Fitness & Health
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23rd October 2023
05:19pm BST
A man living next to the famously "haunted" Cecil Hotel has spoken about the scariest things he's seen from his window.
Peet Montzingo moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles in 2019 opposite the infamous venue, not initially realising why it was so cheap. The hotel is notorious for housing serial killers and for mysterious goings-on.
The 'Night Stalker' Richard Ramirez stayed there, suicides have also allegedly taken place there, and there's been numerous reports of ghosts.
The hotel gained further notoriety after being the subject of the Netflix documentary, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, which documented the disappearance of guest Elisa Lam.
The hotel closed in 2017.
Peet has since told why the hotel is so eerie and has been documenting his discoveries on TikTok.
Peet told The Sun: “I've seen strange shadows, flickering lights, you name it. At night, I always take a look just to make sure nobody's looking at me from any of the hotel's windows.”
He recalled his first ever encounter with a ‘ghost’ at the hotel to the publication, saying his nicknamed it "the cigar man incident".
He said: “I woke up in the middle of the night one time, and I looked out my window and I saw an old man staring at me while smoking a cigar.
"I remember thinking ‘How can he even see me if it’s pitch black?’
"So I decided to run to the other side of my apartment to see if his head were to follow me - and it did.
"He was looking at me and I freaked out, jumped behind the couch to hide and I realised the hotel Cecil hasn’t been open for years."
Peet said he went to "peek" one more time and the ghost was gone, "it was so creepy".
After this experience, Peet became "instantly obsessed" with the spooky going-on at the hotel, and started making content about it for his now 24 million followers.
Peet later got even closer to the hotel when a security guard let him in at 3am.
“The moment I got in I just started running up the stairs all giddy thinking 'I can't believe I made it'.
"But as soon as I got to the 9th or 10th floor, it hit me.
“The energy just changed, it felt heavy and very scary. It felt like I was being watched.
"I also started hearing so many doors slamming shut elsewhere, which wasn’t happening before.”
The hotel reopened in 2022 as affordable housing to ease the homelessness problem in LA.
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