William Griffith - The Murder Castle of HH Holmes: A Scrapbook of Eyewitness Accounts, Diagrams, and Ephemera

CHICAGO UNBELIEVABLE PRESENTS:

THE MURDER CASTLE OF HH HOLMES

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS, PERIOD DOCUMENTS, AND EPHEMERA

www.chicagounbelievable.com

INTRODUCTION: THE HOLMES CASE

In 1894, newspapers swirled with stories of H.H. Holmes, a swindler who had turned a $10,000 trick on Fidelity Mutual, passing off a body as that of his friend. Then the story changed - police announced that they believed the body really was that of Holmes friend Pitezel, and that Holmes had murdered him.

Then people came to wonder what had become of three of Pitezels children, who had last been seen in the company of Holmes.

And, when their bodies were discovered, they remembered a three story building hed operated on 63 rd street in Chicagoone that newspapers said had been filled with hidden rooms and secret passages.

This mini-book is not intended as a re-telling of the Holmes case. Rather, its a collection of ephemera - eyewitness accounts of what Holmes famous murder castle was like. So much misinformation about Holmes circulates that getting primary sources out there seems like it would be an invaluable undertaking. However, even in 1895, wild rumors were spreading, and practically everyone who had ever met Holmes was saying that theyd narrowly avoided being murdered by him. The truth of the story is probably buried beneath all of this guesswork, myths, and gossip.

A few years ago, H.H. Holmes estimated number of victims was around two dozen. Today, numerous experts place the number in the hundreds. Ive been on enough radio shows to know that they play fast and loose with the word expert, though. The fact that the number seems to go up by another hundred every Halloween has less to do with new evidence and more to do with the tale getting taller. Though its common to hear that dozens of people who never returned from Chicago have been traced to the castle, the real number of names we have of possible victims who were killed there is currently under a dozen, and even many of those may have been killed elsewhere.

But a dozen is plenty, and no one assumes that we know about all of his victims.

And take my word for it: the real tale - what we know of it - is scary enough. People have been embellishing it since day one, but its totally unnecessary. Every time I start a new round of research on Holmes, I know Im in for nightmares.

Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H.H. Holmes, came to Chicago around 1885 after studying medicine at the University of Michigan. Just looking at his activities in Chicago over the next ten years is sort of mind-boggling. He had a wife in the north suburbs, and another couple of them, plus various mistresses, on the south side. He had a drug store in Englewood, a candy store on Milwaukee Avenue, a couple of glass bending factories (though by all accounts he knew nothing about bending glass), a cigar factory, a copier machine company with an office in the now-demolished Monon building in the loop, an apartment in Lakeviewthe list just goes on and one. He was constantly involved in some sort of swindle or another, whether it was buying furniture on credit (and then never paying for it) or defrauding the gas company by claiming to have invented some new sort of gas.

But the business venture he was best known for was The Worlds Fair Hotel, a block-long building he erected on 63 rd Street in Englewood. The rest of the world would come to know it as The Murder Castle. It was rigged up with secret passages, a soundproof vault where people could be smothered, gas lines, mysterious rooms, trap doors, and any number of other ways to kill a person and hide the body.

The Hotel was not really a hotel in the modern sense of the word - there was no front desk or check-in time. The first floor was given over to businesses, the 2 nd floor was mostly bizarre rooms (presumably designed for killing, though he may have been thinking more of hiding stolen goods in most of them), and the third floor was flats, which were used for extended stays. The people who stayed there paid rent and mostly seemed to have lived there for months at a time. Its possible that he lured some patrons from the 1893 Worlds Fair there, but most of the stories of him doing so are based on hearsay and misunderstandings.

In general, the people that he killed were people that he knew, whose murders he could plan. Most serial killers pick one type of victim to kill over and over, often by the same method. Holmes killed men, women and children, and he did it by all different methods (though he seems to have favorite chloroform poisoning). One of them was even said to have been shot.

His favorite trick was life insurance - when he had a new girlfriend or employee, he would pressure their families to let him take out insurance on their lives. One by one, theyd disappear when the ink on the policy was dry.

Holmes eventually confessed to killing twenty-seven people, including two unborn babies, but of those, a few were still alive, a few never existed, at least one is known to have died of natural causes, and a few were not named in the confession - see our companion volume, The Confessions of HH Holmes). Even with the confession and a century of specualtion, theres still only about a dozen named victims (four of whom, the Pitezels, were certainly not killed in the castle), but even some of those had only a shaky connection to Holmes, and no one thinks thats a complete list. The actual number of victims is impossible to guess. However, it was probably close to two dozen than two hundred; few, if any, further victims have ever been officially suspected beyond the list of names we know for sure (unless you believe the theories that Holmes was also Jack the Ripper and faked his death in 1896, which, honestly, are not out of the question). Holmes didnt kill everyone he met. Indeed, many people lived and worked in his famous murder castle for some time and lived to tell about it.

But when Holmes became famous, many people who had met him became convinced that he had tried to kill them at one time or another. Some of their stories are fascinating, but some are clearly nonsense and gossip.

Holmes was eventually caught - when he killed Ben Pitezel, his partner, and took the insurance money, Fidelity Mutual smelled a rat, and Holmes began making the papers as the worlds greatest swindler. When his name was all over the papers in 1894, though, no one was calling him a killer - just a swindler. They thought he had used someone elses body as a stand-in for Pitezel. It was only as the case was further investigated that they realized that there was murder in the case.

After the bodies of three of Pitezels children were discovered, stories about Holmes began to fly, and people thought of the Murder Castle back in Chicago.

The police knew about the castle, and about its secret rooms and chambers, even before the Worlds Fair began. At the time, the secret chambers were merely thought to be hiding places for furniture Holmes had purchased on credit and never paid for.

By the summer of 1895, when excavations at the castle began, most of the evidence was already gone. Holmes had disposed of the bodies of his victims quite thoroughly, and, upon vacating the building, had removed what evidence he couldnt destroy by setting fire to the place twice, in 1893 and 1894. Only scraps of evidence remained, and police couldnt do much to disprove Holmes claims that the bones found in the basement were just old soup bones. One newspaper that believed Holmes to be innocent even claimed that the building was built on top of a Civil War graveyard, and that was where the bones came from!

Other papers simply believed that Holmes must have been innocent of most of the murders he was accused of because he had no financial motive for the killings. There had never been a serial killer caught in America before; it didnt occur to some people that the motivation for some of the murders may have simply been fun.