Castle of Horrors

[Devious Viper]

H Holmes loved killing so much he built a 'hotel' with peepholes, trapdoors, torture rooms and gas chambers

"I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing - I was born with the 'Evil One' standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since." HH Holmes

Shortly before he was executed in May 1896, Herman Webster Mudgett, aka HH Holmes, declared he had become so diabolical that he was actually physically transforming. "My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape," he said. "I am growing to resemble the devil." Today, although he is regarded to have been America's first documented serial killer, Holmes has somehow evaded the spotlight that has made legends of his successors. But when police explored his Chicago headquarters in 1895, the world was introduced to a monster of unprecedented proportions. Holmes' self-designed Castle of Horrors, as it came to be known - a conjoined row of three-storey buildings counting 105 rooms - was truly the stuff of nightmares.

A formidable con artist (he once tapped into Chicago's water supply, flavoured it with vanilla and sold it as an elixir for five cents a glass), he was rumoured to have lured over 200 people into his lair, where he would gas, strangle, mutilate, bludgeon or poison them.

While Holmes was being tried for fraud, police discovered a labyrinth of secret rooms and passages, torture chambers, dark stairways which led nowhere, trapdoors and asphyxiating rooms. In the living quarters on the second floor, greased chutes led down to a cellar containing an acid vat, a crematorium, soundproof vaults, a bloodstained dissecting table full of surgical tools, and a medieval rack, which Holmes later claimed could stretch people to twice their length. They also found bones, ashes and a ball of human hair. Smashing down a wall in the cellar, they came across a huge metal-lined chamber, and a hideous, overpowering stench instantly filled the air. When one of them struck a match to get a closer look, the tank exploded, hurling the men across the room. The building shook. People rushed out onto the street. Fire Marshal James Kenyon opened the tank, and an "evil-smelling" vapour seeped out, reportedly taking hold of him. According to The New York World, he had to be "dragged out and carried upstairs, and for two hours acted like one demented".
This was HH Holmes' world.

Growing up in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, little Herman Mudgett was an excellent student with a healthy interest in anatomy and, at 11 years old, was secretly experimenting on living frogs, rabbits, cats and dogs. In 1878, aged 17, he married Clara Lovering and began to study medicine professionally, paying his fees with his wife's inheritance money. He began scamming soon after, stealing cadavers from the University of Michigan's laboratory, disfiguring the corpses, setting up accident scenes and collecting money from the insurance policies he had taken out.

He left the area (and his wife and baby son) for Chicago suburb Englewood in 1886, calling himself Dr Henry Howard Holmes. He immediately got work at a chemist - the store's elderly owners, Mr and Mrs Holton, needed the help, and Holmes, immaculately suited and adorned with gold buttons and cufflinks, was hired on the spot, thus avoiding the need to go through his credentials or explain how he had accidentally poisoned a woman in Philadelphia with a mixed prescription. His over-the-counter charm attracted customers (particularly women) to visit more regularly, and he was soon given the responsibility of looking after the books. When Mr Holton died, Holmes offered to buy the business from Mrs Holton. He failed to pay her, and she took him to court, but mysteriously vanished before the case ended. Holmes told inquirers she was distraught over her husband's death and had moved to California.

Now a drugstore proprietor, Holmes, despite still being married to Clara, wed Myrtle Belknap, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. His roaming eye quickly drove them apart, and her father later claimed that Holmes had tried to cheat him out of property and had attempted to poison him. In 1889, with money he had scammed via an insurance scheme during a brief trip to Indiana, he purchased an enormous empty lot opposite the drugstore. Hooking up with a petty criminal called Benjamin Pitezel, who clung subserviently to him, Holmes devised plans to capitalise on the upcoming Columbian Exposition (or the World's Fair), which was to celebrate Columbus' voyage to America. Employing 500 craftsmen, Holmes set about building his 'hotel'. Those who asked questions about the gas jets and doors that opened onto brick walls were fired. In fact, Holmes fired all workers after they had been there for more than a couple of weeks, accusing them of shoddy work and refusing to pay them. He would then hire anew and repeat the process.

He moved the drugstore to his new premises, adding an elaborate jewellery counter and hiring an Iowa man named Ned Connor to help out as a watchmaker. But Connor fled after realising that his wife Julia was enjoying an affair with Holmes, who swiftly took out insurance policies on his new mistress and her daughter. Julia soon found herself pregnant with Holmes' child, and he persuaded her to have an abortion. He would perform the operation himself, as, he told her, he had successfully done many times before as a medical student. On Christmas Eve 1891, a distressed Julia asked Holmes to put her three-year-old daughter to bed, before he led Julia down a hidden staircase into his makeshift operating room in the basement. Neither of the girls was ever seen again, and a few months later, Holmes hired a machinist who was particularly adept at mounting human skeletons to strip the flesh from a cadaver and articulate the bones. Holmes then sold the skeleton to a medical college for $200.

After seducing and killing a few more unsuspecting young ladies (Emeline Cigrand and Jennie Thompson were locked up and left to suffocate in a vault, Pansy Lee, who had $4000 in her suitcase, ended up as a pile of ashes in his oven, and others were gassed) and selling more skeletons, he advertised that he would be renting rooms in his mansion to visitors to the World's Fair. He placed classified ads in the papers, offering a variety of attractive jobs and instructing young ladies to withdraw all of their funds from the bank to get them started. He also placed marriage-proposal ads, promoting himself as a wealthy businessman; applicants for both were subsequently tortured and killed.

Featuring such attractions as moving pictures, the world's first dishwasher and an enormous Ferris wheel, the Fair brought 27million people to Chicago. It ran from May to October 1893, during which time numerous tourists were declared missing; although he later confessed to killing only one, 50 of the Exposition's visitors were last traced to Holmes' peephole-ridden Castle of Horrors.

Holmes next charmed Georgiana Yoke, and the couple decided to wed, despite the fact that he was still supposed to be married to Myrta and was legally married to Clara. But at this point, the multitasking Holmes began to buckle: the stress and strain of murdering and marrying so many people was taking its toll, and he began dreaming up more elaborate schemes. When creditors threatened to take the Castle, he got his assistant Pat Quinlan to set the top floor on fire. His next plan was to persuade his cohort Ben Pitezel, who had a wife and five kids to support, to take out a $10,000 life-insurance policy, fake his own death and split the profits. Holmes would get a corpse to fit his description. Meanwhile, creditors investigating the fire at the castle threatened him with arrest if he failed to come up with $50,000, and both he and Pitezel vanished from Englewood
for good.

Holmes changed his surname to Pratt and moved with Georgiana to Texas, where he sold a freightload of horses he had bought with counterfeit notes. Becoming ever more reckless, he was arrested after a drug company caught him trying to defraud them, and in jail he met robber and killer Marion Hedgepeth, in whom he uncharacteristically confided about the fake-death plan. In return for a promise of $500, Hedgepeth hooked him up with Jeptha D Howe, a lawyer he said would help him with the scheme.

Georgina bailed Holmes out of jail and he and Pitezel went to Philadelphia to discuss the plan. One night, after Pitezel drunk himself into a stupor at the local tavern, Holmes followed him back to his room, chloroformed him, burnt him alive and obliterated his face with chemicals. The next morning, a carpenter who had previously spoken with Pitezel about selling a tool-sharpener he had invented, came knocking on his door to talk. He noticed the stench of death, went in and discovered the body, and ran straight to the police. The autopsy suggested that the deceased had inhaled something poisonous. Circumstances were unclear.

Holmes went to St Louis to meet Pitezel's panicked wife Carrie, who had just read about Ben's death in the papers. "He's hiding out," he convinced her. "You must play along - this is what Ben wants, he is not dead," he said, consoling her with the same handkerchief he had used to kill her husband. Fearing she might crack (or indeed recognise that the supposed body double was in fact her husband), he persuaded her to let her 15-year-old daughter Alice go over to Philadelphia to identify the body with Jeptha Howe (who had been appointed as Carrie's attorney) and collect the $10,000.

After the three of them identified the unrecognisable and supposedly fake body, Holmes told Alice to accompany him to a hotel in Indianapolis, where he would leave her and go and fetch her sister Nellie and brother Howard from St Louis to keep her company.

He told the young Alice her mother had decided they would all be moving east, and would join them soon and buy a house with Ben's insurance money. Jeptha Howe picked up the $10,000 cheque and Holmes went to see Carrie, who demanded to know why Alice wasn't with him and where her husband was. Holmes told her Ben was laying low in Cincinnati, and that he would deliver all the children to him there until she joined them a few weeks later. She agreed, and Holmes left with Nellie and Howard. For a brief period the three children were happily reunited, but, as Holmes saw it, 10-year-old Howard's incessant whining about how he missed his mommy was a pain in the ass. He told the girls he was taking the boy away to stay with his cousin. That was the end of Howard.

While Holmes was busy killing children, his old cellmate Marion Hedgepeth was still rotting in prison. Pissed off that Holmes had failed to get in touch with him to give him a cut of the cash from the Ben Pitezel insurance cheque, Hedgepeth wrote a letter to St Louis cop Major Lawrence Harrigan, telling all about Holmes' swindle. Harrigan passed the information on to an insurance investigator, who in turn informed Pinkerton Detective Frank Geyer, who keenly followed it up. Despite the information from Hedgepeth about the supposed body double, the insurance agents and the Pinkerton police suspected that the corpse was in fact Pitezel's, and in October began trailing Holmes as he moved from town to town. When he arrived in Boston on 17 November 1894, alone, he was arrested; they initially got him for conspiracy to commit fraud, on account of the horse scam, but they knew they had something bigger.

He pleaded guilty on one count of insurance fraud, having confessed to faking Ben's death (he maintained the body-double story), and was sent to Philadelphia to be incarcerated. Investigating Holmes' activities during the previous few months, the authorities spoke to a Toronto citizen who said Holmes had rented the house next door to him and had asked to borrow a shovel in order to dig a hole in the cellar for storing potatoes. There, in a shallow grave, Detective Geyer found the naked, rotten bodies of the two Pitezel girls. It turned out that Holmes had forced them into a trunk, locked it, raped Alice, then killed both children by connecting a rubber tube to a gas pipe and feeding it into the trunk. At the time of questioning, he remained silent about the murder. "I guess I'll hang for this," he said to a guard as he was led back to his cell.

The discovery of the corpses prompted the police to search Holmes' Chicago residence. Within the winding passages, concealed doors and windowless rooms in the Castle, the extent of his life's work was finally revealed. They found the gas chambers, the torture devices, the crematoriums, the poison, bones and ashes. Many missing people were traced to the Castle and, in a cellar chimney in Indiana, Detective Geyer found the charred, chopped remains of 10-year-old Howard Pitezel.

Just after midnight on 19 August 1895, three loud explosions were followed by a fire which destroyed Holmes' Castle. A gas can was found in the ruins. Some suspected Holmes had hired someone to do the job, while others attributed the blaze to local residents wishing to be rid of his monstrous legacy. Holmes appeared in court just three days before Halloween. According to true-crime author Harold Schechter, it was the 19th Century equivalent of the OJ Simpson trial, attracting enormous crowds of spectators and sensationalist newspaper reports about the daily developments. Unsent letters from the Pitezel girls to their mothers were shown to a distraught Carrie; jury members were in tears; and Holmes himself, who had discharged his attorneys to conduct his own defence, sobbed when his wife Georgina took the stand. He switched from flippant to desperate to bizarre, at one point claiming to

The New York World that, because of increasing loneliness, he had secretly hatched an egg he had been given in his cell and co-habited with the chicken for a month before it died ("Holmes doubtless had the chicken's life insured," the paper commented).

The jury said it took them mere seconds to find him guilty of first-degree murder, and he eventually admitted to killing 27 people. He later changed his mind when some of the people he said he had killed appeared alive and well, and he finally decided he'd killed just two women. Rumours that he may have killed more than 200 are believed to be an exaggeration, but the final death toll is uncertain. "I am convinced I no longer have anything human in me," he wrote, convinced his face was beginning to resemble Satan's.

HH Holmes was hung on 7 May 1896 in Moyamensing Prison, where more than 4,000 people requested tickets for the 60-capacity event. After the trapdoor swung open beneath him, his feet writhed and his heart continued to beat for 15 minutes. He was declared dead at 10.25am. At the Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, his face was covered with a cloth and his body was placed in a pine casket, embedded in cement and buried 10ft down under another two feet of cement. He had requested these conditions because he didn't want medical scientists or graverobbers to get their hands on him.

None of this stopped him from working. Soon after the burial, one of the trial's witnesses, a coroner's physician, died from blood poisoning. The head coroner died of a mysterious illness. The prison's superintendent committed suicide. The claims manager's office at the insurance company Holmes and Ben Pitezel had ripped-off caught fire, and everything there was destroyed except for Holmes' framed arrest warrant and a couple of portraits of him. A priest who prayed with Holmes before his hanging died after being beaten and robbed, and one of the trial's jury foremen was fried by electrical wires above his house. The site of Holmes' Castle remained empty until 1938, when a post office was built there. Many avoided it, believing the grounds to be haunted, and there were stories of dogs whimpering and barking as they were walked past the site.

And now, after decades of relative obscurity, it seems that HH Holmes is ready to meet his public again. Last month, two separate major Hollywood films about him were announced on the same day, one starring Tom Cruise, the other, Leonardo DiCaprio.

"Here's the thing", says filmmaker John Borkowski, who has just completed the world's first documentary about the man. "People say he could have killed hundreds. Some think that's been blown out of proportion with time, but there could have been hundreds, especially at the World's Fair, no-one knows. And it's not that hard to conceive, because here's a man that did, in his 35 years on his earth, more than many people do throughout their whole life. In his mid-20s he came to Chicago without a penny in his pocket, and he winds up building this huge building. He was highly intelligent, always one step ahead of the law, and he always knew what he could get away with. There was a period during the World's Fair when he had three wives, and mistresses, and he was running this building, and doing insurance scams...

It's unfathomable, even today with all our technology, how one person would be able to do all of this. It's baffling."

John Borkowski's documentary - HH Holmes, America's First Serial Killer - is available on DVD through www.hhholmesthefilm.com

[Wraithtouch]

aged 17, he married Clara Lovering and began to study medicine professionally, paying his fees with his wife's inheritance money. He began scamming soon after, stealing cadavers from the University of Michigan's laboratory, disfiguring the corpses, setting up accident scenes and collecting money from the insurance policies he had taken out.

This is frightening, how he managed to get away for so long is incredible, I agree it is very baffling..

[DeadHead]

Castle of Horrors huh? This story reminds me in a way of Gary Heidnik and his house of horrors. He's the fella that would kidnap prostitutes and the sort in the late 70's early 80's. Why so many killers bring their work home is beyond me. I understand the sadistic nature and their desire to torture but they have to realize that all will eventually be revealed, about the goings on in their domiciles. Having the evidence of the crime surrounding them just doesn't seem right. The threat of being caught and their being no way to deny it just doesn't strike me as intelligent. I guess they didn't care about the threat of exposure.

[Ghostlyguy90]

Castle of Horrors huh? This story reminds me in a way of Gary Heidnik and his house of horrors. He's the fella that would kidnap prostitutes and the sort in the late 70's early 80's. Why so many killers bring their work home is beyond me. I understand the sadistic nature and their desire to torture but they have to realize that all will eventually be revealed, about the goings on in their domiciles. Having the evidence of the crime surrounding them just doesn't seem right. The threat of being caught and their being no way to deny it just doesn't strike me as intelligent. I guess they didn't care about the threat of exposure.

Perhaps they go crazy, or don't think things out through. This Holmes guy creeps me out, thank God he is gone.