The horrific true story of HH Holmes’ “murder castle” on 63rd street
True crime connoisseurs have been dining out on stories about HH Holmes and his murder castle for a full century. After all, he did earn the nickname of ‘The Devil in the White City’ for a reason.
In this case, myth and reality have been woven together from the very beginning. Which makes sense, in a way. If you think we’re vulnerable to fake news and sensationalism now, you should imagine a time before the internet made information the most easily accessible commodity of them all. Sure, it’s made misinformation just as, if not more, easier to come across, but it was much worse in the late 1800s.
This was the time when a few errant, hugely speculative news stories made swathes of the world believe a comet was going to kill everyone. Another story made people convinced that winged beasts lived on Mars and that humans regularly visited to see them. Thus, when the crimes of Holmes were uncovered and were centred around a building he owned in Chicago with strange architecture that didn’t match his blueprints, the masses took that story and ran with it.
Suddenly, he was a proto-Jigsaw killer from Saw. This was a man whose house was straight out of a horror movie, filled with trap doors, gas chambers, spiked pits and beds that fed unsuspecting victims through meat grinders at the flip of a switch. At the time of his arrest, popular belief put his body count at somewhere between 150 and 200. While in most cases, I subscribe to the “print the legend” school of journalism, HH Holmes was nowhere near cool enough to have a legacy like that.
The truth, as is always the case with serial killers, is a lot more depressing.
So first, things first, the hotel. Yes, there were a hell of a lot of structural irregularities to it, and the blueprints of it don’t resemble the building in real life at all. However, this isn’t because Holmes went full supervillain; it’s because he was taking several dozen contractors for a ride at the same time. This is more or less the story of Holmes in a nutshell. He was a common crook who went into business for himself and, in doing so, covered up his actual crimes.
If there was one thing he knew how to do, it was play the media. As a result, when his actual crimes were uncovered, he decided to hugely play them up and “confess” to no less than 27 murders. It didn’t matter that some of the alleged victims weren’t actually dead. With that in mind, when folk talk about HH Holmes as this Hannibal Lecter-type figure with the ghoulish story behind him and not who he really was. A coward who murdered two children for nothing more than his own avarice.
By spreading the myth of Holmes and his “murder castle”, we play into an all too common problem with the whole true crime genre. Something that the medium has been wrestling with for as long as it’s been active. Yes, the stories of these serial killers are sensational and compelling, but we can never lose track of the fact that they were human. So many of these worthless men achieve a legendary status that they do not deserve, and HH Holmes was the first to benefit from this.