Article by Tom Head
The horrifying life of Herman Mudgett, the murderous swindler who billed himself as H. H. Holmes, straddled the line between fact and fiction.
The portal between the monster who existed and the monster who didn’t was the hotel he had constructed for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Three stories high and the size of a city block, it has become known over the past century under a more ominous name: the Murder Castle.
Stories about the Murder Castle, like stories about Holmes’ life in general, tend to marble history and folklore. While the hotel did vaguely resemble a castle, journalists at the time probably intended to bring to mind parallels to Bluebeard, the legendary aristocratic serial killer from European folklore, who was said to have put his wives to death, locking their bodies away to rot in the desolate hallways of his castle estate.
For his part, Holmes was a perennial con artist whose recorded murders were not necessarily elaborate, and had as much to do with greed as bloodlust. But despite the banal motives behind them, the horror of his crimes captured the imagination of the public in a lasting way.
More than eight decades after it was demolished, the Murder Castle and the events that are said to have taken place within it still have the power to shock us. Because the building was so secret, the evidence so scant, and the man so manifestly evil, it’s not unreasonable to imagine it contained every possible horror.
5. The Gas Chambers
Holmes’ World’s Fair Hotel is said to have had 100 rooms, many of them rigged up to poison gas. The implication is that if Holmes wanted to kill somebody, he could pull a switch and gas them in their sleep.
There’s no evidence that Holmes ever actually killed anyone in exactly this way, though he had previously worked in the gas industry, and one of the benefits of this particular form of murder is that it would not have necessarily left much usable evidence.
Holmes claimed in his published confession that he’d killed several people using poison gas, but much of the confession has been shown to be fiction and it’s not unlikely that he wrote his story around the rumors that were already circulating in the papers at the time.
Holmes’ business associate Henry Darrow stated firmly at the time that “gas has never been used in the building” and that confusion over the issue was probably brought about by the nature of the building’s lighting, which ran on electric power but had gas fixtures.
4. The Acid Pit
One of the things that distinguish Holmes from many other con artists and serial killers is that he did have marketable skills. Among other things, he knew a great deal about chemistry.
There are three stories about H.H. Holmes and acid that are frequently told. One is that he used acid to burn the flesh off the human corpses he collected so that the skeletons could be sold to medical schools.
This rumor came from Myron Chappell, a pharmacist and Holmes associate who claimed to have prepared the skeletons for sale (though he had erroneously believed the corpses Holmes provided him had been acquired through legal means).
Chappell directed the police to the specific vat in Holmes’ cellar that he said he’d filled with acid for this purpose, though his credibility as a witness has never been firmly established.
Another rumor is that Mudgett sometimes used acid to draw the breathable air out of a room and suffocate his victims. This would have let him effectively kill victims using poison gas without actually having any gas plumbing in the building. The building allegedly had two vaults, one on the first floor and one on the third, and it’s possible that either could have been used for this purpose.
Some newspaper reports from the time suggested that the possible outline of a woman’s shoeprint could be seen near the bottom of the inner door on the third-floor vault as if she was lying on the floor and desperately trying to kick her way out. No photographs of this shoeprint appear to exist.
The most gruesome of the three rumors, and also the least substantiated, is that Holmes burned people alive by dropping them into vats of acid. There’s no evidence that this ever actually happened. But he was a terrible person operating without accountability and he didn’t leave much evidence behind, so it’s not as if it’s particularly unlikely.
3. Burned Alive
We can be pretty sure Holmes killed his longtime friend and co-conspirator Benjamin Pitezel, and the way he did it was clever, inefficient, and incredibly weird. As Adam Selzer put it in the definitive biography of Mudgett, 2017’s H.H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil, the killer waited until Pitezel got drunk. Then he got to work:
”Once Pitezel was in no condition to struggle, Holmes administered chloroform and gradually increased the dosage, slowly cutting off the supply of oxygen without waking Pitezel up. From all available evidence, his old friend died without putting up a fight.”
He then gave the corpse mild burns, spilled benzine nearby, and dropped a burned-outmatch near the puddle. The clear intention was to make it look as if Pitezel had accidentally killed himself in an explosion, but a later autopsy showed this wasn’t what had happened.
Mudgett claimed in his published confession that he’d burned Pitezel alive, which would have been a neat trick since the body had not been burned. Rumors have circulated about H.H. Holmes burning his victims alive ever since, but there’s no evidence that this ever actually happened.
Holmes went on to murder three of his victim’s five children. No doubt Pitezel would have preferred being burned alive to that.
2. The Gallow Shaft
After being convicted of Pitezel’s murder, Holmes was executed by hanging on May 7th, 1896. We can’t be sure how many people he killed; he confessed to 27, though it was an error-riddled paid confession and should not be held in any great esteem.
Because he operated for so long in secret and had presumably been a violent psychopath for his entire life, he could have killed hundreds; because he was clearly proud of his record as a murderer and prone to making things up, it’s also possible that he killed fewer than ten. But one well-documented murder was enough to get Holmes to the gallows.
Before he faced the hangman’s noose himself, Mudgett was said to have used it to execute his victims. Detective John Norton found a twenty-foot rope with red stains in the Murder Castle and hypothesized that it might have been used to hang victims in the elevator shaft.
The stains appeared to match carmine dye in the basement, suggesting a less violent alternative theory, but by the time the connection was made the story of the Murder Castle’s deadly elevator shaft had spread.
1. The “Elasticity Determinator”
The worst story about Holmes is that he was a mad scientist who believed he could make people taller by using a medieval rack. He’d draw and quarter one person trying to perform this experiment, shrug, and then move on to another. It’s the most horrifying form of execution described in the Murder Castle. It also never happened.
The first person to describe the “elasticity determinator,” the nickname Holmes was said to have given the rack, was Herbert Asbury in his 1940 pulp history Gangs of Chicago. Asbury was more of a storyteller than a historian, and this was one of the many gruesome bits of the legend that he introduced into the popular imagination.
But if Holmes wasn’t already a spectacularly evil person, we wouldn’t have believed these stories. Almost everything that has been said about him speaks to a deeper reality; that he lived a wretched life, a life so wretched that we wouldn’t be surprised if he did the
worst things we could dream up.
His greed and self-interest took him to the darkest depths of human behavior, and there is built a Murder Castle, carved out of fear and rumors, that has proven far more durable than the one on West 6th Street.
The cowardly fraud Herman Mudgett has been dead for over a century, but the devil H.H. Holmes, the American Bluebeard, continues to outlive him.
