentially to the Black Dollia murder. It's a
place with a dark energy.
Speaker 1: It's got a reputation. But we are focusing on January
twenty thirteen. The subject is a Lisa Lamb. Now, if
you were on the internet ten years ago, you know
the story or you think you know it. You know video,
you know the video. But we need to really look
at the details provided in the accounts because they are visceral.
It all hinges on that surveillance video.
Speaker 2: The elevator footage. It is a piece of evidence that
becomes almost like a roar shock test for whoever watches it.
I'm not exaggerating when I say it's one of the
most analyzed clips of video in modern history.
Speaker 1: It really is. So let's set the scene based on
the footage. It's grainy, it's from a high corner angle,
it's late at night. Alisa enters the elevator. She's casual,
wearing a red hoodie in shorts, but immediately her behavior
is off.
Speaker 2: It's not just a little off, it's deeply strange. From
the very first second.
Speaker 1: She steps in and she leans forward and presses a
whole column of buttons, not just one or two floors,
it's the middle row. She hits them rapidly.
Speaker 2: But then, and this is the first mechanical failure, or
maybe just a bizarre coincidence, the door doesn't close, It
just stays open.
Speaker 1: And that's when the creep factor spikes. She steps out,
almost cautiously. She looks left, she looks right, almost scanning
the hallway. Then she jumps back in and hides in
the corner, literally flattens herself against the wall where the
sensors can't see her.
Speaker 2: It looks for all the world like she's hiding from
someone playing a game maybe, or genuinely terrified or something
or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Then she steps out again, and this is the
part that haunts me. She starts moving her hands. It's
this weird fluid motion, almost like she's treading water or
conducting an invisible orchestra.
Speaker 2: Or talking to someone. Her fingers are splayed, her wrists
are turning. It's very specific the gestures she's making. It's
not just random flailing.
Speaker 1: Not at all. She looks down the hallway, appears afraid
or maybe just confused, and then she just walks away.
The doors finally finally close, and she is never seen
alive again.
Speaker 2: It is a deeply, deeply unsettling sequence of events. When
you watch it, your brain desperately wants to find a
logical cause. Is there someone just out of frame? Is
she having a psychotic break? Is she on drugs?
Speaker 1: All of the above her theories right, absolutely.
Speaker 2: But the official ruling eventually linked her behavior to a
mental health episode, specifically bipolar disorder. She had a history
of it.
Speaker 1: I know that's the medical explanation. And you know she
was reportedly off her medication or undermedicated. According to the
toxicology reports later. But that explanation, while medically sound regarding
the behavior in the elevator, it doesn't stop the avalanche
of logistical questions that.
Speaker 2: Follow, not even close.
Speaker 1: Because she goes missing for days and the way she
was found, that is the part that turns this from
a tragedy into a complete nightmare.
Speaker 2: It was in police discovery. It wasn't search dogs. The
LAPD had searched the building with dogs, including the roof,
and found nothing, which is a whole other mystery in itself.
Speaker 1: No, it was the guests. The guests started complaining, and
this is the detail that makes me never want to
drink tap water in a hotel again.
Speaker 2: I know where you're going with this, and it is
just it's grim.
Speaker 1: They went to the front desk saying the water pressure
was low and worse, the water tasted odd. Some said
it had a weird sweet taste. Others said the color
was brownish or black coming out of the tap.
Speaker 2: And people are showering in this, brushing their teeth with it,
drinking it.
Speaker 1: For days for over two weeks. Some reports say. So
maintenance goes up to the roof to check the main
water supply. There are these four massive cisterns water tanks,
and inside one of them was a Lisa Lamb.
Speaker 2: And this is where the thrilling thread really gets tangled.
We have the official conclusion accidental drowning with bipolar disorder
as a significant condition. But we have to look at
the mechanics, which the accounts highlight as the primary source
of the mystery. Right, you can explain the erratic behavior
in the elevator with a manic episode. You could explain
her wandering the hotel, But the tank, that's a physics problem.
Speaker 1: Right, Let's get into the mechanics because this is where
the Internet slooths lose their minds, and frankly, for good reason.
First getting to the roof, the police report states the
roof door was alarmed and.
Speaker 2: Locked, but the hotel staff noted that the alarm system was,
to put it mildly temperamental. Staff used that roof for
smoke brakes all the time. There was also a fire
escape that led to the roof. Getting on the roof
is impossible.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's grat that. Let's say she got on
the roof.
Speaker 2: Agreed, the roof access is plausible, but the tank itself
is the real puzzle. We are talking about a one
thousand gallons cistern. It's nearly ten feet tall. There is
no fixed ladder on the side of these tanks.
Speaker 1: None, So to get to the top you have to
find a way to scale the smooth metal side, or
use a nearby ladder that may or may not have
been there. Then balance on the rim and then lift
a lid.
Speaker 2: And I looked up the specks on those lids. They
aren't tupperware lids. They're heavy metal hatches. Some report say
twenty pounds, others say closer to fifty depending on the
hinge resistance in condition.
Speaker 1: So it's a significant weight. Now here's the question. If
you are inside treading water, barely buoyant, how do you
generate the leverage to close a heavy lid back over yourself?
Speaker 2: That is the crux Biomechanically, it borders on the impossible.
To close a heavy hatch from below requires you to
pull it down, but you have nothing to anchor your
feet against. You are floating. If you pull down on the.
Speaker 1: Lid, you just push yourself deeper in to the water.
It's basic physics. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
You pull the lid down, you push your body down,
and yet when the maintenance worker found her, the lid
was closed.
Speaker 2: That singular physical discrepancy is what keeps the foul play
theory alive despite the coroner ruling in an accident. The
police theory is that she climbed in, perhaps thinking she
was being chased, in a paranoid state, and pulled the
lid shut to hide.
Speaker 1: But panic usually makes fine motor skills and complex leverage
tasks harder, not easier. I can barely open a jar
of pickles when I'm calm right.
Speaker 2: And her toxicology report was another point of contention. It
showed her prescription medications, but at levels that suggested she
hadn't taken her full dose recently. It also showed no
illegal drugs and.
Speaker 1: No alcohol, so it supports the mental health crisis theory,
but it doesn't explain the tank lid.
Speaker 2: It explains the why she might have been acting strangely,
but not the how she ended up in that specific state.
Speaker 1: And what about the search teams? Why did they miss
her initi if she was there the whole time they
had dogs on the roof. I thought cadaver dogs could
smell a body through water.
Speaker 2: Usually, yes, decomposition scents rise, but if the lid was
sealed tight, maybe the scent was contained. It's a weak explanation,
though it highlights how a large building like a hotel
can hide things in plain sight. We assume, because there
are cameras in staff, that everything is seen.
Speaker 1: But there are voids.
Speaker 2: Exactly, there are voids in these buildings, rooftops, utility closets,
water tanks, places where the surveillance state ends, and that's
where the real mysteries can happen.
Speaker 1: Speaking of voids and the failure of surveillance, let's pivot.
So with the Lisa, the hotel was this passive container
that sort of swallowed her up. The building hid the secret.
But in our next case, the guest wasn't a victim
of the building. She reconized it.
Speaker 2: She used the anonymity of the hotel system as a shield,
as a tool.
Speaker 1: Exactly, we're moving from a possible accidental concealment to active,
aggressive erasure. We need to talk about Oslo Norway ninety five,
the case of Jennifer Fairgate.
Speaker 2: This one feels like a spy novel, but it's real life,
and unlike Lisa Lamb, where we have this haunting video,
but no clear motive for her final actions. Here we
have a clear motive disappearing, but zero video and zero identity.
Speaker 1: A woman checks into the Oslo Plaza Hotel. This is
a high end place, glass elevators, international clientele, right in
the heart of the city. She uses the name Jennifer Fairgate,
though records show variations in the spelling on the registration
card like Furgate, and.
Speaker 2: Right away the system fails. She checks in with no
credit card, no ID.
Speaker 1: How does that even happen in nineteen ninety five in
a major international hotel. I can't even check into a
motel six without showing my license and a credit card.
Speaker 2: It's the glitch again, but likely a social engineered one. Sometimes,
if you act confident enough, or if the desk clerk
is busy enough, protocols slip. She likely said, oh, my
card is in my luggage, I'll bring it down later,
or she paid some cash up front. She manages to
get a room, a high up room, Room twenty eight
oh five, with zero verifiable identity.
Speaker 1: She stays there for three days, almost entirely in her room.
That do not disturb sign is on the door. The
whole time.
Speaker 2: Then a security guard knocks on the door because the
bill hasn't been paid.
Speaker 1: He knocks and then bangs a singular gun shot from
inside the room.
Speaker 2: The guard freezes, which honestly I would too. He retreats,
calls for backup. They wait about fifteen minutes because they
don't know if there's an active shooter, if they're hostages.
Speaker 1: They finally enter the room and she's dead on the bed,
a single gunshot wound to the forehead, weapon in hand.
It looks like a suicide case closed right.
Speaker 2: That is where the simple version ends, as our source
material suggest because when they started looking for Jennifer Faregate,
they realized she didn't exist.
Speaker 1: Nowhere, no records, no family coming forward, and her room
it was weirdly empty, sterile.
Speaker 2: Minimal belongings. But the most telling detail, and this is
a recurring theme we'll see, is the clothing.
Speaker 1: The labels were removed.
Speaker 2: Every single tag cut right out of her blousees, her coat,
her pants, everything.
Speaker 1: Why do you do that? That's not something a depressed
tourist does on a whim. That is premeditated. That's something
someone does when they are actively trying to prevent their
body from being tracked or identified precisely.
Speaker 2: It implies a level of tradecraft, a professional effort to
sever ties with one's own history. Clothing labels tell a story.
If you buy a shirt in Paris and the label
says made in France or has a specific boutique tag,
that's a lead for investigators.
Speaker 1: It tells them where you were, when you might have
been there. If you cut it out, you are just
a body in black clothing, a blank slate.
Speaker 2: And she had no toiletries, no toothbrush, no hair brush,
no makeup in the luxury hotel for three days. It's
like she was a ghost before she even died. Who
travels without a tube.
Speaker 1: Someone who doesn't want their DNA found on a toothbrush,
or someone who disposed of everything before the final act.
But there's another forensic anomally here that we need to
touch on the gun.
Speaker 2: The Browning nine millimeter pistol.
Speaker 1: Right. She was found holding the gun. Her thumb was
on the trigger. Those suicide cases involving a powerful handgun
like a nine millimeter, the recoil is significant. The gun
usually flies out of the hand or lands beside the body.
Speaker 2: To find it's still gripped in her hand is unusual,
not impossible. There's a phenomenon called cadaverc spasm. But it
definitely raised eyebrows with the investigators.
Speaker 1: And no gunshot residue on her hands.
Speaker 2: That's the other thing. There was no blood on her
hand that held the gun and no GSR. It's incredibly
clean for such a violent close contact death. It's almost
as if she wiped her hands after firing the gun,
which makes no sense.
Speaker 1: So was she murdered? Was there someone else in the
room who staged it as a suicide?
Speaker 2: The door was double locked from the inside, That's the
classic locker room mystery. The security guard was outside unless
someone went out the window twenty eight floors up, or
was hiding in the room and somehow slipped out later
she was alone.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying. It implies you can just step out of
the world and the hotel lets you. And speaking of
stepping out of the world, we have a similar case,
but with a completely different method. Let's go to Ireland
two thousand and nine, the case of Peter Bergman.
Speaker 2: This is a fascinating counterpoint to Fairgate. Fairgate hid in
her room, creating a void. Bergman, on the other hand,
was everywhere right.
Speaker 1: He checks into the Sligo City Hotel in Ireland. He
gives a fake name, Peter Bergman, and a fake address
in Austria. But he's not hiding. The CCTV catches him constantly.
He's a visual fixture in the investigation.
Speaker 2: But look at what he's doing in the footage. He
leaves the hotel repeatedly, and every single time he leaves
he's carrying a purple plastic bag, a purple.
Speaker 1: Plastic bag that's such a mundane, everyday object.
Speaker 2: And when he returns to the hotel.
Speaker 1: He's empty handed.
Speaker 2: Exactly, he is dismantling his life, piece by piece and
scattering it across the city of Sligo. He's walking to
different bins around the town, throwing away his clothes, his documents,
his personal effects, making sure that when the end comes
there's nothing left to find.
Speaker 1: That is so hauntingly methodical. It's like he's conducting his
own funeral rite in reverse, a e raising the evidence
of his existence while he's still walking around.
Speaker 2: It's a calculated erasure. Unlike Fairgate, who removed labels, Bergmann
removed the objects entirely. He went to great lengths to
ensure his body would be found. It was eventually discovered
on Ross's Point Beach, but that his story would.
Speaker 1: Not be and it worked completely.
Speaker 2: It did to this day. Despite the unusually good surveillance
coverage of his last days, investigators never found out who
he was. We know from the autopsy he had advanced
prostate cancer and bone tumors. He was likely in immense pain.
Speaker 1: So he knew he was dying. He wanted to go
out on his own terms. But why Sligo, Why there?
It's a quiet town on the crist of Ireland. It's
almost poetic in a dark way. He scripted his own ending,
and then he burned the script.
Speaker 2: It connects back to that idea of control. Suicide is
often about regaining control when life feels uncontrollable, but this
goes beyond that. This is controlling the narrative, or rather
the complete absence of one. Post mortem. He denied the
world the same satisfaction of knowing his tragedy.
Speaker 1: He didn't want pity.
Speaker 2: He just wanted to end anonymously.
Speaker 1: It's chilling, But if Bergmann was about erasure, our next
case feels like someone living multiple conflicting lives all at once.
We're going back in time a bit to nineteen seventy
Norway again the Isdol Woman.
Speaker 2: This is perhaps Norway's most famous cold case, and it
fits perfectly into our thrilling threads because her life seemed
to be nothing but threads woven into a very very
complex knot.
Speaker 1: She was traveling all over Norway, checking into different hotels
in Bergen, Stavener, Oslo. But here's the kicker. She used
a different alias at every single hotel.
Speaker 2: Different names, likely different backstories. Fanilla Lorc, Genevieve Lancier, Claudia Tilt.
The source material says she had a collection of wigs,
she was a chameleon.
Speaker 1: And then the grim discovery on November twenty ninth, nineteen seventy.
She's found in the Isdalen Valley, a remote hiking area
known locally as Death Valley, and she's been.
Speaker 2: Burned a brutal end. Her body was found near a campfire,
with sleeping pills in her system and carbon monoxide in
her blood from the smoke. But the investigation led back
to the railway station in Bergen, where they found two
suitcases connected to her left in a locker.
Speaker 1: And what was inside those suitcases close.
Speaker 2: And guess what don't tell me the labels were removed?
Speaker 1: There it is again the label removal trope. Is this
int a handbook somewhere? How to be a mystery? One
oh one?
Speaker 2: It connects her to the Fairgate case and methodology, for sure,
but the scale here is different. They also found something
else in their belongings that Fairgate didn't have coded notes.
Speaker 1: Coded notes. Okay, now we are fully in spy territory.
This is where it gets very John lecre It really does.
Speaker 2: Investigators found note pads with strings of numbers and letters.
When they finally cracked it, it wasn't nuclear launch codes.
It was a travelogue, dates, locations, codes for cities. She
had visited Paris, Rome, Bergen.
Speaker 1: So she was meticulously tracking her own movements, but in
a way that no one else could easily read exactly.
I have to push back on the spy theory for
a second, though. I know it's the sexy answer, it's
what everyone wants it to be. But does a professional
spy really write down their travel route encode on a
notepad they keep in their suitcase. That feels sloppy or performative.
Speaker 2: It's a valid critique. Real tradecraft is usually about being
boring about blending in not having a suitcase full of
wigs and cryptic notes. However, the counter argument is the
consistency of her raider. The labels weren't just ripped out,
they were surgically removed. That implies training.
Speaker 1: And the context of the time.
Speaker 2: In the context nineteen seventy Norway, this was the Cold
War's northern flank. Norway was a hugely strategic location for
NATO to monitor Soviet naval activity from the vases in Romansk.
Speaker 1: So she could have been watching military movements.
Speaker 2: Well. Witnesses saw her observing military trials of new rockets
in western Norway. She was seen in a restricted area
taking notes, so it's not just speculation. There are eyewitness
accounts placing her near sensitive military operations.
Speaker 1: Okay, that adds a lot of weight to the spy,
But then you have the mental illness theory. Paranoid schizophrenia
often involves the belief that one is being followed, the
need to use aliases, the need to destroy identification.
Speaker 2: True, but paranoia rarely comes with the funding to travel
extensively across Europe, staying at high end hotels. That's where
the mental illness theory hits. A wall, the financing, she
had money, She moved with purpose. The coded notes, even
if a bit clumsy, show a methodical mind.
Speaker 1: So what's the verdict? Was she a spy, a courier,
a criminal on the run.
Speaker 2: That's the thing we don't know. The case was officially
closed as a suicide, but almost no one believes that.
Was she hiding from someone working for someone? Did she
try to stage a disappearance? That one horribly wrong. The
hotel trails the only clear part of her story. It
shows as the logistics of her life, but none of
the motivation.
Speaker 1: It's the spy novel come to life.
Speaker 2: But the last chapter is missing precisely, and the fact
that we are still talking about it over fifty years
later proves how effective her erasure was. She destroyed the facts,
so we filled the void with legend.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's move from the cold intrigue of Europe to
a gritty noir nightmare in the American Midwest. We're going
to Kansas City, nineteen thirty five, The Hotel President.
Speaker 2: The Room ten forty six.
Speaker 1: Mystery this story. Honestly, if you wrote this as a screenplay,
people would say it's too cliche noir. It's two on
the nose, but it happened. It feels like it should
be in black and white, with cigarette smoke hanging in
the air.
Speaker 2: It has all the elements, the mysterious stranger, the darkened room,
the cryptic phone calls the brutal violence.
Speaker 1: So a man checks in, says his name is Roland
t Owen. He has no luggage, just a comb and
a toothbrush. Essentially. He asks for an interior room, one
that doesn't face the street right away.
Speaker 2: That's suspicious. He wants privacy, he wants to be insulated
from the outside world. He's not there as a tourist, no.
Speaker 1: And he keeps the room dark. The staff go in
to clean and he's just sitting there in the dark
with the shades drawn. He's described as nervous, anxious. He
keeps pacing. He tells the maid to leave the door
unlocked because he's expecting a.
Speaker 2: Friend, and this friend is the key to the whole thing.
The staff overhear him on the phone. He's talking to
someone named Don Don and.
Speaker 1: The quote that a made overheard is down I will
be back in fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2: It implies a schedule, a meeting, a transaction. Something is
supposed to happen.
Speaker 1: Then the next morning, absolute chaos. The phone operator notices
the phone in room ten forty six is off the
hook for hours. They send a bell boy up to
check on him. The door is locked from the outside
with a do not disturb.
Speaker 2: Sign, which is strange because Owen told the maid to
leave it unlocked exactly so.
Speaker 1: The bellboy, after knocking, uses a passkey and he finds
a scene that makes the Shining look like a cartoon.
Speaker 2: It was gruesome.
Speaker 1: Roland was on his knees, his neck, elbows and wrists
bound with cord. He had been stabbed multiple times in
the chest. His skull was fractured, and there was blood
on the walls, the ceiling, and the bed.
Speaker 2: And yet the room didn't show signs of a chaotic struggle.
There were no overturned chairs. It was almost ritualistic. And
here's the detail that gets me. The phone was off
the hook. He had been beaten within an inch of
his life, bound tortured, but someone had taken the time
to knock the phone off the receiver.
Speaker 1: So he couldn't call for help. But get this, he's
still alive when they find him, barely. The police arrived,
they cut him free and they ask him, who did
this to you? And what does he say?
Speaker 2: He says nobody. I fell against the bathtub.
Speaker 1: I fell against the bathtub. Sir, you are tied up,
You've been stabbed. Your skull is fractured. That is the
ultimate code of silence. Even while dying, he protects the perpetrator.
Speaker 2: It suggests a criminal underworld connection. You don't snitch even
on your deathbed. This seels like a mob hit or
a gambling debt gone wrong.
Speaker 1: He dies later at the hospital, and then the mystery deepens.
The police find out Roland t Owen isn't his real name.
Speaker 2: Right years later he was identified as Artemis Ogletree, a
young man from Alabama. But that identification didn't solve the
case at all.
Speaker 1: No, it just raised more questions. Who was Don? Why
was Artemis in Kansas City using a fake name. And
here's the weirdest part. His clothes were missing. The room
was stripped of his belongings, his coat, his pants, everything
was gone.
Speaker 2: That's the detail that differs from the suicide cases we
discussed in Farrigate and Bergwen. They remove their identity. In
room ten forty six, a second party, presumably Don removed
the identity. It suggests a clean up operation.
Speaker 1: Someone walked out of that hotel with a bundle of
bloody clothes and a weapon right through the lobby and
no one saw a thing.
Speaker 2: It's brutal. The violence was external, but the motive is
a complete void. It's a locked room mystery where the
door was left open and the answer just walked right out.
Speaker 1: It highlights how vulnerable you are in a hotel room.
You're isolated. If you invite someone in, you are completely
at their mercy. The hotel door locks the world out,
but it also locks you in with whatever you brought
with you or whoever you invited, and in.
Speaker 2: This case, he invited in a monster.
Speaker 1: Let's shift gears a little. We've talked about these unsolvable mysteries,
but I we want to talk about how time and
technology are changing the game. We're seeing cases that were
unexplained for decades suddenly getting answers.
Speaker 2: The John does and the march of technology. This is
a very important thread because it recontextualizes all these other cases.
Often what we call a mystery is simply a limitation
of the current science.
Speaker 1: Take the case of Lyle Stavick two thousand and one
Amanda Park, Washington. It's a very remote area.
Speaker 2: A young man checks into a motel, pays for the
room in cash, and ends his life. He used the
name lyle Stebic, which comes from a Joyce Carol Oates novel.
Speaker 1: You must remember this, a literary reference that immediately got
the Internet sleuse excited and it felt like a clue.
Speaker 2: It did. It suggested intelligence, a specific background. He sat
unidentified for years. They had his DNA, his fingerprints, his
dental records, but no matches in any of the criminal
databases like Cody's.
Speaker 1: He was a ghost in the system. People built up
all these theories. Was he a runaway cult member by
a terrorist who lost his nerve?
Speaker 2: All these elaborate backstories were created for him online, and
then twenty eighteen happens.
Speaker 1: Genetic genealogy right, and for the listener who hears that
term a lot. This isn't just checking fingerprints against a
police database. Can you explain how it works?
Speaker 2: It's incredible. Forensic investigators create a DNA profile from the
unidentified remains and then upload it to public ancestry sites
like ged match, where people voluntarily upload their own DNA
results to find relatives so.
Speaker 1: They aren't looking for the guy. They're looking for the
guy's third cousin who decided to build a family tree
last Christmas.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's triangulation. They find distant relatives and then genealogists,
often volunteers, work for hundreds of hours building out family
trees forward and backward until they find the empty branch
that belongs to the John or Jane Doe. It turns
a cold forensic sample into a living name.
Speaker 1: And the reality. For Lyle Stavick, it wasn't a spy thriller.
It was a sad family story. He was a young
man from California who was struggling, who wanted to drift away.
The family has kept the details private, which is their right,
and it's.
Speaker 2: A really important reminder that behind these thrilling threads there
are real families with real grief. The mystery was just
privacy maintained by tragedy, and frankly, does the public have
a right to know the why? I'm not so sure
we do.
Speaker 1: That's a tough one. We feel entitled to the answer
because we invested time in the mystery, but we aren't
entitled to his life. We saw again with Donald Hadlan
Junior in Nogallis, Arizona, two thousand and two.
Speaker 2: This one was strange because of the physical details. He
told the hotel manager he was seeing a doctor in
Mexico for head surgery, and he actually had a visible
surgical scar on his.
Speaker 1: Head, So you have a specific physical identifier a scar.
But because he used a fake name, it led to
years of confusion. Was it fraud, identity theft? Was he
fleeing a medical debt.
Speaker 2: It took until twenty twenty three, over twenty years later,
for genetic genealogy to connect the dots. The mask of
the hotel registry held for two decades.
Speaker 1: And then there's Edward Sidney Bruton a John Doe in
a holiday inn in Raleigh, North Carolina since nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2: Four, identified only in late twenty twenty five according to
the source material.
Speaker 1: It's over thirty years.
Speaker 2: Think about that, for thirty years, the hotel had this
lead little box around his death check and date, room number,
death date, a tidy little file, but his life, who
he was, who loved him, who his favorite color was,
remained completely outside that box.
Speaker 1: It really emphasizes that unexplained often just means waiting for
science to catch.
Speaker 2: Up, and it changes how we look at the older cases.
If we had twenty twenty five technology in nineteen thirty five,
with the Room ten forty six mystery be solved, would
we know who Don was?
Speaker 1: Oh, that's a fascinating thought. Don's DNA was probably all
over that room, on the phone, on the cords, on
the doorknob.
Speaker 2: Almost certainly we could have traced Don to his great
grandchildren today, but that evidence is long gone. We can
solve the new mysteries, but the old ones are sealed
by time.
Speaker 1: But some mysteries endure not because of science, but because
of stories folklore. Let's talk about the intersection of the
unsolved and the supernatural, the.
Speaker 2: Stories that become part of the mortar of the building itself.
Speaker 1: We have to talk about the Iowa couple nineteen eighty
Rose Bergert and Roger Actison.
Speaker 2: This is a heavy one. A holiday inn in Williamsburg, Iowa,
right off the interstate.
Speaker 1: They check in, they are found to cease the next day.
The investigation suggested a third person was involved, but no
arrests were ever made.
Speaker 2: This one scares me because of the mundanity. A roadside
holiday inn near Interstate eighty. It's not a gothic castle.
It's not the Cecil Hotel. It's where you stop on
a road trip to get a vending machine soda and
sleep for six hours before getting back on.
Speaker 1: The road, exactly. And the scary part is the lack
of resolution. Someone left that busy hotel, got in a
car and just drove away. They left no path to
a courtroom. It highlights that hotels are transit points, perfect
for predators who want to keep moving.
Speaker 2: Interstate eighty is a river of steel, and sometimes things
just wash away in it.
Speaker 1: It's the anonymity we spoke about the beginning. It protects
the guest, but it also protects the entre truer. If
everyone is a stranger, then the killer is just another
face in the lobby getting coffee.
Speaker 2: And no one would ever know.
Speaker 1: And finally we have to go away. Back to the
grandmother of hotel mysteries. Eighteen ninety two, the Hotel del
Coronado in California.
Speaker 2: A beautiful historic building, the red turrets, the Victorian architecture.
It's iconic and the story of Kate Morgan.
Speaker 1: She checked in as Lottie A Bernard. She was there
for five days. She looked sick, sad. Witnesses said she
was waiting for a gentleman who never arrived. Then she
was found dead on the exterior staircase leading to the beach,
a gunshot wound to the head.
Speaker 2: Ruled a suicide at the time, but over the last century,
the discrepancies in the inquest, the witness statements, the type
of bullet versus the gun found, it is all fueled
a legend. Some say she was murdered by the husband
she was waiting for. Some say she was pregnant and
he abandoned her.
Speaker 1: She's basically the resident ghost now right, she's famous for
being a ghost.
Speaker 2: She is Room three three twenty seven is infamous. But
why does this fit our thrilling threads? Because it shows
that hotel mysteries don't just fade away. They become part
of the brand. The Hotel del Coronado embraces the Kate
Morgan story. You can buy books about her in the
gift shop.
Speaker 1: Right, it's a strange thing. If you die in a house,
it's a tragedy that lowers the property value. If you
die in a historic hotel under mysterious circumstances, you become
a tourist attraction.
Speaker 2: It's a way for us to process the darker side
of these spaces. We turn the unexplained into the haunted,
because ghosts are easier to understand than the randomness of
violent death or the despair of suicide. A ghost story
has rules, it has a narrative. A random murder feels
chaotic and meaningless.
Speaker 1: That is a profound way to put it. We sanitize
the horror by making it a campfire story.
Speaker 2: It cannex back to the beginning. The hotel is a stage.
Kate Morgan is still performing on that stage one hundred
and thirty years later.
Speaker 1: So let's wrap this up. We've looked at the glitches
like Alisa Lamb, the erasures like Jennifer Fairgate and Peter Bergman,
the spy, the noirs, and the ghosts. What is the
common thread here? What connects all of these?
Speaker 2: I think it's the suspension of reality. Whether it's eighteen
ninety two or twenty thirteen. A hotel is a place
where the rules of normal life seem to suspend. People
use them to hide, to reinvent themselves, or to commit
acts they feel they can't commit at home in their
own lives.
Speaker 1: It's the locked room concept. It's terrifying because it implies
we can be physically present, checked in, logged in on camera,
but socially non existent. We can be in a building
with five hundred other people and be completely and utterly alone.
Speaker 2: And when something goes wrong in that space, it feels
like a violation of a social contract. We paid for safety,
we paid for a night of rest, and instead we
got a mystery. We expect the hotel to be a
neutral background, and when it becomes an active participant in
a tragedy, it breaks our sense of order.
Speaker 1: It's deeply unsettling. Now I want to hear from you.
We've covered a lot of ground today, a lot of
very dark quarters. Which of these threads keeps you up
at night? Is it the impossible physics of the Elisa
Lamb case in that worldk Do you have a theory
on how she closed that lid?
Speaker 2: Or is it the calculated chilling erasure of Peter Bergman
with his purple plastic bag, That image of him walking
through the city methodically dissolving his own life. That one
sticks with me?
Speaker 1: Or do you have a theory about who Dawn was
in Room ten forty six? Was he a hit man,
a lover a figment of Artemis olbal Tree's tortured imagination.
Speaker 2: That one is still the most baffling to me personally,
the sheer brutality of it.
Speaker 1: Drop a comment and let us know your stance. What
do you think really happened behind those closed doors? We
read everything, and we genuinely want to know your theories.
And perhaps, next time you check into a hotel, take
a look at who is standing next to you in
the elevator. You never know what story they are writing.
Speaker 2: We're racing.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on thrilling threads. Until next time,
keep your eyes open