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The Chicago 'Murder Castle'

Stormkhan

Stormkhan

Disturbingly familiar
Joined
May 28, 2003
Messages
8,560
In the Summer of 1893, a hotel was opened to welcome visitors to the World's Columbian Exposition. It was, in reality, a mansion - the ground floor leased to various retail outlets while the second and third floors the hotel ... and a disposal factory for a serial killer!

It became known as The Chicago Murder Castle, it's 'master' one Dr. Henry Howard Homes, who's real name was Herman Webster Mudgett.

Here's my interest:

The house has long gone, replaced by a U.S.Post Office. On the internet there's quite a few accounts of H.H.Homes and a few pictures, including one contemporary sketch of the floor plan. Each give passing mention of ghostly screams and moanings from the cellar (largest disposal area of the 'castle'), including one fanciful mention of dogs becoming agitated walking past.
I think the location is worthy of higher note. After all, this is an early 'haunt' of an American serial killer. But I wondered - from academic interest - if there are any contemporary accounts of ghostly phenomena surrounding the location. Of course, the building is gone and the Post Office is stolid in it's place. But do 'lost souls from the many unidentified victims' still cry out in Englewood, Ill.?
 
Erik Larson's 2003 book, The Devil in the White City cunningly interweaves a history of the 1893 Chicago Fair with the story of Holmes and his castle of horrors.

He tends to novelize it somewhat but it is a good read.







Trivia Section:

Did you know that the tune for

All the Girls in Spain
Do the Titty in the Rain
When their tits hang low
You can tie them in a bow
When their skirts fly high
You can see their sausage-pie!

Was written for a snake-charming act at the 1893 Fair?

I think the words were later and dreamed up in a schoolyard but the tune is immortal. :)

This site: Here, gives a cleaner version than mine. :p
 
I was about to recommend that too.

Full of interesting stuff but I found it a slightly hard going in places.
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Trivia Section:

Did you know that the tune for

All the Girls in Spain
Do the Titty in the Rain
When their tits hang low
You can tie them in a bow
When their skirts fly high
You can see their sausage-pie!

Was written for a snake-charming act at the 1893 Fair?

I think the words were later and dreamed up in a schoolyard but the tune is immortal. :)

This site: Here, gives a cleaner version than mine. :p
Click to expand...
Is this the same song as 'in the south of France/where the naked ladies dance'?
 
The ground floor of the Castle contained Holmes's own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions.
Click to expand...

Sounds like the Winchester Mystery House!

The Devil In The White City has been on my 'to read' list for ages. Anybody read it? Worth a read?

EDIT: Not discounting your review liveinabin!
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Did you know that the tune for

All the Girls in Spain
Do the Titty in the Rain
When their tits hang low
You can tie them in a bow
When their skirts fly high
You can see their sausage-pie!

Was written for a snake-charming act at the 1893 Fair?
Click to expand...

It fits to a sailor's hornpipe ... the most recent example being the theme to Blue Peter.
 
Hearing it to that tune I am sure I've heard that in a film. I am seeing leonardo Di Caprio singing it. Gangs of New York maybe?
 
McAvennie_ said:
The ground floor of the Castle contained Holmes's own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions.
Click to expand...

Sounds like the Winchester Mystery House!

The Devil In The White City has been on my 'to read' list for ages. Anybody read it? Worth a read?

EDIT: Not discounting your review liveinabin!
Click to expand...

TBH there was more about the Chicago Worlds Fair than there was about the murders. It was interesting but I felt that he had not enough information about the murders and bulked it out with information about the Fair.
 
I got the book mainly because I was interested in the HH Holmes angle, only to find that the story of the world fair was actually the far better read. The Holmes side was a bit crappy docu-drama speculation.

I never realized that half a book about architecture could be so compelling.
 
Chicago's Murder Castle

:miaow: You can read more on the supernatural aspects of the murder castle by going to www.prairieghosts.com,Troy Taylor's website.He has about various hauntings in the US.I haven't read the book,but Troy Taylor gives a good history of the place .Heard about it from my late father,who also told me about Vlad Tepes,known as Vlad the Impaler and the model for Dracula.
 
Thanks, HollyDolly1. I'll follow up the link.

The Devil In White City was reviewed on my website ... as a historical crime fiction! I hadn't got around to it but I was going to get a copy to read - not connecting it to the aforementioned "Murder Castle".

A good read on Vlad Tepes is Vlad The Impaler - In search of the real Dracula by M.J.Trow ... who happens to write a pretty selection of semi-humourous novels of the historical crime fiction type.
It's a small world!
 
Harold Schecter, who has written books about killers like Ed Gein and Albert Fish, produced Depraved in 1994, which outlines Holmes' travels about the country (trying to throw off detectives) in great (maybe too much) detail. Robert Bloch, who used Jack the Ripper and other killers often in his fiction, finally came out with a Holmes novel, American Gothic.

Schecter recommends The Torture Doctor (1975) by David Franke, and this is the closest to the supernatural or psychic I've seen. Apparently several people connected to the Holmes case died under mysterious or violent circumstances soon after the killer was executed. "Talk began of an 'evil eye' and of an 'astral' quality in Holmes." I don't recall anything about the Murder Castle site being haunted, though.
 
Stormkhan said:
In the Summer of 1893, a hotel was opened to welcome visitors to the World's Columbian Exposition. It was, in reality, a mansion - the ground floor leased to various retail outlets while the second and third floors the hotel ... and a disposal factory for a serial killer!

I think the location is worthy of higher note. After all, this is an early 'haunt' of an American serial killer. But I wondered - from academic interest - if there are any contemporary accounts of ghostly phenomena surrounding the location. Of course, the building is gone and the Post Office is stolid in it's place. But do 'lost souls from the many unidentified victims' still cry out in Englewood, Ill.?
Click to expand...

From the book "Weird Chicago",it briefly touches on hauntings inside the post office,but nothing new. I might note that Englewood is a high crime neighborhood in Chicago...so I suppose there's more reason to fear the living than the dead. :)

More at http://www.weirdchicago.com/ including their books if you do not plan to visit anytime soon.

Gene
 
Here's a Google Street view link to the Englewood Post Office,site of the Holmes murder castle.

http://g.co/maps/a3uvc

Just getting used to this forum thingy and learning how to link. :)

Gene
 
Great! Anyhow, your skills on the FTMB will improve with practice! :D
 
Stormkhan said:
Great! Anyhow, your skills on the FTMB will improve with practice! :D
Click to expand...

Well,in that case,Stormkhan...a small followup. :)

I re-read the Holmes Murder Castle story in the book Weird Chicago. Odd growing up I had not heard of this until very recently. It was "Jack the Ripper" that was the more popular serial murder tale when I was growing up.

The Murder Castle did not burn to the ground as I had thought,but was torn down and replaced in 1938 with the present day Post Office.

I hope not to digress,but there is a post office in San Francisco on the site of the cult leader Jim Jones' Peoples Temple. Sometimes there are reports of paranormal activity there as well.

Gene
 
I had no idea that Holmes' "Murder Castle" survived until 1938. What was it used for, if anything, during those intervening 45 years?
 
OldTimeRadio said:
I had no idea that Holmes' "Murder Castle" survived until 1938. What was it used for, if anything, during those intervening 45 years?
Click to expand...

Apartments and businesses,such as a cigar store,a sign shop,and a used magazine and book store. There were also two other fires in 1903 and 1907 that this building survived.

The source: Weird Chicago by Troy Taylor
 
I didn't know people were still discussing this, but apparently the family wants to put this rumor to rest:

Authorities To Exhume Grave Of Chicago Serial Killer H.H. Holmes

(CBS) — The great-great-granddaughter of America’s first serial killer – a man who lived and murdered in Chicago in the 1890s — tells WBBM she thinks her family’s move to exhume his body is “much ado about nothing.”

Some of the descendants of Dr. H.H. Holmes are having his body exhumed from a Pennsylvania cemetery so that the remains can be DNA-tested to put to rest decades-old rumors that Holmes cheated the hangman.
Click to expand...


Source: http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/05...me-grave-of-chicago-serial-killer-h-h-holmes/
 
Kingsize Wombat said:
I didn't know people were still discussing this, but apparently the family wants to put this rumor to rest:



Source: http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/05...me-grave-of-chicago-serial-killer-h-h-holmes/
Click to expand...

Thanks for that update. Don't know how he would have found someone to take that kind of fall and I'm certain he was under careful guard.

I recall in 1978, Lee Harvey Oswald's body was exhumed over his family's objections because of that same kind of conspiracy theory. Michael Eddowes, a British author and lawyer published a series of books claiming the real LHO was assassinated while in Russia and replaced with a double for the purpose of killing Kennedy.

So the exhumation disproved that one.

But I guess the family would like that Holmes conspiracy theory forever in the fiction section.
 
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Despite its notoriety as an evil labyrinth, precious little seems to have survived to document the Murder Castle. It was, I gather, burned-out, repurposed and remained in business use until it was demolished in 1938.

As that Rolling Stone article says:

"After the fair closed in October 1893, Holmes fled Chicago creditors and a fire insurance company for a cross-country scamming trip. He was finally caught, charged and convicted two years later of the murder of his right-hand-man, Benjamin Pitezel. He was arrested in Boston and hanged for his crime in Philadelphia. It has been suggested that Holmes had over 200 victims, though he confessed to 27 and modern experts believe that figure to be closer to nine."

Conviction for the murder of Pitezel would not have involved any legal enquiries into the Chicago horrors. These days, victims' or supposed-victims' relatives would clamour for "closure."

I suspect that the reason it sounds like a nightmare is that much of it is wild exaggeration woven around a core of truth. The architecture of real-life Houses of Horror calls for down-to-earth concealment and sound-proofing; the elaborate plans of Mr Holmes are more like a rehearsal for the Final Solution. :(
 
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And here's the result of the exhumation and testing ...

TESTS CONFIRM GRAVESITE OF 1800S SERIAL KILLER H.H. HOLMES

Tests show that the remains in a suburban Philadelphia grave are indeed those of a 19th century serial killer, quelling rumors that he'd conned his way out of execution and escaped from prison.

A judge approved the exhumation of Dr. H.H. Holmes' grave earlier this year. Descendants requested it for a series called "American Ripper" on the History Channel. Part of the show looked at whether Holmes escaped, and scientists' findings were revealed in this week's final episode. ...

University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Samantha Cox, who did the forensic science on the exhumed remains, tells the NewsWorks online site that because of his unique burial requests, Holmes' body had not properly decomposed.

She said his clothes were almost perfectly preserved and his moustache was intact on his skull. But the corpse had decayed.

"It stank," Cox told the news site. "Once it gets to that point we can't do anything with it. We can't test it, can't get any DNA out of it." Holmes' teeth were used to identify him, she said. ...
Click to expand...

FULL STORY: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-09-01-16-09-15
 
I suppose anyone inferring a connection to the Ripper case can get a book deal and even a TV show. Add points for distant relationship to the killer.
 
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