[2][3] Interest in Lam's disappearance increased on February 13 when the Los Angeles Police Department released security camera footage of her behaving erratically in a hotel elevator on the day she was last seen alive.

[7] Guests at the Stay on Main sued the hotel over the incident and Lam's parents filed a separate suit later that year; the latter was dismissed in 2015.

Some of the early Internet interest noted what were considered to be unusual similarities between Lam's death and the 2005 horror film Dark Water.

In a January 2012 blog post, Lam lamented that a "relapse" at the start of the current school term had forced her to drop several classes, leaving her feeling "so utterly directionless and lost."

Lam worried that her transcript would look suspicious with so many withdrawals and that it would result in her being unable to continue her studies and attend graduate school.

[4] Lam had a history of not taking her bipolar medications and, as a result, on several occasions suffered hallucinations that would cause her to hide under her bed for refuge; she was hospitalized at least once for one of these episodes.

[19] A few days before her disappearance, Lam attended a live taping of Conan in Burbank, but was escorted off the premises by security due to disruptive behavior.

[27] The video drew worldwide interest in the case due to Lam's strange behavior, and has been extensively analyzed and discussed.

[30] On the morning of February 19, Santiago Lopez, a hotel maintenance worker, found Lam's body in one of four 1,000-gallon (3,785 L) tanks located on the roof providing water to guest rooms, a kitchen, and a coffee shop.

[32] The tank was drained and cut open since its maintenance hatch was too small to accommodate equipment needed to remove Lam's body.

[14][31] On February 21, the Los Angeles coroner's office issued a finding of accidental drowning, with bipolar disorder as a significant factor.

[33] The full coroner's report, released in June,[4] stated that Lam's body had been found naked;[14] clothing similar to what she was wearing in the elevator video was floating in the water, coated with a "sand-like particulate".

[33] Toxicology tests showed traces consistent with prescription medication found among her belongings, plus nonprescription drugs such as Sinutab and ibuprofen.

[36] Investigators and experts have however noted that the concentration of her prescription drugs in her system indicated that she was under-medicating or had stopped taking her medications recently.

Doors and stairs that access the hotel's roof are locked, with only staff having the passcodes and keys, and any attempt to force them would supposedly have triggered an alarm.

A video posted to the Internet after Lam's death showed that the hotel's roof was easily accessible via the fire escape and that two of the lids of the water tanks were open.

In May 2013, the episode "Watershed" aired as that year's season finale of the ABC series Castle, in which a New York police detective and the title character, a mystery novelist, investigate crimes.

[48] In mainland China, director Liu Hao announced a year after Lam's death that he would be making a film based on it; he went to Los Angeles himself and stayed for a few days at the Cecil doing research.

[51] The 2014 video for Vancouver pop duo The Zolas' "Ancient Mars" is meant to be an idealized representation of Lam's last day, showing a young woman exploring Los Angeles and taking in simple pleasures.

"It bugged me how tidily people explained away her disappearance with drugs or mental illness," said singer Zach Gray, who attended UBC around the same time and had a friend who knew Lam.

"[52] Later that year, the American post-hardcore band Hail the Sun wrote "Disappearing Syndrome," also inspired by Lam's story.

"[56] In March 2016, BuzzFeed Unsolved studied the case, with hosts Ryan and Brent checking into the hotel to visit locations involved in the mystery.

[57] Lam's case was incorporated into the plot of the 2018 horror film Followed, which shows the elevator footage, but instead has the body being found in a hotel's basement.

YIIK: A Postmodern RPG, released in February 2019, had the character Semi Pak disappear in a similar way to Lam, kickstarting the plot of the game.

[61] On January 13, 2021, Netflix announced a four-episode docuseries titled Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, which explores Lam's death and premiered on February 10, 2021.

[62] Lam's death serves as a minor plot device in Argentinian writer Mariana Enríquez's short-story "Un lugar soleado para gente sombría" (included in her 2024 homonymous collection published in Spanish by Anagrama), in which a journalist is tasked by her editor to write an article about a cult that holds regular séances by the hotel's water tank, in an effort to contact Lam's spirit and shed light on the circumstances surrounding her passing.