The year is 1893 and on a chilly day in October you’ve finally arrived at your destination,
the famed windy city of Chicago. You’re here to visit the World’s Fair, an event
that will be remembered for all its glory for many years to come. What you don’t know
is that the smooth-talking gentleman you just met on the street will also go down in history,
but not for anything good. This man with a grand handlebar mustache who’s sporting
a rather dapper bowler hat will become known as one of America’s most cunning and murderous
scammers. You’re the prey and he’s the predator, and you are soon going to experience
a nightmare beyond anything you could imagine. You’ve just unwittingly agreed to spend
the night in his demon trap, what will become known as a real-life house of horrors, aka,
“Murder Castle.”
To give you an insight into how this guy worked, let’s carry on with this fictional meeting,
which is based on true events.
The man you have just met introduced himself as H. H. Holmes, although what you don’t
know is that his real name is Herman Webster Mudgett. He’s just 32-years old, but while
still young, he’s been through a lot and done a lot of bad things.
He’s smartly dressed, you could say immaculately dressed; a “fop” or a “dandy” as they
might have said back then. He’s articulate and intelligent and comes across as a man
of the world, sophisticated, and as you’ve just found out, charitable. What a kindness
to invite an out-of-towner to stay at his house. This is what you see anyway.
The truth is this man comes from a working class background he’d rather deny ever happened.
Like many serial killers he was beaten by a violent father and picked on by a mother
who took her devoutness a little too far. He took his anger out on animals, and may
even had practiced some amateur dissection on them.
Young Holmes married young at just age 16, and just a few years later he enrolled at
the University of Michigan's Department of Medicine and Surgery. He studied anatomy,
which will serve him well in his criminal future.
He was unsettled, though, and it seems always strayed to the dark side. His wife soon left
after he took his hand to her once too often, while there were rumors he might have had
something to do with the disappearance of a young boy. This remains a rumor. What is
true is that while working with dead bodies when studying anatomy he began making false
insurance claims on those bodies. He might even have experimented on some bodies, but
we can’t be sure of that. In short, he went from job to job after that.
He married again while not even divorced to the previous wife, and carried on with his
life as a trickster. The likely reason he left for Chicago was because while working
in a drugstore a boy who’d he’d prescribed drugs to died. Throughout his life people
around him would go missing or mysteriously die.
This doesn’t bode well for you.
Now we are back in the street and you’ve just been invited by Dr. Henry H. Holmes,
who claims to be a pharmacist, to stay at his house. To your surprise, though, this
is not just a house, the building takes up almost an entire block on Chicago’s 63rd
and Wallace streets. Wow, you think, this erudite man of high-esteem must have made
a ton of money in the medical profession. You could say he did, but not in the way you
imagine. His business wasn’t saving lives, it was taking them, or at least exploiting
the dead.
The house is kind of ugly, and Dr. Holmes tells you he’s been renovating of late,
hoping to turn it into the World’s Fair Hotel. It’s just about done, but you don’t
see any guests just yet. There are some people milling around and others working in a drugstore,
but the place seems eerily quiet. By the way, from that drugstore Holmes would market fake
cures for alcoholism and also say he had tapped in a miracle spring. The water, he said, could
cure all kinds of ailments. The pump led right to the drugstore, but Holmes had actually
just illegally tapped into the water mains. He tells you there are over 50 rooms, and
proceeds to take you to one of them. “You must be suffering from the enervating travails
of travel,” he says to you, which you don’t quite understand. Hey, you spent most of your
childhood helping out your pop on the pig farm. “Perhaps I can offer you an inebriant.
An anodyne for the weary traveler?” You stare at him blankly. “Would you like a
drink,” he says. “Ah, ok, why not,” you reply, ashamed of your pitiful intelligence.
You now hate pigs.
You take the drink, a special cocktail he tells you, something he created just for the
World’s Fair. You put down your bags and start to drink. “A tonic,” he tells you,
“or should we call it a tincture.” He says you’ll soon be refreshed, ready for
the resplendence of what awaits you at the fair. This trip could not have been any better,
you think. Who said city folks weren’t kind. Your eyes feel heavy, and you tell Dr. Holmes
you might want to rest for a while. “Sleep,” he whispers, “you get some rest. Tomorrow
is a big day for you.”
You wake up in the middle of the night with a bit of a headache. Your bags are gone, so
you assume the kind doctor has just stored them somewhere for you. You’re gasping for
some water, and so decide to make a visit to the bathroom.
It’s hard to see in the dark and there are few lights turned on. You follow a set of
stairs that are to the right of the door, only when you get to the bottom of them there
is just a wall. Strange, you think. Maybe he didn’t finish that renovation.
You walk back up to the landing, and try to walk the other way, when again you find some
winding stairs. You walk to the bottom of them, and there are two doors. You try one
and behind it is a wall. This guy really needs to fire some contractors, you think.
You try the next door, and just as you step inside it closes behind you. When you try
to open it you find it is locked. In this room there are no windows. You bang on walls
and it seems they are very thick. It’s so stuffy in this room. There’s hardly any
ventilation at all. Then suddenly you smell something like gas. It seems to be coming
from a small grate. What the hell!?
Then you notice a kind of door fixed into the floor, like a trapdoor. You open that
and it seems there is some kind of chute. If there’s a gas leak you better get out
of the room, so you climb into the chute. Only when you get to the end of that chute
you are confined in a room just a bit bigger than a coffin. You hear a locking sound above
you. There’s nowhere for you to go. You can’t breathe.
And that’s it, you’re dead.
What might have happened after this, when Dr. Holmes was sure you were dead, is the
coffin room opened at the bottom and you fell to another room in the basement. In this room
he has his tools; knives, saws, scalpels, acids. He has his work bench, and other chutes
that lead to a lime pit and a crematorium. That’s where some of your bones will later
be discovered. You made the mistake of staying with a man
who would later say, “I was born with the very devil in me…The inclination to murder
came to me as naturally as the inspiration to do right comes to the majority of persons.”
How many people did he kill? It’s hard to say. He might have killed 200 people. He confessed
to 27, but evidence for only 9 murders was ever found. In that basement of his there
were signs he’d been hacking apart people for a long time, and not only for insurance
purposes. Police believed he might have tortured some people before he killed them. They found
the tools, saw the blood. He might have burned people alive in some
rooms, because police discovered a kind of flame thrower hidden in some walls, and those
walls were packed with asbestos so the whole building wouldn’t catch fire. They found
other rooms with moving walls and no windows, where he may have simply starved people. In
some of those rooms they found peep holes. This is what the press would later call some
of those rooms: “asphyxiation chamber–no light–with gas connections” … “blind
room” … “sealed room all bricked in” … “five-door room” …and the “dummy
elevator for lowering bodies” …We guess you found your way into the, “black closet.”
Maybe the worst find was something that looked like a torture rack. You see, Holmes was always
the experimenter. He had created something called the “elasticity determinator”,
which was basically a medieval rack a person could be stretched on. Dr. Holmes believed
he could make a giant. He could slowly stretch a person and they’d become taller.
How did this fiend evade arrest for so long? Well, firstly the name change helped. After
doing that he could no longer be linked to his former scams. This was the 19th century,
a man could disappear and reinvent himself. It was also later said that Holmes knew a
lot about the law. He was ahead of the police. But a con-artist’s greatest skill is to
make people believe they are not what they are, far from it. Holmes was skilled in the
art of rhetoric; he used language that might impress someone whose education wasn’t the
best. He was also a skilled hypnotist. He was a manipulator, and appearances made him
look like he had money, lots of it. To the people in the street he was a success story,
a man of great intellect who could be trusted. If you’re gonna scam people, wear a suit.
He wasn’t just glib and intelligent, though, he was pleasant on the eye. One of his main
schemes was to induce women to fall for him. They thought they had met a well-educated,
handsome fella with bags of cash. Their chips were in, but it was he who would be taking
them to the cleaners. Well, to the lime pit. Sometimes he might even strip the bodies of
their flesh and sell the skeletons to medical labs. It’s thought he lured plenty of young
women to his castle, and many never made it out.
But he was in debt with creditors and they wanted their cash. So he could pay them he
set fire to his castle and then tried to claim the insurance. An investigator named F. G.
Cowie was on to Holmes. He knew something of his sketchy past and he soon became suspicious
of Homes’ insurance claim as well as discovering other frauds. Holmes then got out of Chicago.
How he was eventually caught is quite complicated. In 1894 police discovered the burned body
of a Mr. B. F. Perry in a house on a street in Philadelphia. He was an inventor and it
was assumed he might have blown himself up. That’s what the crime scene indicated. In
his pockets were letters, they seemed to suggest he had come to Philadelphia from St. Louis
and his wife would come to meet him soon. Then sometime later the Fidelity Mutual Life
Association of Philadelphia got a letter and it stated that the dead man was actually Benjamin
F. Pitzel and he was insured. A Dr. H. H. Holmes was making a claim for $10,000. He
listed the distinguishing marks and the body was dug up to see if they matched. They did,
and Holmes got his cash. Holmes was apparently acting on behalf of the Pitzel family. Pitzel,
by the way, had been Holmes’ friend and partner in crime.
Only a little later and things would come undone for Holmes. You see, he had spent some
time in jail in another state for fraud. This was a man with his fingers in many crooked
pies. While in jail he told his cellmate of a scam and said if you help me get a lawyer
I’ll let you in on the scam. He said his name was Howard. That scam involved faking
the death of a B. F. Pitzel, by dumping a body and then making an insurance claim on
that dead body. He said if you help me out now, I’ll give you some of the $10,000.
It all gets crazy here, because it seems Holmes double-crossed his partner, Mr. Pitzel, and
did actually kill him. Why share the cash? Ms. Pitzel was in on it, too. We mean in on
the scam, she was told that her husband would just hide. Holmes told her there was no need
to go with him and identify the body. She would have seen it really was her spouse.
He just kept telling her that her beloved husband was hiding and he’d take her to
him soon. The celly was never paid for his help, and
so to get revenge he told the cops about this guy called Howard and the scams he’d been
doing. The cops knew it was Holmes they were after and they soon found him in Boston. He
was arrested for insurance fraud and the murder of Pitzel. Holmes at first admitted to the
fraud but denied the murder. He was also wanted in another state for stealing a horse of all
things.
Holmes told the cops lots and lots of tall tales. He was trying anything to get out of
what he’d done, and at one point even offered a guard $500 if he could hypnotize him. The
guard said no. The cops also wanted to know the whereabouts of Ms. Pitzel and her five
kids. Holmes said he knew, but kept lying. At different times he said they’d moved
to the UK, gone to South America and were in Detroit. He’d actually murdered three
of them.
Ms. Pitzel had left them with Holmes at one point and later he told her he’d taken them
to Indianapolis and they were staying with a widow. They were very safe, he told her,
and then said her husband was now waiting for her in Montreal. All lies, he’d killed
three of them. Mr. Pitzel’s body was exhumed another time,
and it was discovered that he hadn’t died in an explosion but had been poisoned with
chloroform. What’s so ironic about this is that the insurance company believed Holmes
had defrauded them, but for once in his life the body was actually the real body. Now it
wasn’t fraud, though, it was murder.
Holmes was eventually found guilty and hanged, but only for the murder of Mr. Pitzel in Philadelphia.
He admitted to many more murders and police were well aware of what went down in murder
castle, but that’s not what got him in the end. Had that celly not told the cops, Holmes’
murder castle might have had a lot more guests who never left.
He had one request before he was hanged. Dr. Holmes asked if he could be buried and encased
in thick concrete. He didn’t want anyone messing with his body after he’d passed.
In his own words he said he wanted the cement case to “ensure his body against the vandalism
or scientific curiosity of ghouls.” He didn’t get what he wanted, because he was exhumed
in 2017 after rumors circulated that he’d actually escaped and not been hanged. The
rumors were wrong. It was him. His teeth proved it.
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