Urban Legend

I remember a story that I was told, about black water. I found a retelling of the story on cracked.com. It is copied and pasted below.

"The Legend:

We tend to be really trusting of what comes out of the shower head or kitchen faucet. The people in charge wouldn't let water make it as far as our homes if it hadn't been treated and filtered to the point of near sterility. Even if you have an open cut on your hand, you don't hesitate to stick that shit right under the tap.

After all, what's the worst thing that could be in the water? What's the absolute worst possible thing?

The Truth:

Guests at the Hotel Cecil in downtown Los Angeles were having trouble with their water. There was weak pressure, it smelled and tasted funny, and it wasn't just coming out brown, it was coming out black. Black as death, you could say (whoops, was that a spoiler?). Unfortunately, the residents of the Cecil didn't heed Homer Simpson's immortal wisdom ("If it's brown, drink it down, but if it's black, send it back") and just kept bathing in and drinking the hotel's rank water for nearly a week.

"We thought it was just the way [the water] was here," guest Sabrina Baugh told a reporter. No, Sabrina, black stench water isn't just the way it is anywhere.

Finally, one of the Cecil's bizarrely reluctant-to-complain residents (most hotel guests will make a scene if their mint isn't placed at the right angle on their pillow) mentioned something about the water and a maintenance worker was sent to check things out. He made a stomach-churning discovery -- in one the hotel's four large cisterns he found the decomposed and liquefying body of a young woman.

She had somehow fallen into the tank, turning the hotel's water into a corpse consomme the guests of the Cecil had been drinking down for weeks. The body was that of Canadian student Elisa Lam, and it remains a mystery how she ended up in the Cecil's water supply. Was it suicide? An accident? Or something more sinister? CCTV footage from Lam's last night alive show her acting in a furtive, agitated fashion, almost as if she was afraid she was being followed, and a guest staying below Lam reported hearing a "tremendous racket" from above the night she died.

Or maybe it was dark forces within the hotel itself that did Lam in? The Cecil's history is so dark, it makes the Overlook Hotel look like a TripAdvisor top pick. The Cecil has been the scene of numerous murders and suicides, and not one, but two serial killers have stayed there. But hey, on the other hand, it only costs $65 a night! Just, you know, bring your own water."

Can I just say, ew. There. it's said for all of us. This story left me on edge but knowing that it was true was the closing thought in my opinion. Creepy, weird, and flat out scary? D. All of the above. I think the part that stuck with me most was the fact that the guests were just accepting it. If I were to stay in a hotel room and the water was coming out black, I would tell someone and get out of there because that,^^ is not normal.