Selzer - Inside the Murder Castle

Inside the Murder Castle

Investigating Chicagos 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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First e-book edition 2012

E-book ISBN: 9780738737171

Cover designed by Lisa Novak

Cover images: Grunge banner iStockphoto.com/mon5ter

Victorian Greystone Mansion in Grand Boulevard, Chicago iStockphoto.com/Steve Geer

Edited by Brett Fechheimer

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Inside the Murder Castle

by Adam Selzer

: Back in Business

: Myth and Mystery

: The Curse of Holmes, 2012

: Just Press Play

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 didnt really go anywhere. The ceiling was low enough that I couldnt 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, Americas 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 Worlds 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 Harpers magazine said decades ago, If ever a house was haunted, that one on Chicagos south side should have been.

Snot-nosed skeptic that I am, though, I didnt really expect any ghosts to show up. I wasnt actually even there to do a ghost huntI 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 Id 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 didnt even want to identity.

With the rest of the filming crew elsewhere, I was alone in the tunnel.

Great, I said out loud. Im 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.

Im 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 its a ghost. I always say that theres 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 Id brought along in hopes of gathering material for a podcast.

Now, Im not usually the kind of ghost hunter who tries to ask questions out loud to induce ghosts to show upI 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 Ive 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 dont even know about? Are we in the right place?

I kept up like that for a while, and didnt hear anything in response.

At least, not until I played the recording back.

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 thats 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 TVthe kind that usually starts with I never believed in none of this stuff, until one day. but I just dont. 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, Id 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 historical 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 cant 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, dont 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.