by Adam Selzer
Inside the Murder Castle
Investigating Chicago’s First Serial Killer, H.H. Holmes
by Adam Selzer
Llewellyn Publications
Woodbury, Minnesota
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Inside the Murder Castle © 2012 by Adam Selzer
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E-book ISBN: 9780738737171
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Inside the Murder Castle
by Adam Selzer
Introduction
Chapter 1: Back in Business
Chapter 2: Myth and Mystery
Chapter 3: The Curse of Holmes, 2012
Chapter 4: Just Press Play
Excerpt from Your Neighborhood Give Me the Creeps
Introduction
Allow me to introduce this the way all the best ghost stories start:
So there I was….
I was sitting on the dirty ground, leaning against some crusty old bricks, in a dank, narrow tunnel below the 63rd Street post office in Chicago. Everything about the tunnel was weird. It didn’t really go anywhere. The ceiling was low enough that I couldn’t quite stand upright. To get into this tunnel in the first place, you had to climb up a little stepladder and shimmy through a hole in the basement wall, which I had failed to do without hitting my head.
No one was sure why the tunnel was even there, but the workers at the post office told us it was believed to have been an old escape tunnel built by Dr. Herman W. Mudgett, who was better known as H. H. Holmes, America’s first known serieal killer.
The tunnel did lead right into the footprint of the building Holmes had built on the site in the 1890s: a hulking three-story beast of a building that he called the World’s Fair Hotel, and which the rest of the world would come to know as the Murder Castle. Exactly how many people he killed there is a mystery, but people like to throw the number 200 around.
Every ghost hunter I knew was dying to get into the basement below the post office that now stood on the grounds. The “castle” building had been torn down in the 1930s, and its footprint only overlapped a little with the modern post office, but for bits of original structure to survive underground below new buildings is hardly unusual. And, as Harper’s magazine said decades ago, “If ever a house was haunted, that one on Chicago’s south side should have been.”
Snot-nosed skeptic that I am, though, I didn’t really expect any ghosts to show up. I wasn’t actually even there to do a ghost hunt—I was just tagging along with the crew of a new History Channel program that had been interviewing me about Holmes and his career, and now I was taking the opportunity to explore the basement I’d spent so much time speculating about.
I knew that most of the stories about Holmes and the building were wild exaggerations, but at least a handful of murders almost certainly took place there, and the creepy old tunnel did lead right into the original footprint of the basement. It was musty and dirty down there. There was dust, gunk, and some debris that I was later told were probably ancient rat teeth (a common feature in old basements). There were smells I didn’t even want to identity.
With the rest of the filming crew elsewhere, I was alone in the tunnel.
“Great,” I said out loud. “I’m alone in the Murder Castle. Super.”
I was just there as a historian, but given that my night job is running ghost tours and investigating ghost lore, I had no intention of passing up the chance to do a little ghost hunting while I was there.
I’m sort of anti-gear as a ghost hunter; my real job on ghost hunts is to do the historical research, and I think most of the gadgets people use on ghost investigations are really just for entertainment purposes. You can get weird readings on them, but it usually takes a lot of imagination to make you think it’s a ghost. I always say that “there’s no such thing as good ghost evidence. Only cool ghost evidence.” Still, as I leaned against the bricks, I set up an audio recorder that I’d brought along in hopes of gathering material for a podcast.
Now, I’m not usually the kind of ghost hunter who tries to ask questions out loud to induce ghosts to show up—I sort of feel stupid sitting around trying to talk to dead people. But part of this is just my own stubbornness. To be honest, most of the coolest “evidence” I’ve ever gathered has come about when I was asking questions out loud. So, with the recorder running, I began to whisper the names of the victims, in the vain hope that maybe it would lead me to a new clue about what went on in the castle.
“Emeline?” I whispered. “Julia? Pearl? Minnie? Anna? Anybody we don’t even know about? Are we in the right place?”
I kept up like that for a while, and didn’t hear anything in response.
At least, not until I played the recording back.
[contents]
Chapter 1
Back In Business
People ask me how I got into the paranormal, and I always tell the same story:
One day, when I was about three, I was sitting at home in my parents’ house outside of Des Moines. My brother would have just been born a few months before, and my great-grandpa Frank had just passed on. And while my brother was lying down for his nap, I turned on Channel 9 on the TV, and there it was: a cartoon show called Scooby-Doo…
And that’s it. I thought Scooby-Doo was cool when I was a kid, and one thing led to another. I wish I had a story like they usually tell on TV—the kind that usually starts with “I never believed in none of this stuff, until one day….” but I just don’t. But I always loved a good ghost story, and even as I grew older and more skeptical, tromping around old houses looking for ghosts was still a fun way to spend an evening.
By the time I moved to Chicago in my twenties, I’d become adept enough at telling ghost stories to get a gig as a ghost tour guide. I quickly found that the most intesting part of the job was doing the historic
al research; smartphones were starting to come out right when I started running tours, and, ever paranoid that people would fact-check me, I determined to investigate every story I was telling. I realize that most ghost sightings are impossible to verify (you usually can’t even track down a firsthand sighting at famously haunted places), but I always figured that we could at least get the historical stories behind them right.
Most people who tell ghost stories, though, don’t seem all that concerned about being fact-checked, and most of the stories that go around Chicago are hopelessly muddied by misinformation (some of it made up quite deliberately). I get sick of fielding questions about how many victims H. H. Holmes had picked up at the Congress Hotel (none that we know of), about Indian massacres that had never happened, and about whatever became of “devil babies” that only ever existed in the imaginations of superstitious women in 1913. In my research I found that many famous stories had no basis in fact (some, I was pretty sure, were invented by my fellow tour guides), but nearly every investigation led me to a new, true story that was often even better than the fake one. Soon, I was uncovering stories that no one had retold in decades, and I parlayed the job into a handful of TV appearances and nonfiction book deals to supplement what I was earning writing young adult novels, which was my main source of income at the time.
In 2011, after a couple of years drifting away from the business, I got an email from Ursula Bielski, author of the popular Chicago Haunts series of books and owner of the Chicago Hauntings tour company, asking if I wanted to run a few tours for her. October was coming, and she needed some guides who knew their way around downtown. She promised not to make me tell any stories I didn’t believe or do anything else that would risk me getting egg on my face, and her company didn’t allow people to be drunk on the bus during regular public tours (the issues that had driven me out of the industry), so it sounded like a good situation for me.
I agreed to meet up with her at a ghost conference she was running the next day at the Portage Theater on the Northwest Side. When I arrived, I noticed that one of the guests was Jeff Mudgett—a great-great-grandson of H. H. Holmes.
Of all the topics I researched, none led me down such a rabbit hole as Holmes, who had become famous in Chicago (a century after he was first famous here) when Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, which told his story, became a bestseller. Practically everyone in Chicago seems to have read it by now, and it’s a gripping book. Tours based on the book are popular, despite the fact that practically none of the buildings in the book are still standing.
In preparation for running tours of Holmes-related locations in 2007, I went into the newspaper archives and dug up an awful lot of contemporary stories about Holmes and his famous “murder castle.” What I found was a fantastic mystery: The Devil in the White City told one version of the story of H. H. Holmes, the swindler/serial killer who murdered people in his Chicago hotel, but it was a version based largely on neighborhood gossip from the 1890s, pulp retellings from the 1940s, and theories that the police had only kicked around for a few days before discrediting. (In Larson’s endnotes, he’s quite open about the fact that many scenes in the book are just things he imagined happening, not something based on fact.) For every expert who said the stains found in the castle were blood, there was an equal-but-opposite expert who said they weren’t. What really went on in the building was never truly discovered.
Just about everything you read about Holmes today is nonsense, really. His “World’s Fair Hotel” was not a hotel in the modern sense of the word (it was more of an apartment building), and there were only a few people who could be traced to it who were missing when Holmes was arrested, not dozens or hundreds. There’s little evidence that he tortured people to see how much pain they could endure, as is constantly claimed now, and even the idea that he was “driven” to kill, not just a swindler who killed people now and then, comes from dubious sources.
But behind the nonsense is a genuine, unsolvable series of mysteries: How many people did this guy really kill? How did he do it? And why? How did he keep all of his many wives from finding out about each other? And how did he kill even a few people in such a crowded building without anyone noticing?
Perhaps the most glaring mistake that nearly every writer makes when talking about Holmes is saying that his “castle,” the building on 63rd Street where he plied a great deal of his trade, burned to the ground in 1895, while the police were in the middle of investigating it. In fact, while there was a fire there in August 1895, the castle didn’t burn to the ground. The second and third floors had to be rebuilt, but the castle remained standing for more than forty years. There’s a picture of it from as late as 1938, just before it was torn down to make way for the new post office, with a pickup truck parked outside of it. I’ve had tour customers who remembered the place from when they were children—kids in the neighborhood didn’t know much of the story by the 1930s, but it was still a place that they were superstitious about. Some kids crossed to the other side of 63rd when they had to pass it.
Naturally, there were stories that the place was haunted. A crowd gathered outside of it on the day of Holmes’ execution to see if anything would happen, and a jeweler whose shop was on the first floor said that “some people are always seeing ghosts here,” and that people came in to look for spooks every day. A cop on the beat that night was transcribed in dialect by the Daily Inter-Ocean: “Divel a ghost have oi seen,” he said, “and divel a wan do oi want to see this blessed night. If oi see wan oi’ll run the spalpeen in, oi will.”
Nothing happened at the castle site that day, but a widely circulated article from the early 20th century said that people who lived in the place were constantly bothered by spirits.
I’d had a few possible encounters with Holmes-related ghosts of my own, mostly in a North Side space where he’d operated a one-story building that he said was a glass-bending factory, but which was more likely a place where victims were cremated (the man had no idea how to bend glass, though he constantly claimed that he did when people asked why he was building such massive furnaces), and which was close enough to the homes of a few of his known victims that it’s reasonable to guess that two or three of them might have even been killed there.
Weird things happen when I take tour groups there from time to time; odd pictures of three-dimensional shadows are sometimes taken, and incredible smells are frequently discovered. Once we showed up and found several hawks with dead birds—doves, from the looks of them—in their mouths. On two occasions, women in the road got in the way of the bus, then vanished like a breath into the wind. When I first started going there, there was a flood light that, on some nights, would turn off or on whenever I said the name Emily Van Tassel, the name of the victim most likely to have been killed on the spot. Lately, one of the trees has been oozing with blood-red liquid; the fact it’s probably just the result of iron oxide in the soil doesn’t make it much less creepy when you see it.
Getting back to work as a tour guide was a fine chance to start taking groups to the site again, and I knew that getting back into the tour business would open a few new doors for research. As soon as I tracked down Jeff Mudgett at the conference, I introduced myself and asked if he knew anything about the glass-bending factory.
He didn’t, but asked if I knew anything that might help back up his own pet theories—that Holmes, his great-great-grandfather, was also Jack the Ripper, and that when he was hanged in 1896, it wasn’t really him on the scaffold.
I didn’t have any information about either of those, but Jeff seemed friendly and coherent, and gave me a copy of his novel, Bloodstains, which was a terrific suspense story based around those two theories. I told him I’d look into it and see what I could find.
Like anyone would be, I was awfully skeptical about those theories. I would probably have an easier time putting together a case claiming Holmes was innocent than a case claiming he was Jack
the Ripper. Stabbing prostitutes and leaving their bodies in the street, like the Ripper did, wasn’t really Holmes’ style, from what we know, and neither was killing the same sort of person over and over when there was no financial gain to be had. Most of his victims that we know about were people he knew pretty well and killed carefully and methodically—the ones in Chicago were killed cleanly, not slashed to ribbons, and were disposed of so well that they could never be found. But, hey—if he was in London in 1888, he would have been on vacation. Why not break up the routine a bit? Maybe he stabbed one prostitute to death and thought, “Hey, that was swell! I’m gonna do it again!”
Somewhat more compelling was the faked death theory—I’m a sucker for a good faked death theory, even though I realize that they seldom turn out to be true. Holmes had been taking great pains to tell everyone who would listen that his physical appearance was changing as he sat in the jail cell, and asking to be buried in a huge block of cement was an odd—one could even say suspicious—request to make. When I went back to old articles written by people who met him in prison or attended the hanging, I was struck by how many people noted that he didn’t look like he did in his pictures. And why did Holmes ask to be buried in a huge block of cement after he was hanged? This was not a guy who respected the sanctity of the human body, after all. Was he trying to stop people from finding out that it wasn’t really him?
Not to mention the fact that people associated with Holmes and the trial that convicted him had a tendency to come to no good end. People in the 1890s (and for a good twenty years after) often spoke of there being a “Holmes Curse,” and I eventually found newspaper articles identifying nearly thirty “victims” of it over the years. Some were just people from the jury and prosecution who suffered personal setbacks (ranging from a sprained ankle to disappoinment in elections), but others got terribly sick, and several died under violent or mysterious circumstances. Many have claimed that Holmes was getting back at them from beyond the grave—it’s actually more rational to say that he was simply still alive and getting revenge.
