by Adam Selzer
One can sort of surmise what had happened: Holmes had probably disposed of a couple of bodies in the basement, then decided that destroying a body in a crowded building without arousing suspicion was impossible. You really just can’t have bodies decomposing in your basement without people noticing the odor. He probably tried it a few times, then decided to dispose of any bodies he found on his hands elsewhere, perhaps first in the shack, then in the glass-bending factory on the North Side. Witnesses said trunks were sent out of the castle frequently (and that Holmes seemed particularly agitated about a few of them).
He may have even deliberately planted some of the other things in the castle, such as soup bones and torn clothes, just to keep the police busy if they ever caught him (since the building had been in the papers, he had to assume that it might be searched one day). Giving them something to do at the castle bought him some time to have evidence at other places destroyed; while the police were busy digging out the “castle,” a man named Patrick Quinlan, who was sort of the Igor of the Murder Castle, was seen emptying out cartloads of garbage from the North Side factory on what was then called Sobieski Street.
The factory was a much better place to dispose of bodies than the crowded castle—Sobieski was a sparsely populated dead-end street where few of the neighbors spoke English, and where any weird smells in the air might have been blamed on the nearby sausage factory (where the owner, Adolph Luetgert, would boil down his wife’s body in a curing vat a few years later, in a case that would be notable for the first use of bone fragments as evidence—the kind of science that could have doomed Holmes in Chicago). If the fire insurance maps made a few years later can give us an idea of what the area was like in Holmes’ day, there was a coal yard right next to it. How easy would it be to hide ashes in a coal yard?
Given the lack of hard, surviving evidence, Holmes was never brought to trial in Chicago, and probably never could have been convicted there. He’d been sloppier elsewhere; had he been acquitted for killing Ben Pitezel, he would have been sent first to Indiana to stand trial for killing Pitezel’s son, and, if he got away with that one, he probably would have been extradited to Canada to be tried for the murder of Pitezel’s daughters. Chicago was fourth or fifth on the list of possible places. But only the Philadelphia trial was ever necessary; he was found guilty of murder in the first degree there, and investigations elsewhere mostly stopped, since they couldn’t execute him twice. He was hanged in Philadelphia in May 1896, a few weeks after writing his bizarre “confession.”
In a letter he allegedly wrote to an old friend the night before his execution, Holmes said,
“They have me at last, old chap. Will swing tomorrow. If I see you no more in this world I may run into you in the next. Yours without a struggle, Herman.”
Just before his hanging Holmes made another confession to a couple of priests, the contents of which they never disclosed (one mysteriously died a few years later). On the scaffold, he said that he had only killed two people—both of whom died while he was performing abortions on them.
Papers would say that he “died with a lie on his lips.”
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1. These names were printed in a map of the building in the Chicago Tribune, but the article, including the diagram and drawings, actually first appeared in the New York World, a tabloid that probably didn’t have a reporter on the ground in Chicago. The article’s influence on Holmes lore is incalculable, but, naturally, its reliability is very much in doubt, and there are a couple of glaring mistakes in it.
Chapter 3
The Curse of Holmes, 2012
As I got back into life as a ghost tour guide and dove back into research, I started emailing back and forth with Jeff Mudgett regularly, trading new bits of information and helping him vet any new stories that came to light. We’re still finding out new things about Holmes—new swindles he was involved in, new aliases he used, new addresses of buildings he owned or rented (which invariably turn out to be long gone now). I’ve published what I’ve found in a series of e-books analzying Holmes’ castle, his confession, and the stories of the “curse” that followed those who prosecuted him in court.
Jeff, unlike me, had been in the basement of the post office built over a portion of the “murder castle” site, an experience he details in his novel. He was absolutely overwhelmed when he first came to the grounds; in fact, he says he was later found to have had a seizure upon stepping into the building. He’s told many interviewers that he went into the place a skeptic and came out a believer.
When a new TV show began to speak to him about going back into the basement, he told them to get in touch with me, and I spent several days talking about Holmes lore with the producers over the phone. They arranged to film a sit-down interview in which I would talk about Holmes’ career, and for me to show them around the “glass-bending factory” site, which I’d begun to refer to as the “body dump.” (It’s terrific fun to get a bunch of passengers onto a tour bus and say, “All right, kids—who wants to go to the body dump?”)
When the producers got permission to go into the basement of the post office, they said that I could come along. It was hard not to brag about this to everyone I met—every ghost hunter I knew would have killed to get into the place.
On a Monday in June, I spent several hours being filmed talking about Holmes in a Lincoln Park apartment; then they filmed a few shots of me talking about Holmes while driving around the neighborhood in a van. As we drove, a red SUV blew through a stop sign and nearly creamed us. A bicyclist darted into our path and nearly got creamed himself. A truck blocked us from getting clear down one street. As is often the case when I investigate Holmes sites, it was hard not to imagine that the famous Holmes “curse” was in full effect.
Meanwhile, Hector, who had driven for me on several tours over the years and was now co-host of my podcast, was coming out to the “body dump” to talk about the times he’d seen ghosts there on the tour. He called to say that he was on his way, but had to get under his car to disconnect his horn—it had started blaring all on its own, and wouldn’t stop. He called back a minute later to say a branch had fallen on his car, too.
“Dude,” he said, “I think Holmes is out to get us!”
It sure seemed like it. The body dump site that day was hot and windy—sand blew into my face and into the cameras, and by the time we finished filming, I felt as though I’d just been in a brutal fight.
And the next day, when I came out to the post office, the summer heat was intense. Some say that the murder castle is “the place where God allowed evil to run amok,” and on that June morning it felt as though the fires of Hell were burning there to prove it.
But I have to be honest here: when I arrived early and began to wander around, the first thing I noticed was an empty-looking building around the corner, the 1970s-era sign for which announced that it had once been a “Disco Salad Bar.”
You never know what you might find around the corner in a big city.
By all accounts that I could dig up, the Disco Salad Bar was a pretty fancy place in its time. As late as 1984, it was known as a pretty classy joint, with a jazz room and a “disco waterfall room,” and lingerie fashion shows every Sunday morning in its outdoor garden. The El train that passed overhead would slow down when it passed by the fashion shows so that passengers could get a peek.
Now, a few decades later, many El passengers would freak out if a train slowed down in Englewood, a neighborhood that has come to be known as the baddest part of town. Something like a quarter of all murders that occurred in Chicago in 2011 took place in Englewood—even with H. H. Holmes gone, you can still get killed there. When I told people I was going there, everyone thought they should warn me not to turn into a ghost myself. I’ve occasionally tried to get passengers out of the bus on Holmes-based tours to stand in the grassy knoll that now occupies most of the castle’s old
footprint, and few are ever brave enough.
From news reports on the place, you’d think that 63rd Street looked about like Kabul during a bombing raid these days. But the area around the post office doesn’t look so bad—there’s an Aldi grocery store, a clinic, a fancy-looking Walgreens, and a TV station visible nearby. I wandered around a bit, holding onto a camera, an iPad, and some audio gear, and no one tried to mug me, let alone force me to join a gang and smoke crack. In fact, everyone who passed me on the sidewalk smiled and said, “Good morning,” and they were happy to answer my questions about the Disco Salad Bar. I’ve lived in small towns that weren’t nearly so friendly.
The TV crew from the day before began to filter in gradually, and I chatted with them and the security guards about the building and its history. Rory Hood, the longtime security guard at the post office, told me that when he first started his job, back in the 1980s, he used to have lunch at the Disco Salad Bar. “It was okay,” he said.
He also told me that he was the only guy who ever went into the basement. He’d heard a few sounds, and smelled some mysterious and “horrible” smells, but hadn’t really seen anything.
“I don’t stay down there long, though,” he said with a laugh.
Jeff Mudgett arrived with a couple of friends, and the four of us found a spot in the shade to chat and joke around while we did what you always do when you’re working on a TV show: hurry up and wait. The crew was incredibly nice and considerate with us, offering drinks and snacks to all of us, even though only Jeff was to be on camera that day.
Jeff was a bit nervous, based on what had happened last time he came into the place, but said he wasn’t as freaked out as he had been before. I suspected it was possibly because he’d since found out that the whole building didn’t occupy the exact same footprint as the castle, as he’d thought before. I had always sort of assumed that his reaction upon entering the building before was mainly psychological, not something actually based on the energies or spirits in the environment.
But then again, I’m open to the idea that people who die a sudden, violent death can leave something behind. Some sort of energy or “vibe” that people might pick up on somehow from time to time. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I believe this, but several years of trying to be open-minded and skeptical at the same time has taught me to diffrentiate between what I believe and what I suspect.
And if there was any place in town where the ghosts might be waiting to be discovered, this was it.
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Chapter 4
Just Press Play
My main job on a ghost hunt—besides just making sure everyone we’re looking for is actually dead—has usually been EVP: “electronic voice phenomena.” That’s where we go around with microphones trying to pick up odd voices; if you watch the TV shows where they really ham it up, these are usually the guys who are saying, “Are there any spirits here who have a message for me?” I keep waiting for an episode where one of the ghosts says, “Yes! Your wife wants you to pick up milk on the way home...”
I became “the EVP guy” not due to any great belief in the technique, but because I had a lot of audio gear already, and it was a job I could do while wandering around and not bothering with equipment—all I had to do was hit “Record” when I arrived and hang on to the recorder. If we were recording a podcast, we could just use the same microphone to record all the talking and wandering around.
Honestly, I very rarely hear any EVP recordings that impress me too much. Most of the time, you have to use too much imagination to hear anything—the voices are quiet and garbled, and require subtitles and a lot of editing before most people would notice anything unusual at all. And it’s difficult to do EVP in the city, anyway; it stands to reason that if you want to pick up the voices of the dead, you should probably use a sensitive microphone, and those can just pick up voices from other buildings. One night we were definitely picking up human voices in the basement of an old theatre, but when we tweaked the audio enough to understand the words, the first word I understood was “McNuggets.” We had been reecording the voices from a nearby McDonald’s.
Furthermore, even more so than most other “ghost evidence,” everyone else who hears your recordings has to take your word for it that you didn’t fake it. Faking an EVP recording would be very, very, very easy. Faking any ghost evidence is easy; when researchers were first investigating ghost photos a century ago, they found dozens of ways that a ghost picture could be faked. Today, the number of ways to fake a ghost picture has been estimated to be about a “million bajillion.”
I wasn’t going into the castle to do a “proper” ghost hunt, the kind where you lock down the area and try to keep everything up to labatory conditions, but I had my audio recorder with me anyway. No one, to my knowledge, had ever done even an informal investigation of the place. There were some accounts of people looking for ghosts in the old castle when it stood, but these would have been 19th-century ghost hunts. People didn’t take audio gear or cameras to haunted houses then—“ghost hunts” of the day usually consisted of a bunch of guys running around with guns and swords. The purpose of a ghost hunt back then was not to document ghosts; it was to beat them up.
If there were any ghosts in the post office basement with anything to say—perhaps the kind of ghosts that can’t be heard with the naked ear, but for some reason appeared on audio recordings—they’d been waiting more than a century to say it.
Down the Stairs
At length, the producers finished talking with the post office employees and called Jeff to get going. His friends and I hung around in the background, taking pictures of the post office itself, which had some terrific vintage touches, including a fallout shelter sign by the front door (ironically, half a century after the heyday of the castle, the basement became a place where you went to survive).
Between takes, Jeff and I took the producer out to the grassy knoll and tried to triangulate the location of where the front door to Holmes’ drugstore would have been. We’d lined up the fire insurance maps to see where the footprint of the building would be, and how much overlap there would be with the current post office, but the maps aren’t always totally to scale, so lining them up is not an exact science. If you line up railroad tracks east of the castle together in two versions of the map, the buildings to the south go out of sync. We all speculated that the castle’s footprint probably went a few feet farther into the post office site than it looks like it does on the maps—the place was 50–60 feet wide (depending on whose report you read), and the knoll next to it isn’t very wide at all.
After Jeff had been interviewed, we headed into the warehouse behind the front area of the post office, where fans were blazing, but the air was still hot enough that the chocolate-covered raisins in the vending machine were melted. The close heat only made the place seem more imposing.
And at the back stood an ominous door reading “Basement: Not an Exit.”
The crew interviewed a visibly nervous Jeff, then took him downstairs.
Jeff’s friends and I lingered around the warehouse for some time, letting the crew get their shots, and then a postal employee led us down the staircase.
The staircase goes down about a story and a half, and led into a dark tunnel that smelled like decay. The air was damp and heavy. I immediately made my way past the film crew and over to the east end of the basement, the part most likely to be in the footprint of the castle.
There, a stepladder was set up leading to a hole in the wall where a crew member was trying to get some footage, but there was a problem: his brand-new batteries had all died after just a few minutes.
My own camera started acting up, too.
Inside of the hole was a tunnel leading back to the far east end of the basement. One wall was partially lined with bricks that were said to be “original.” The people at the post office said it was an old “escape h
atch” that Holmes could use to get away if the police showed up.
I climbed up the ladder, and promptly hit my head really hard on the ceiling.
“Damn you, Holmes!” I thought. “You’re not killing me from beyond the grave!”
I was only kidding. Mostly. In the heat of an investigation, I’m known to set my skepticism aside, if only because it makes the investigation a lot more fun.
The ceiling in the tunnel was only about five-and-a-half feet above the ground, so a tall person would have to duck to stand up. At 5'7", Holmes might have been just barely able to stand upright himself, if it was really one of his tunnels, as long as he wasn’t wearing his usual bowler hat. I set to work getting the best photos I could, particularly of the bricks, so that I could send them to Punk Rock James, the archaeologist I regularly consult.
There were several fires at the murder castle.
I crept along to the edge of the tunnel, then set my recorder down on the ground and sat there for a moment, alone in the basement of the Murder Castle.
I was so focused on getting the basement documented that I didn’t have time to feel all that scared.
Once I’d thoroughly filmed and photographed everything of interest, I sat down for a minute and took notes. The bricks were said to be original, but I would have imagined them to be a bit east and a bit south of the footprint of the castle—more likely a part of the foundation of the building next door to it, or a wall in the alley behind it if they weren’t just built by the post office to house steam pipes. I’d never heard of the authorities finding a tunnel in that part of the basement of the castle when they dug the place up in 1895.