On February 9, 2013, the body of 21-year-old Canadian student Elisa Lam was discovered at the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Her death, while tragic, was not entirely shocking, as she had been missing for two weeks. The circumstances surrounding her death, however, continue to leave us feeling baffled and, to be honest, a little freaked out.

Top 10 Strangest Theories About Mysterious Occurrences

10 Skid Row

The Elisa Lam story starts in one of the most violent and dangerous places in the United States: LA’s infamous drug- and crime-infested Skid Row. The crime scene? The cursed Cecil Hotel (affectionately called “The Suicide” by its long-term residents). Also known as Stay on Main, Skid Row’s budget hotel has served as a temporary residence for homeless people, prostitutes, and drug addicts who needed a place to stay.

The Cecil opened on Main Street in 1924 with more than 600 guestrooms among its 15 floors. It quickly became notorious for suicide, violence, and murder—at least 13 suicides have taken place in its rooms since 1927. But the Cecil was cheap, which appealed to unwitting tourists and travelers—like Elisa Lam—who were looking for an inexpensive LA stay.

9 Unwanted Attention

Elisa Lam loved her Tumblr page. She posted frequently on the social media site, sharing all aspects of her life. In a post from January 27, 2013, Elisa expressed receiving unwanted attention from men and wrote, “I’m going out tonight…I really hope no creeper comes near me…seriously though…those Italian and Mexican guys go after you STRONG.”

On the last day she was seen, security footage showed Lam entering the lobby of the Cecil Hotel with two men. The men gave her a box they were carrying and then left. Who were these guys? What did they want? And what was in that box?

8 Mental Health

Lam’s Tumblr account, Nouvelle-Nouveau, revealed more than the details of her social life. The page also provided insight to her mental health and overall state of mind around the time of her death. She openly posted about being suicidal, and it was well known among her friends and family that she was unstable and depressed.

In one post on her Tumblr blog she wrote, “Depression sucks. Period. If someone says to you that they have depression, don’t ask why. There is no why. Tell them every day you love them. Remind them every day it will get better.”

In another post, she wrote: “Today has been one of those blah days full of apathy. Really dangerous too; I can see myself feeling suicidal and it always scares me when I start feeling suicidal.”

The documentary that delved into Lam’s disappearance, The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, revealed that she had been prescribed at least four medications to treat bipolar disorder. The postmortem toxicology report found only small doses of the drugs in her system, leading coroner Jason Tovar to believe “she was undertaking her medications.”

7 Hotel Manager

Amy Price, the Cecil Hotel manager at the time, had a fair amount of interaction with Lam and was one of the last people to see her alive. When giving her statement in court, Price claimed that her guest was originally booked to stay in a dorm-like hostel room with other girls but that her “odd behavior” had forced her to be moved. Lam was writing notes like “get out” and “go home” and placing them on the beds of other women in her room. She also locked out her roommates and demanded they provide a password to be let back in.

Sadly, as an affordable place to say in the middle of an area overrun with drugs and crime, the Cecil Hotel regularly hosts guests who display odd behaviors. Nevertheless, Price testified that Lam had been acting strangely in the lobby the day before she disappears.

6 Television Taping

As a part of her California vacation, Elisa Lam had decided to sit in on the live taping of a television show. She was a member of that audience just a few days prior to her death. Lam had written a rambling letter and became obsessed with getting the letter to the host. Due to her disruptive behavior and deemed to be a danger to other audience members, she was escorted out of the studio by security and removed from its premises.

What had Lam written in that letter, and why was she so hell-bent on delivering it?

5 Dark Water

While investigators were still looking into the disappearance of Elisa Lam, guests at the Cecil Hotel began complaining of low water pressure and odd-tasting water. Hotel maintenance man, Santiago Lopez, went up to the roof to take a look at the water tanks. He claimed that the latch on the main tank was open but was not expecting to find what he did: Elisa Lam lying face-up in the water approximately twelve inches from the top of the tank.

There was confusion around this discovery, however, as initial reports indicated that the latch on the water tank was closed, not open, indicating that someone else would have had to have been involved, as Elisa would not have been able to close it herself while she was in the tank.

This tragic event also happens to be the plot of the 2005 film, Dark Water, in which a girl’s body is discovered in a water tank on the roof of an apartment building.

4 Morbid Musician

There were many theories surrounding the death of Elisa Lam. While some ruled it to be suicide, others believed that she may have been murdered. One theory that really gained traction was that the musician, Morbid, had killed her. A closer look, however, revealed that this theory was based on nothing more than the fact that he was a metal musician who sometimes wore scary makeup and had posted a video a year prior showing that he stayed at the Cecil Hotel.

When this conspiracy was debunked, people began to question who might have planted this story and what the actual truth was that they were trying to cover up. This would not have been something out of the norm for the Cecil Hotel employees and its residents, who included serial killers such as The Night Stalker and Jack Underweger.

3 Tuberculosis Outbreak

Another theory suggested that Elisa Lam was a test subject for a new tuberculosis medication. A website called Ghost Theory speculated that the odd behaviors Lam exhibited could be linked to the side-effects of anti-TB meds.

Lam was a student at the University of British Columbia, which houses a well-known tuberculosis research center. The theory argues that Lam “knew too much” and was fatally silenced. In February 2013, after Lam’s body had been discovered, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis on Skid Row. Coincidentally, LAM-ELISA is the actual name of a TB test.

2 “The Last Bookstore”

The last place Elisa Lam was seen was at The Last Bookstore in Downtown LA. This happened to be where the two men who had brought the box back to her hotel with her had been from. The box had supposedly been filled with books she had bought but could not carry back to the hotel herself. This is where it gets really weird, so get ready.

The Last Bookstore’s domain contains a postal code in its registration that reads V5G 4S2. When plugged into Google Maps, this postal code leads directly to a specific location in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Canada: Elisa’s burial site.

1 Elevator Footage

No. 1 on this list can only be the final live footage of Elisa Lam. The security video was released to the public was that of an elevator in the Cecil Hotel. The deliberately jumbled and tampered-with timestamp at the bottom of the video, along with a brief segment of missing footage, raises questions without answers. But it’s Lam’s absolutely bizarre and erratic behavior on the tape that is the most unsettling.

At the start of the video, Lam enters the elevator and proceeds to press a series of buttons. She waits for a while before becoming frightened. She pops her head out to see if there is someone outside the elevator. It is unclear whether or not there is, but Lam jumps back into the elevator and proceeds to hide in the corner. She takes another look out to see if there is anyone there. This time, she steps out of the elevator and starts walking in an almost choreographed fashion, first in a square and then side to side.

Lam walks out of frame and returns a few moments later, holding her head and grabbing onto the elevator as if she were off balance. She presses more buttons and then exits the elevator once again. While it is impossible to know if she was communicating with someone, she gestures her hands in such a peculiar fashion that one could interpret she might have been. Elisa walks out of frame for the last time and after a brief pause, there is an abrupt edit in the footage and the elevator door closes.

The next time Elisa Lam is seen is when her deceased naked body is discovered in the water tank on the hotel roof. Ultimately, the Los Angeles County Coroner ruled the death an accidental drowning, with bipolar disorder being a significant contributing factor.

Top 10 Mysterious People Who Should Have Movies Made About Them

Comic book plots are not restrained by the scientific laws that govern the real-world universe. Of course, ironically, the imaginary atomic and subatomic particles, chemical elements, and substances of the Marvel Comics and DC Comics universes often either have actual real-world counterparts or borrow from one or more of them, usually with an unlikely or impossible twist.

This is true whether we’re talking Wolverine, Captain America, Thor, the Metal Men, Superman, Deathstroke, Flash, Dr. Doom, Wonder Woman, Luke Cage, or the Fantastic Four or whether we’re referring to superpowers, costumes, or weapons. If we take a closer look, we find that one or more of the 10 real counterparts of comic book particles and elements on this list come into play in these comic book characters’ lives and universes, and what a difference they make!

For better or worse—or, actually, for better and worse—the real-universe counterparts of these particles and elements, in most cases, lack the properties of the ones in the Marvel Comics and DC Comics universes.

Related: Video: 10 Comic Book Heroes Who Could Theoretically Exist

10 Adamantine

Where would Wolverine be without adamantine? The same place that Captain America and several other Marvel Comics superheroes would be—a lot less dangerous and a whole lot more vulnerable, that’s where. Wolverine’s skeleton and Freddy Krueger-like retractable claws are both bonded to the virtually indestructible alloy. Captain America’s disc-shield, which is both a defensive instrument and an offensive weapon, is also made, in part, from adamantine, alloyed with vibranium, another element that exists only in the Marvel universe. Adamantine is both impervious and all-but-indestructible. There’s no other element quite like it in the Marvel universe.

Adamantine exists in the real world too. However, it’s nothing like the Marvel version. It is an ingredient in a veneer; it is also a mineral known as adamantine spar.

The celluloid veneer is used in clockmaking. A product of the Celluloid Manufacturing Company of New York City, the veneer was available in black, white, and “colored patterns such as wood grain, onyx and marble” and was patented on September 7, 1880. A year later, the Seth Thomas Clock Company acquired the right to use it and, beginning in 1882, glued it, as a facing, to the wood cases of their clocks.^[1]

9 Star Core

One version of Thor’s mystic hammer Mjolnir is—by his father Odin’s command—forged by elves from the core of a star. What, exactly, is the core of a star? In the Marvel universe, who knows? Even in the actual universe, it’s not easy to pin down the exact meaning, especially if we expect the definition to include an object.

The core of a star is actually more a place than it is anything else, a place in which enormous temperatures and pressures “ignite nuclear fusion, converting atoms of hydrogen into helium,” which results in the release of “a tremendous amount of heat.” The Universe Today website uses our own sun as an example. It’s a fairly normal star measuring 1,391,000 kilometers (864,938 miles) across.

Our sun’s core, which is about 278,000 kilometers (172,000 miles) across, makes up approximately “20 percent of the solar radius.” It is inside the solar radius that temperatures as high as “15,000,000 degrees Kelvin occur and nuclear fusion [takes] place.” The bigger the star, the bigger and hotter its core. Obviously, human technology couldn’t forge a hammer or anything else out of a star’s core, but, apparently, elvish technology is up to the task.^[2]

8 Iron, Gold, Lead, Tin, Mercury, and Platinum

Since the Metal Men form a group of adventurers, we treat them as a single entity on our list.

DC Comics’ Metal Men had their origins in response to a real-life emergency. As Don Markstein’s Toonopedia article points out, The Atom had moved up from the ranks of the minor leagues of characters to the big league, meaning he was given a title of his very own. His promotion left Showcase, the comic book series in which he’d appeared, without a principal. To make matters worse, the next “issue was due at the printer in two weeks.”

Fortunately, writer-editor Robert Kanigher came to the rescue, creating a group of adventuring robots, scripting “a story for them in a single weekend.” Penciller Ross Andru and inker Mark Esposito also proved up to the task and drew the comic just before the deadline. Not expecting them to grace the pages of Showcase or any other DC comic again, Kanigher killed them off at the end of their debut story.

He then resurrected them, and they continued their adventures after Dr. Will Magnus collected their remains and forged the team anew, complete with their life-giving “responsometers.” In all, the Metal Men number six.

Of course, each of them has a counterpart in the actual universe as well as in the DC Comics universe. The actual properties of gold are reflected in Gold’s personality and abilities. The leader of the Metal Men has a golden hue and the physical properties of the metal. Armed with these qualities, Gold can “stretch into a thin wire miles long or flatten into a sheet four-millionths of an inch thick.”

“Big-hearted” Lead often shields his teammates from harmful rays and radiation. Iron, “the Metal Men’s strongman,” can be shaped and formed into an infinite variety of objects that help the team carry out their missions. Vain, arrogant Mercury boasts of his being the only metal that is a liquid at room temperature. Tin, the smallest and weakest of the Metal Men, feels “inadequate [and] stutters, although this impediment often vanishes in the heat of battle.” Bright and beautiful Platinum falls in love with her maker.^[3]

7 Kryptonite

Depending on its color, chunks of kryptonite have various effects on Superman (and other Kryptonians, including Supergirl). The chunks of the crystalline mineral are remnants of the planet Krypton, from which Kal-El’s parents dispatched him, as a baby, in a tiny spaceship just before the planet exploded. Kryptonite may be green, red, blue, gold, silver, black, or white.

Green weakens, causing severe pain and fatigue, and is ultimately “lethal to all Kryptonians.” Red weakens, causing extreme mood swings and mutations. Blue negates the effects of red kryptonite. Gold strips Kryptonians of their superpowers. Silver causes extreme hunger, “intense delusions and hallucinations [and] paranoia.” Black has a Jekyll-and-Hyde effect, splitting a Kryptonian’s identity into good and evil personalities or even good-twin, bad-twin versions of themselves. White kryptonite kills any plants in the universe.

As Bill Christensen reports in a LiveScience website article, kryptonite also exists in the real universe! Except for its lack of fluorine, it has the same chemical composition as the varieties of Superman’s crystalline mineral. However, Earth’s sodium lithium boron silicate mineral doesn’t exhibit the same array of colors that the Kryptonian version does. Instead, it fluoresces a pinkish-orange under ultraviolet light. Fortunately, unlike the type that plagues Superman, real kryptonite is also harmless.^[4]

6 Promethium

As the DC Universe Infinite website article on Deathstroke indicates, his “origin has been revised and reimagined several [times] over the years.” In DC Comics’ original story of his origin, Col. Slade Wilson participates in an experiment. As a result, he develops superhuman physical and mental powers and becomes a black ops agent. His friend and executive officer, scientist David Isherwood, develops a “‘gravity sheath’ bodysuit” for Slade. However, Slade rejects it in favor of custom-made promethium armor, which “absorbs kinetic energy and blocks it, making it impervious to bullets or the fist of a superhuman opponent.”

Although promethium exists in the actual universe as well as the DC cosmos, the real-world element has none of the properties or uses described in DC Comics. Instead, as the Royal Society of Chemistry points out, most of the radioactive element is used in research, although “a little promethium is used in specialized atomic batteries…the size of a drawing pin…[and] for pacemakers, guided missiles, and radios.” It is also used as “a source of X-rays,” and its radioactivity is employed in measuring instruments.^[5]

5 Molybdenum

In an issue of DC Comic’s Flash, as the superhero closes in on Alchemy while the villain seeks to force information from a victim, the Scarlet Speedster is puzzled. “I don’t get it,” Flash thinks. “Alchemy must know I’m chasing him—and yet he’s standing right out in the open. He’s unprotected!” The reason for Alchemy’s apparent lack of concern is revealed when Flash discovers that his foe has laced the entire area with strands of molybdenum. Had Flash not noticed the nearly invisible filaments, his charging through them at super-speed “would have been like running through a vegematic.”

Not only does molybdenum really exist, but its use in the Flash comic book is a rare instance in which the element actually could do what the writers depict it as doing. One use of molybdenum is to make wire rope resistant to corrosion. Specifically, we’re referencing Type 316 wire rope, which is used in severe environments that require a higher level of “resistance to corrosion” than is afforded by Type 304 wire rope, a “basic stainless steel alloy” variety that includes chromium, nickel, and carbon. The addition of molybdenum allows Type 316 wire rope, a chromium-nickel alloy, to fare better against many industrial chemicals and solvents and, in particular, “inhibits pitting caused by chlorides.”

It’s hard to say just how thick the strands of molybdenum shown in the Flash comic book are, but wire rope containing the element is usually stocked in diameters ranging from 1/16 of an inch to 4 1/2-inches. It’s possible that Alchemy cast thinner strands, which appeared nearly invisible to Flash. It’s also possible that Flash, whose speed afoot matches or exceeds that of Superman, might run so fast that he would streak through Alchemy’s molybdenum filaments without seeing them, in which case he would most definitely learn what it is like to be sliced to pieces.^[6]

4 Titanium

As Shawn S. Lealos points out in his CBR.com website article, Dr. Doom’s armor, made of titanium, has been upgraded several times over the supervillain’s career. Ironically, the supervillain’s original armor was forged by monks and was later embedded with splinters of the true cross. His armor is equipped with several high-tech weapons and further enhanced by magic, too, but it’s the element of titanium we’re concerned about here.

The Royal Society of Chemistry website is one of several sources that give visitors the lowdown on titanium, a real-world element with several practical applications, none of which, alas, is related to armor. Although some of its qualities suggest that it could be used for such a purpose. For starters, the element is as strong as steel but much less dense and can be used as an alloying agent with iron and other metals. In fact, alloys, including titanium, are used primarily in aircraft, spacecraft, and missiles because of their “low density and ability to withstand extremes of temperature,” the website notes.

According to the Society, The titanium pipes used in power plant condensers resist corrosion even in seawater, which makes the element ideal for use in the hulls of ships as well as submarines. It is also used in desalination plants. Since titanium “connects well with bone,” it also has medical uses, including joint replacements and tooth implants. It is most often “used as a pigment in house paint, artists’ paint, plastics, enamels, and paints,” but it is also an ingredient in sunscreens.

Titanium also has an incredibly high melting point (1,670 degrees Centigrade, or 3,038 degrees Fahrenheit) and an even higher boiling point (3,287 degrees Centigrade, or 5,949 degrees Fahrenheit). If Victor von Doom is reading this, perhaps has given the Fantastic Four’s nemesis some new ideas for armor upgrades.^[7]

3 Photons

DC Comics featuring the Amazonian princess doesn’t specify from what material her magical sword was forged, but Wonder Woman: The Ultimate Guide to the Amazon Princess by Scott Beatty informs us that its blade is sharp enough to sever electrons from an atom.

In Alexis Ross and Mark Waid’s graphic novel Kingdom Come, Wonder Woman’s sword cuts Superman when the Man of Steel draws her weapon before she can warn him of its effects. In one of Kyle Hill’s YouTube videos, he explains the stunning effects that such a sword would have if it existed in the real-world universe. An ordinary blade cuts objects (and people) by “applying more pressure than a material’s structure can withstand,” thereby separating the material’s molecules.

Wonder Woman’s sword, however, slices through the spaces between atoms and their orbiting electrons, “applying pressure directly to the ionic and covalent bonding [that holds] materials together,” notes Hill. In the process, her sword swings “separate atmospheric atoms from their electrons and ionizes them,” which would leave a trail of lightning behind each stroke. Her sword would be the sharpest thing in the universe, capable of slicing through Luke Cage’s bulletproof skin, Wolverine’s adamantine skeleton, or Captain America’s vibranium shield.

According to Stephen Reucroft and John D. Swain, professors in Northeastern University’s Department of Physics, three things split electrons from atoms: electromagnetic radiation, particles, and heat. Heat is a form of energy; almost all particles are material objects; and radiation can be either energy or matter. Once all the electrons are stripped or cut away from the atom, only the nucleus remains.

We seem to be left with two possibilities, both rather broad: Wonder Woman’s sword is made exclusively of particles or of energy. The former state of affairs could allow the weapon to have a material form since most particles are matter, but could pure energy also have a form? The short answer is almost certainly no. As Ethan Siegel explains in his online Forbes article, with one possible exception, “energy is never seen to exist on its own, but only as part of a system of particles, whether massive or massless.”

The exception? Dark energy, which causes the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. It may also be the energy that is “inherent [in] the fabric of the Universe itself!” However, even if dark energy exists independently of matter, it cannot be generated by any technological means. As Siegel concludes, “Creating energy independent of particles? It might be something the Universe itself does, but until we learn how to create (or destroy) spacetime itself, we find ourselves unable to make it so.”

It seems, then, that Wonder Woman’s sword must be made of some sort of particles, such as those of light, which can be contained in the shape of a sword, the particles, or photons, of which knock electrons from their atoms. In magic, as in fantasy, after all, anything is possible.^[8]

2 Bulletproof Skin

Although Luke Cage’s bulletproof skin seems possible only in a comic book, a news headline, “Bulletproof Human Skin Made From Spider Silk,” suggests otherwise. Sort of. Obviously, spider silk is not the same as human skin itself. Still, the substance can make human skin bulletproof.

According to the online article, a Dutch team created a piece of “bulletproof” skin from special, U.S.-made spider silk and human skin cells and found that it indeed can repel bullets—as long as “they’re not traveling too fast.” If additional research allows improvements to the silk armor, soldiers may one day be impervious to bullets.^[9]

1 Cosmic Radiation

In comic books, exposure to various types of radiation has turned ordinary folks into superheroes (or, sometimes, supervillains). Among those who have developed superpowers due to such exposure are Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm, better known, respectively, as Mr. Fantastic, The Invisible Woman, The Human Torch, and The Thing or, collectively, The Fantastic Four. They all developed their powers (super elasticity, invisibility, combustion, and superhuman strength) by being exposed to cosmic radiation during their testing of an experimental rocket ship.

Cosmic rays do exist outside the pages of comic books, and, yes, they could endanger space travelers. According to The Space Review website, galactic cosmic rays represent a “continuous background radiation to which the crew would be exposed, [and]…in an unshielded spacecraft, [such] radiation would result in significant health problems, or death, to the crew.” Shielding would absorb cosmic radiation, but it could also cause a problem even worse than the radiation itself: cosmic rays interact with the shielding and can create “secondary charged particles, increasing the overall radiation dose.”

Former astronaut Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman, who is currently a professor at MIT, believes Earth shows how to create more effective shielding to protect against cosmic radiation and other hazards such as solar flares: a hybrid system that employs both a magnetic field and passive absorption. “‘That’s the way the Earth does it,’ Hoffman explained, ‘and there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to do that in space.’”

Although cosmic rays are real, they wouldn’t have conferred superpowers on Richards and his crew. As the host of the Reactions’ “Can Radiation Give You Superpowers” video and her guest Professor Dan Claes, Ph.D., point out, even on Earth, everyone is bombarded with cosmic radiation every day, as much as 115 times a second. In space, inside the Van Allen Belt, the foursome “were probably hit around 15 million times a second,” Claes adds, and “ten times that” if a solar flare occurred during the crew’s trip.

However, it is so extremely unlikely that all 75 trillion cells in the crew’s bodies could have been struck the same number of times by the cosmic rays “in the same superhuman way and giving them each a different ability,” Claes explains. It is much more likely, it seems, that Richards, Susan Storm, her brother Johnny, and Ben Grimm would have died instead of becoming The Fantastic Four.^[10]