What’s the True Story Behind the Man Who Constructed Chicago’s Infamous Murder Castle?

When it comes to H.H. Holmes, how much is myth, and how much is reality?

In the fifth season of American Horror Story, Evan Peters plays James March, the serial killer who built the fictional Cortez Hotel as a trap to lure guests and then murder them in gruesome ways. The character was based on the real-life story of H.H. Holmes, who allegedly constructed what has become known as Chicago’s Murder Castle.

Herman Webster Mudgett, also known as H.H. Holmes, is considered one of America’s first serial killers in the modern era. Reports differ on how many people he killed, with some saying as many as 200.

However, Holmes confessed to 27 murders, later changing it to 130. But, evidence can only definitively point to nine murders. And even though the description of the murder castle itself is strikingly detailed, there is reason to believe it was all just stories.

The Hotel at the World’s Fair

Many legitimate online sources report on the intricacies of Holmes’ Murder Castle. It is said he constructed a hotel in time for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The hotel was reportedly a death trap for tourists coming to the fair.

Newspapers at the time ran stories saying that Holmes had designed a three-story hotel with gas chambers, torture rooms, and laundry chutes designed to transport bodies to the basement. Newspapers reported that people checked in, but they never checked out. The basement was supposed to contain a kiln where Holmes burned the bodies.

What is real?

Where is the evidence that any of this happened?

According to Historian Adam Selzer, author of H.H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil, there is evidence to tie Holmes to the murder of nine people. Although even some of those murders are questionable. It’s not the 27 murders that Holmes confessed to, and nowhere near the reports of 200.

Selzer thinks that the staggering number came from a book published in 1940, called Gem of the Prairie by Herbert Asbury,

“It had kind of a throwaway line that some people suggested it may have been as many as 200 people. Nobody had actually suggested that, in fact. But thereafter, everybody else who [retold] the story threw in that same line until people started deciding that that was a real estimate or a real possibility.”

What about the murder hotel?

But even if Holmes was not responsible for 200 deaths, was the murder hotel real? Selzer suggests it was born of yellow journalism, a style of journalism that was big in the 1890s where they didn’t let the facts get in the way of the sensational.

According to Selzer,

“It’s my belief that probably all those stories about all these visitors to the World’s Fair who were murdered in his quote-unquote ‘Castle’ were just complete sensationalistic fabrication by the yellow press. By the time I reached the end of my book, I kind of realized even a lot of the stuff that I had written was probably exaggerated.”

There was never even a hotel

According to Selzer, the building was never used as a hotel. The first and second floors were filled with shops and retail spaces. Holmes had indeed told investors the third floor was to be used as a hotel. But it never opened as a hotel nor housed guests.

Selzer believes there was no third-floor hotel nor did Holmes ever intend there to be. It was a lie used to con investors and suppliers in one of Holmes’ many money-making schemes.

The building mysteriously caught fire

Two weeks after Holmes was arrested, a mysterious fire burnt it to the ground. The second and third floors were demolished. But the first floor was renovated and turned into a sign and bookshop until 1938 when the building was razed. A U.S. Post Office now sits on the former site.

Holmes was a killer

The murder castle may not have been real, but Holmes was a conman and serial killer. He bought items on credit and hid when his creditors showed up. He swindled business partners out of money. He conned women and murdered them for money.

His victims were real but they were not strangers that checked into his hotel. They were people he knew and had relationships with.

He had an affair with a woman named Julia Connor and confessed to killing her and her 6-year-old daughter.

There is also evidence that he may have murdered three women: Emeline Cigrand, Minnie Williams, and her sister Nannie Williams.

He was convicted for the murder of a business associate, Ben Pitezel. And evidence suggests he murdered the man’s children Howard, Nellie, and Alice.

After his arrest, investigators only tried Holmes for the murder of Ben Pitezel. He was convicted and died by hanging in 1896.

It’s time to let the appalling, but untrue story die. The myth that endures about the macabre Chicago Murder Castle and its diabolical owner takes away from the reality of the true victims of H.H. Holmes.

********

Sources: Biography.com, Britannica.com, History.com, Smithsonian Magazine

********

This story was originally published on Medium.