[history/murders] Hello, friends! Today I'm going to tell you the absurdly horrible tale of Henry Howard Holmes, the serial killer from which all modern serial killer tropes may have been born.
/sits here
And to get it out of my system:
OH MAN I FUCKING LOVE HH HOLMES!!!
/sliiiiides in
I don't think there are any particular trigger warnings for this one but if you get really freaked out by 100% real serial killers (there is almost nothing paranormal about this one), be careful.
...I was perhaps a little to enthusiastic about America's first serial killer.
But oh my god he was so twisted????????
OH GOOD some of you are already here. :}
YASSSSS MY FAVE
I am having coffee with my mom but I will read this later
!1!1 most excellent
I actually know very little about serial killer stuff because they kind of scare me a lot, but OH BOY OH BOY 
If you want a ping in later plurks like this, let me know! Plurk's running kind of slow this morning so I might not see replies until I manually refresh.
It sounds like a bunch of you know about him already so you are welcome to throw in with details I miss or extra stuff.
SO.
H. H. Holmes was... a hell of a character, and he changed his name and identity on the regular, making him extremely hard to track down.
He explained a lot in his written confession, but... he also... changed his story a lot, so who knows how accurate it all is.
YES SERIAL KILLERS
he looks like Chris Pines with a catepillar stache.... /okay being quiet now.
Hey man that stache got him places. 
He was originally named Herman Mudgett, born in 1861.
The story varies, but it sounds like he was born the middle child in a family of very well-respected farmers in New Hampshire.
His father may or may not have been a violent alcoholic.
He was very, very smart, excelling in his studies and graduating high school at the age of 16.
He also supposedly got picked on a lot for being a Huge Nerd, with the famous incident being when some bullies took him to the doctor's office to go stand in front of a human skeleton.
(Brief side note but if you haven't read Devil in the White City you should! Parallel stories of HH Holmes and the World's Fair!)
He was supposed to be really scared of doctors and the creepy study skeleton, so they like, made him stand there while they made the skeleton's hands touch his face...
But instead of being freaked out, he was... Super-fascinated.
And in his later confession, he wrote that this is where his intense fascination with anatomy and medical science started. He pursued further studies in the medical field.
(And if y'all were around for the Danvers State Hospital plurk, you'll remember that medicine and science back then were still pretty... eeeehhh no one knew what they were doing.)
To complete the picture, he was so interested in this stuff that he started performing his own surgeries on animals while he was still in high school.
Dissections and otherwise.
After high school he took on some teaching jobs in New Hampshire and got married to his first wife, Clara Lovering.
They had a son two years later.
When he was 19, he enrolled in the University of Vermont, but decided he didn't really like it much and left after only a year.
Then he enrolled at the University of Michigan's Department of Medicine and Surgery, where he graduated in just two years.
But this guy wasn't just school smart, he was also very business-oriented and learned the ins-and-outs of the insurance world.
Specifically, he became an expert in insurance fraud.
While he was enrolled at the University of Michigan, he would steal cadavers from the library, disfigure them to look like they were normal people who'd been killed in horrible accidents...
Leave them somewhere for authorities to find, and then roll up later to collect the life insurance money from policies he'd take our earlier on the fake deceased person.
And he did this pretty damn successfully.
wow that's a perfectly healthy hobby
However, his marriage with Clara fell apart pretty quickly because he was a Horrible Awful Person, and he soon abandoned his wife and kid to go continue his scams in New York.
RIGHT? Totally not suspicious or unusual at all.
Speaking of which, while he was in New York, there were rumors going around that he'd been the last one spotted with a young boy before that boy mysteriously disappeared.
He claimed that the boy went back home to Massachusetts, but he totally-not-suspiciously-at-all quickly packed up and moved to Philadelphia before he got too much attention.
There, he got a job as a keeper at a state hospital, but quit after just a few days and started working at a pharmacy instead.
While he was working there, another young boy died from taking medicine that was bought at the store--and I don't know if this one was actually his fault or not, but he packed up and moved again anyway.
He moved to good ol' Chicago, Illinois, and this is where he decided to change his name to Henry Howard Holmes to keep all of his previous scam victims off his case.
It was hella easy to fake your identity in the 1880s, good lord.
While he was in Illinois, he met Myrta Belknap, who he married and had another kid with.
He was still legally married to Clara at the time, and he filed for divorce soon after his second marriage...
Though the divorce was, technically, never finalized.
He spent most of his time working in Chicago, where he met Georgiana Yoke seven years later... and married her, too.
While he was still married to Myrta.
And maybe to Clara.
You can see a running theme, here.
Here's where it starts getting awful.
In 1886 he met Elizabeth Holton, who owned a drugstore with her husband. Holmes was hired as an employee and quickly made himself invaluable to the company.
He was a hard worker, he built up strong relationships with a ton of their clients, he became popular with the community, and he weaseled his way into owning a ton of the store's equipment.
Furthermore, Elizabeth's husband had been dying of cancer since before Holmes even met them, and he knew the guy was on his way out.
So when he did finally die, he told Elizabeth to sign over the other half of the company to him.
I've seen conflicting information about whether or not she actually agreed to sell him the company, but either way, Elizabeth disappeared soon after.
To anyone who asked about her, Holmes told them that she'd moved to California to be closer to her relatives.
She very conveniently signed over everything to him before she "moved", which made him the sole owner of the drugstore.
A little later, just in time for the Chicago World's Fair, a big ol' lot opened up right across the street from his drugstore, and he was like... Yes. This is my time.
He constructed a three-story, block-long hotel building. It was officially called the World's Fair Hotel, but because of its size, people in the area nicknamed it "The Castle".
He was the sole architectural planner of the building and wouldn't actually let any of the workers he hired see the plans.
He also managed to barely pay anyone anything for working on the building; he'd constantly fire and hire different workers during construction, claiming shoddy workmanship.
I think he went through something crazy like 150-200 workers during the process. This was also to keep workers from getting too suspicious about the bizarre things he'd ask them to build.
As you might guess, a few workers that asked too many questions were mysteriously never seen or heard from again.
While the building was under construction, he befriended a carpenter named Benjamin Pitezel because of the guy's criminal background; Pitezel ended up assisting Holmes in many of his future scams.
Remember Pitezel, he'll come up again later.
Once the building was complete, Holmes opened it to the world and marketed it as a sort of boarding house for young women new to the city.
A lot of people were showing up because of the World's Fair, looking for work or visiting from elsewhere.
He moved his drugstore to the bottom floor of the building, put his personal office on the second floor, and then rented out the rest of the space to businesses and tenants.
He hired a lot of female employees, many of whom disappeared over the course of their time there.
Later, there were many accounts of him bringing women into building, only for no one to ever see those women come back out again.
One of the more famous examples of his victims was Julia Smythe; she came there with her watchmaker husband, Ned, and their daughter, Pearl.
Ned was originally hired to help as a jeweler somewhere in the building, but Holmes quickly became interested in the gorgeous, six-foot-tall Julia.
She was given a job as his personal bookkeeper, and it was pretty clear that he was into her waaay more than just as his employee.
Ned turned a blind eye to it, maybe because he was just happy to have work somewhere...
...until Julia revealed that she was pregnant, at which point he filed for divorce, packed up, and left both his wife and his daughter in the custody of Holmes.
She demanded marriage, and he agreed under the condition that she have an abortion. With that "settled", he led her down into the basement, where she was never seen again.
Pearl, the daughter, also disappeared shortly after.
When confronted by another tenant, he said that they had gone to Iowa to attend a family wedding.
Later, he asked a guy named Charles Chappell to come articulate a skeleton for him so that he could sell it to medical professionals for study.
/reads and sips coffee
When Charles went down into the basement, he found that Holmes had "skinned the body like a rabbit" (his quote), but he assumed that Holmes was just performing an autopsy of the body or something.
Because Holmes was a doctor, after all!
So Charles did his thing, prepped the body, articulated the bones, and got paid $35 for the job.
The skeleton was then sold to a doctor elsewhere, who was questioned later as part of the whole Holmes investigation...
And that doctor reported that he'd often look at it and marvel at how unusually tall it was for a female skeleton...
It wasn't every day they could find one that was six feet tall.
oh no 
Charles was actually invited back a couple of times to do skeletal articulations so that Holmes could sell the bones to contacts he'd made during his extensive medical studies.
He finished one of them at his home but refused to give it back to Holmes, because funny enough, Holmes refused to pay him the money he was owed.
That skeleton was later used against Holmes to help identify one of his victims.
While Holmes was visiting Boston, he met another woman named Minnie Williams, who fell head over heels in love with him.
They started a relationship, and a while after that, she moved to Chicago and got in contact with him.
Holmes invited her and her sister, Annie, to come see his hotel.
He convinced Minnie to sign over her property in Texas to a guy named Alexander Bond (one of his aliases). Minnie disappeared shortly after that.
He gave Annie a lovely tour of the hotel, asked her to go fetch a file from his vault, and then locked the vault door behind her.
He turned on the gas that got piped straight into the vault, suffocating her to death.
Now you're probably thinking, holy shit, what the fuck, when are they going to catch this guy?? Well, hold onto your hats.
We'll come back to the Castle and Chicago in a minute, but this story has to get weirder first.
While he was doing all of this business with "disappeared and never heard from again" employees and girlfriends, he was also still running scams left and right.
He'd gotten really good at buying things on credit, avoiding the bills, selling the things for a profit, and making a small fortune.
But after the World's Fair, the Chicago economy wasn't doing great and the creditors were starting to close in on him again, so he packed up and moved to his brand-new property in Texas.
While he was there, he started making plans to build a second Castle-like hotel just like his first one.
In 1894, though, he was briefly incarcerated because he got caught in a "horse swindle" that I can't find any explanation about.
Some scam involving horses.
He got bailed out very fast, but while he was there, he made conversation with this guy named Marion Hedgepeth.
Hedgepeth, for flavor, was a convicted train robber and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
He told Hedgeworth about this plan he'd concocted: he was going to swindle an insurance company out of $10,000 by taking out a policy on himself and then faking his own death.
He promised Hedgeworth that if he gave him the name of a lawyer he could trust, he'd pay Hedgeworth a $500 commission.
Hedgeworth pointed him to Jeptha Howe in St. Louis, who he visited as soon as he was bailed out of jail.
Howe thought that Holmes' fraud idea was genius, and was totally on board to help him swindle the insurance company.
However, for whatever reason, when they tried to go through with the plan, the insurance company got suspicious and refused to pay them any money.
(OH THANK YOU FOR THE HORSE SWINDLING INFO)
Holmes backed off and didn't press his case. He decided to try something else, instead.
So... Remember Pitezel? His buddy, his lackey, his partner in fraud crimes and other nefarious deeds?
(Np)
Holmes convinced Pitezel to try faking his death, and he agreed. Pitezel's wife would collect on a $10,000 life insurance policy, and he and Holmes would split the money.
The plan was that he'd pose as an inventor, who was to get killed and disfigured in a horrible lab explosion. Holmes was supposed to go find a cadaver that looked enough like Pitezel to pass.
But instead, he knocked out Pitezel, set him on fire, used the actual corpse in his scheme, and collected the insurance money for himself.
It was later specified by Holmes himself that Pitezel was totally still alive when he torched him.
I'LL LEAVE THIS HERE while I go eat lunch.
The best is yet to come.
I HAVE RETURNED so here is the rest of the story.
Holmes has at this point proven himself to be very smart, very dangerous, and very remorseless. He's thrown almost everyone off his trail and probably wasn't going to slow down any time soon.
After murdering Pitezel, he actually went back to Pitezel's wife, convinced her that her husband was hiding out in London, and then manipulated her into allowing three of her children to be in his custody.
(She had five total.)
....omg
So... I can't actually figure out why he did this, so if anyone's got clarification, feel free to chime in...
But it sounds like he and the three children traveled north, up towards Canada, and he made it seem like he and the children had disappeared...
...But he simultaneously led the lady Pitezel and her two remaining children on a long journey parallel to theirs, operating under several aliases and lying about her husband the whole time...
So she never knew it was him. At one point she and her missing kids were staying in the same town, separated by only a few blocks, and had no idea.
He, meanwhile, was staying in a separate hotel with his wife of the time, who had No Idea that anything was going on.
Eventually he killed the two girls in his custody by locking them in a large trunk, feeding a hose through a hole cut in the top, and then affixing the other end of the hose to a gas line.
They basically suffocated to death as gas was pumped into the box. The girls' bodies were found later in a shallow grave, where Holmes had gone so far as to cut off one of the girl's feet.
She had club foot, so it's theorized he did it to keep her corpse from being easily identified as one of the missing children.
The last child, a boy, was killed in Indianapolis, where he was poisoned to death. Holmes chopped up and burned his body, but bone and tooth fragments were found in the fireplace of the cottage he rented there.
MEANWHILE.
Back in prison...
Remember that guy he talked to, Hedgepeth, who gave him that tip about the trusted lawyer?
Remember how Holmes promised to pay him a $500 commission?
Remember how bad Holmes is about actually paying people for any of the work they ever do?
Hedgepeth certainly never heard from Holmes again, nor did he get paid like he was promised.
So that very same year (this is still 1894) he tipped off the police about this guy who was running around committing life insurance fraud, and the police started an investigation.
They caught up with him in Boston soon after that, and would you look at that--he was held on an outstanding warrant for horse theft in Texas.
Since all of his acquaintances were either clueless or murdered, there was no one to bail him out this time.
Which was good, because further investigation turned up that he and his wife-at-the-time were just about ready to flee the country entirely.
The more they tried to look into his case, the more they'd pull up, which eventually led the police investigation all the way back to Chicago, to the Castle itself.
I just keep thinking about these poor 1890s policemen and detectives, because they went into this building expecting to investigate insurance fraud and a false identity...
But what they found was... so much worse...
They started by interviewing the Castle's employees. Pat Quinlan, the caretaker, helpfully informed them that Holmes never allowed him to clean the second floor.
Investigators started poking around, and quickly realized that while the first floor was more or less normal, the second and third floors were actually a labyrinth of confusing hallways and secret doors.
They found doors that opened onto solid brick walls, oddly-angled passages, stairways that went absolutely nowhere, doorways that could only be opened from the outside, and plenty of other confusing misdirects.
jesus fuck
They uncovered secret passages, hidden panels and peepholes, trap doors, and even figured out that Holmes had built an elaborate alarm system for the upper floors...
So that whenever anyone opened a door on the upper floors, he'd be able to hear them down in his office and know that someone was moving around the hotel.
Some of the guest bedrooms were sealed, soundproofed and fitted with gas lines that let Holmes asphyxiate them at any time.
One secret room was lined with iron plates and fitted with blowtorches, so that his victims would be incinerated.
holy shit
Holmes called one of the rooms on the second floor his "secret hanging chamber", which was exactly what it says on the tin. He took some of his victims there and hanged them.
That vault near his office, the one he suffocated Annie in? Yeah, that one was easy to lock and totally soundproofed.
They found scratch marks and what appeared to be a woman's shoe print on the inside of the door, which Holmes later confirmed to be Annie's.
Yet another secret room was completely sealed in solid brick and could only be entered through the ceiling; some victims were left in there for days until they died of hunger or thirst.
Fun times at the Castle hotel
Perfect vacation destination...
Oh, and police were initially confused by what appeared to be a metal closet; it was about tall and wide enough for a single person to stand in, and had a grate at the bottom.
And then they figured out that the grate could drop, revealing a chute that went down to the basement.
Corpse goes in, hit the switch, and shoop! Instant delivery.
They also found a dummy elevator that went straight to the basement as well, which leads naturally into the last horrible question we have to ask... What was in the basement?
That's right, there is more.
Yay! More horror!!
This isn't sarcasm jsyk
The police did an extremely thorough, month long investigation of the Castle, and it took them a while to figure out that the basement even existed...
But when they got down there, oh boy.
First of all, the basement was huge. Over the years that he ran the place, Holmes managed to expand the basement out past the lot space until part of it was literally under the sidewalk.
People were strolling over it without a clue, every day, which is scary to think about.
He had a whole laboratory setup down there, including a large dissection table that was still covered in dried blood at the time it was discovered.
As I think I mentioned earlier, he made a fair bit of money by carefully dissecting the corpses, stripping them of their flesh, and then selling their organs and bones back to medical contacts who had no idea.
Many skeletons were set up as models and then sold to medical schools.
He also buried some of the bodies in lime pits, which turned most of the remains into dust by the time police got there.
But why stop there when you could also have two giant furnaces, several pits of corrosive acid, bottles of various poisons, and a fucking stretching rack for those days when you feel like changing things up.
By which I mean that he had all of those things.
The stretching rack is the same as a torture rack, for anyone curious. I believe they found it half-buried along with the lime pits and the vats of acid.
So yeah. This is a thing that happened. This was a place that existed. I have not made any of this up.
It looked so charming from the outside...
Though after all of this was uncovered, locals started referring to the Castle as "The Murder House", which is way legit.
With enough searching, investigators pulled up plenty of evidence and all signs pointed right to obvious murder.
In a large stove upstairs, they found a piece of gold chain, a woman's shoe, and some hair. A jeweler (who'd sold to her in the past) was able to identify the chain as belonging to Minnie Williams.
Down in the basement they found a pile of human bones mixed with animal bones.
There was also a large wooden chest containing several female skeletons.
They found a pile of bloody women's clothes, and also opened up a fabric bundle that contained a carefully-wound ball of women's hair.
Again, the bones had mostly turned to dust in the lime pits, but they dug through them anyway and uncovered a couple of pieces of hair stuck in soft spots of the clay.
They matched the hair colors of Annie and Minnie Williams. On top of that, they found a footprint in the clay that looked like it may have been a match for Minnie.
They found more human remains at the bottom of those acid pits, and unearthed several bones belonging to a young child (probably the girl, Pearl).
They found a dress that they suspected belonged to Julia Smythe, and her still-living ex-husband Ned was able to confirm that it was hers.
Holy fuck it's like a horror story amped up x10,000
I didn't learn this until this morning, but a little later some firemen went down to check out dead-end wall that sounded hollow. After they dug through it, one of them lit a match to see with...
And it caused a sudden explosion that was strong enough to rock the whole building.
Some of the men were hospitalized from injuries.
wow. All of this is so... wow
It turns out that the fumes which caused the explosion were coming from an oil tank Holmes had hidden behind the wall.
Holmes never explained what it was for or why it was hidden behind a wall, but investigators later looked at the oil and determined the fumes were strong enough to kill someone in under a minute.
And hey, just to put a cherry on top?
It turns out that one of the requirements of employment for many people in the Castle was that they take out life insurance policies.
Holmes would pay the premiums for them, but he was also the beneficiary.
welp
So whenever he decided to murder one of his employees, he got a nice little bonus out of it on top of everything else.
Holmes was held in prison for a while after admitting to the insurance fraud, and his sentence was delayed while they put Howe (the lawyer) on trial...
You couldn't use this guy as a villain in a story
No one would buy him
But between Philadelphia police trying to unravel the fate of the three missing Pitezel children, and Chicago police investigating his operations and murders at the Castle
his fate was pretty much sealed by the time his trial came around.
You're my hero
The Pitezel situation got pretty wide press, so the public was 300% ready to see this guy brought to justice. He was charged with the murder of Benjamin Pitezel, found guilty, and sentenced to death.
BUT, THIS FUCKER.
Of course he couldn't just be executed quietly.
Up until the last possible second, he made it as hard as possible for anyone to get the story straight.
He initially confessed to thirty murders and six murder attempts.
Upon investigation, police found that several of the people he had confessed to murdering were, in fact, very much alive.
He was paid by Hearst newspapers ($7500, which is worth $213,330 today) in exchange for a written confession...
Which he did!
But he... Gave contradictory accounts of his life, and kept changing his numbers, and soon the story was different with every telling.
He started off claiming that he was totally innocent.
At the end, for his final confession, he gave them a very poetic bit about how he was possessed by Satan.
"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."
Even at the last minute, before his execution, he confessed again... to the murder of two people.
I think at one point he confessed as high as thirty-seven.
(/awkwardly deletes info typos)
well yes I'd argue if any demons walk on this earth, he'd qualify for one, but that just means you should kill him faster
YEAH, people are still to this day trying to figure out what happened and how many people he actually killed.
They've confirmed nine victims, but some experts estimate he may have killed up to 200 people over the course of his life.
I think that's mostly from looking at missing persons reports for the time and area that fit his usual style, as well as reports of people going in to the Castle and just never being seen again.
In 1896, a little less than a year after he was put on trial, Holmes was finally hanged for murder.
Wasn't there some belief for a while that he was *also Jack the Ripper?
Or am I possibly confusing him with the thirty other people supposed to be him nvm
Apparently, he stayed calm and very pleasant-like up until the moment of his death.
He didn't appear to be scared or anxious in the slightest.
And of course he couldn't just die nice and quiet, either.
Something just... went wrong with the way the noose was set up, some malfunction, or it wasn't tied right...
But instead of killing him instantly like it was supposed to, the trapdoor dropped, his neck didn't snap, and the crowd got to watch as he was slowly strangled to death over the course of fifteen minutes.
At this point I'm not sure if that's the awful death he deserved, or if it was just one more horrible thing he happened to inflict on people before his death.
Here's a little follow-up, to finish the story!
Hedgepeth, who had been pardoned of his jail sentence for informing the police about Holmes, was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer on New Year's Eve in 1909.
It was during a holdup at a Chicago saloon.
So... That was it for that guy.
Fun fact about hangings: generally height and weight were calculated in to judge how far you should be dropped to allow for a neck break, but not decapitation. What probably happened was that he was either
1. dropped from the standard drop of ~5 feet and weighed less than most criminals did
2. lost weight and threw off the calculations.
which would result in a slow strangulation, just like any short drop hanging would.
Hangings are horrific.
YOU KNOW WHAT, he mentioned in his latest written confession that he'd changed shape and that his gentlemanly face was becoming more gaunt and horrible...
He said he was turning into the devil because of what he'd done, BUT that could absolutely be the weight loss that would throw off the calculation...
THANK YOU for this contribution this is excellent to know.
My (rather gruesome) pleasure.
My ladyfriend also helped explain to me a thing about how people who are chloroformed and then burned have particular-looking burns around their mouths because of the chemicals...
Which helped explain how police called bullshit on Holmes about Pitezel's murder; Holmes initially said he chloroformed him to death and THEN charred the body...
...When in fact chloroform had been put over the body AFTER he'd burned it, maybe to make it look more like a suicide and not a horrible scorching murder.
GRUESOME SCIENCE.
Speaking of gruesome, Quinlan, the former caretaker of the Castle, committed suicide in 1914.
He did so by taking Strychnine, which is awful.
He was found in his bedroom with a note that read, "I couldn't sleep."
They managed to question some of his relatives, who said that he'd been doing poorly for several months. He spoke of being "haunted" and had been suffering from hallucinations.
And as for the good ol' Murder Castle itself, it was gutted by a fire in 1895, a year before Holmes was hanged. A couple of men were seen going in through the back, and then later running the hell away.
There were several explosions from inside the building, and then the whole thing went up in flames.
Executioners would also sometimes short drop on purpose if they hated the guy
(They could have also totally given him the short drop, I'm pretty sure that NO ONE liked this guy.)
yeah I doubt anyone truly pitied him for the way he went out
The two big theories about the fire are that it was either started by someone wanting to destroy any remaining evidence that the police hadn't found yet...
Or it was started by a couple of really angry citizens that wanted to keep the Castle from becoming another tourist attraction, which we all know it totally would have.
y u p
Some of the building was still standing after the fire and remained in use until 1938, when it was torn down.
There's now a branch of USPS in its place.
which makes sense they'd want a ground that accursed.
it's the postal service after all
AND THAT is at least part of the story of H. H. Holmes, who was basically the first properly recorded and investigated American serial killer.
And was more serial killer-y in real life than most horror movie serial killers combined.
He's actually the one they coined the term "multiple murderer" for, if I'm recalling right
I am so interested in this and may go look into the documentary about him, and the book Ty mentioned...
autumnleaving: Coined as in... They didn't have a term for it yet so they made it up just to describe him?
and/or his case?
it's all just so horrifying
Wow.
And the scary part is... and it's cliche to say so but... I mean
He looks so normal
shave off the mustache for modern sensibilities and
it's just another guy
(I could actually see him played by Brad Pitt)
Jesus Fucking Christ
you seriously could never use him in a horror story, no one would buy it
bees-n-murders
says
spookystick: yes that. They literally invented the term for him
bees-n-murders
says
Also the book is great, it's nonfiction and really well-written telling the parallel stories
oh my god i heard about this some years ago, when i was just starting to develop my taste for tales of gore and murder
i actually forgot about how terrible it was, and i didn't know half these facts, either. Thank you!
...and yes i totally would have gone there if it was still standing
i would have bought the pin they surely would have made
You're so welcome! :} Serial killers aren't usually my thing because I like feeling secure as a human being around other human beings, but this guy is fascinating in an awful, awful way.
"Absurdly awful" is still the best way I can think to describe him.
AND... as much controversy as there is about everyone being monitored, cameras everywhere, electronics tracking your every movement, etc....
This story has made me a little more thankful that I live in a time where it's much harder to falsify your identity and build a MURDER LABYRINTH in your spare time.
Also yes I agree I would have totally visited the Castle.
I would have bought the t-shirt.
no yeah uber monitoring is creepy but at least we have no murder hotels
yeaaah no kidding
I think we hit a balance around when everyone got a social security number and we've kinda gone beyond what's efficient for crime prevention now
that was fascinatingly horrible!
I'm so mad when I lived in Chicago I never went to find his place.
My ladyfriend says it was in what's now a scary neighborhood, so maybe getting there might be kind of tough anyway...
WHAT A GREAT WAY TO START MY DAY lmfao
Thankfully Chicago is a veritable cornucopia of awful history and terrible people getting away with things so I'm sure there is plenty to see and find.
(I say this with full fondness, I love Chicago.)
it's really true.
I love stuff like this a little too much 
;;
;;
Chicago is the Midwest's loveable shithole
Chicago is the asshole character that everyone loves, but when you think about it they should really probably be arrested.
unlike the other unloveable shitholes we got
YES. perfect apt descriptions
repliderp: I love stuff like this too it's ok. ;;
IF ANYONE HAS... UH... recommendations about serial killers or similar horrible people to research, let me know?? I know way more about ghost stuff and mythological creatures.
I don't know who the interesting real actual human people are.
I might start looking into Jack the Ripper but his story seems so intimidating with how much the story has grown.
Redundancy, oy
um this one is actually possibly more horrific mostly because all her victims were children
but Amelia Dyer is another 19th century serial killer- just over at the UK
actually executed just a month after Holmes was
1896 was either a very good or a very bad year for police...
oh gooood
THE DYER CASE IS INTENSE
IT IS
daaaaamn! that was a great read! thank you for this!
Thank you for this!
but yes thank you for this! You are really good at telling these tales
if you want more stories to tell, I'd also love to hear about ghosts and stuff
oh wait you have some on your plurk already! I'm going to follow you 
Gosh no thank you guys for being interested and reading... It makes me feel pretty cool... ;w; And I really love sharing and reading what other people have to contribute so gosh.
I have a couple of much smaller topics lined up, so hopefully it won't be a whole month before I next time I have something to share!
I like the topics and the way you narrate too! This plurk cheered me up after an awful day yesterday, weird as it sounds
Random lurker from a replurker, but this was fascinating and well done! 
Thank you for sharing!
Thank you for sharing!
Also another random lurker-from-replurker, here with thanks and /Optional!Hugs/ ^^
yeah, got this through a replurk but damn that was a ride. all I can think, now, is 'man, I would not wanna work at that usps'
at least get out before dark...
Oh, H. H. Holmes. Always a guy up for fun times.
THERE ARE A LOT OF HORRIFYING THINGS ABOUT THIS CASE but honestly the scariest is that people of the day and of history will honestly never know how many people this guy murdered.
People basically came to Chicago for the World Fair and then, because records were so shoddy back then, disappeared for a lot of reasons.
There's a little biography program about H. H. Holmes on Netflix, if anyone's interested in watching it.
Oh! I may hit up the Netflix one. I'd love to learn more.
The podcast where I got a lot of my info and sources, Lore, mentioned one girl who showed up in Chicago looking for work, and found the Castle.
She told Holmes that her family thought she was travelling to New York to look for a job, but that she liked the idea of working at the Castle there in Chicago much better.
SPOILERS she was totally murdered, but.
That's one of the things that made the murders easier to get away with. It was just way harder to keep in touch with people.
A-And you are all very welcome, y'all are sweet as pie. 
I'd very much like to research more about the late 19th century in general, it seems like it was a wild time in the States.
People were freaking out about vampires over in New England...
The first "Lunatic Asylums" were being built...
Serial killers became a thing... At least, in the documented and modern sense.
And the more I read about medicine/science in the late 19th century (and even the early 20th) the more I'm amazed at how far we've come in about a hundred years.
I think part of the reason the 19th century is so freaky compared to earlier ones is we have better records and people were very SCIENCE!!
They were SO about that science.
SCIENCE WAS SO HIP.
so what might be explained as magic or whatever prior is researched and documented extensively
and even when they were wrong they freaked us the hell out
THE 1900s WERE A WEIRD, KIND OF LAWLESS TIME
The Black Widows of Liverpool were about 20 years before H. H. Holmes, but were also pretty awful
(spoilers: they poisoned people for insurance money and their actions actually tightened up some life insurance laws?)
Back in the day you could. Apparently just take out policies on total randos?!
man
the more I hear these stories the more I realize the reason why so many official processes are so super complicated and tedious almost always starts with
"THERE WAS THIS TERRIBLE DOUCHE..."
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY WAS WILD, MAN, there are so many creepy turn-of-the-century murder stories out there
belle gunness is another great one (and by great I mean awful)
This was Belle's set-up: she had a farm. She had a nice farm. So she'd put ads out in the paper all like "yo you wanna marry me, I got a farm"
AND MEN WOULD LEGIT JUST COME CROSS COUNTRY TO MARRY HER
long story short she would poison her suitors and literally fed them to her pigs
She was only caught because her farm burnt down and "her" body was found.
... I use quotes because the body they found was decapitated (?!?!!?!?!?) and. too small.
(belle gunness was like six feet tall)
oh i think i remember that one too
So when the authorities were investigating her property for signs of arson and then they just. kept finding stuff like teeth and bones.
so basically nobody knows if belle actually died in the fire or if she faked her death and just moved somewhere else for whatever reason
Wow, just...wow.
/slowly chinhands a bit
A local performance group my friend is did a rock opera about the guy called Murdercastle. Never got to see it but...another fun fact to add?
(thanks for the storytime btw)
All of this... 
Dang, I am writing all these stories and suggestions down btw.
THIS IS AMAZING
I don't know how far back you want to go, but I just heard about another serial killer in Ancient Rome- Locusta
claimed to be the first documented serial killer ever, her method was with poisons.
This is super horrific and oddly fascinating
Whoooooa
that was a wild ride. Would come again
/rubs hands together
I will totally look into Locusta... Really old accounts are fascinating because it's hard to tell what's legit and what parts were exaggerated/completely made up along the way.
all these kids with psycho genes....
EsperBot
says
Jesus christ what a story
EsperBot
says
If it was any century than the 1800s I wouldn't believe it.
Ah yes, H.H. Holmes! Always an... interesting figure.
(I just read Devil in the White City a few months ago, nth-ing the recommendations in this plurk....)
oh, neat
I would like to point out a small point of irony in two of this guy's aliases. Namely his last names - Holmes and Bond.
Just a random detail that leapt out at me.
Man, you weren't kidding when you said strychnine was a bad way to go: Strychnine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"You couldn't use this guy as a villain in a story.
No one would buy him"
This is the scary thing. If you write a book you have to carefully craft motives and such
No one would buy him"
This is the scary thing. If you write a book you have to carefully craft motives and such
RL? Dude just felt like it.
Bonus points: look up his pseudonym on Google Books.
specifically the free ones.
/random plurker from a re-plurk Just watched a docu of this guy, when my friend told me about it (watched it together) and then read this plurk.... it really was an interesting read o-o
u r right about the tropes friendly story teller, american horror story has an expy of hh holmes this season 
on the suggestions front, while it's rather less on the murder front, I recently picked up a really interesting book on the guy who was (most likely) the rl inspiration for Moriarty
The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Wo...
man everything about this is great Imma follow you too. Stories!
The mother of a friend of mine was doing some genealogy and found out her maternal grandmother was H.H. Holmes's cousin.
Their last name was Mudge, but she found out they'd changed it from Mudgett to try and distance themselves from their not so illustrious relation.
I don't hardly blame them. o.o
Wow, weird relationship
Yeah, it was a bit uncomfortably close for Friend's Mum. She even joked about it nervously, "I always knew my family was weird, but..."
Here via a replurk, thank you for putting this together! It's one of the more comprehensive tellings I've read
There's actually an episode in one of the early seasons of Supernatural where they fight the ghost of H.H. Holmes, and the writers actually toned him down a lot
I'm a history buff. Thank you so much for telling this story! Incredibly morbid, but also massively fascinating. In many ways reminded me of Terry Pratchett villains, such as Teatime or Carcer.
People are cynical about the horror/snuff film villains nowadays but... well, there's people in real life just as fucked up.
From the way you told the story, it's highly possible he had some sort of antisocial personality disorder, as he didn't seem afraid of his own death, or the consequences of his actions.
Yeah it's one of the Jo episodes and they totally did tone it down massively
[finds way here from a few diff ways, replurks, etc] YES 10000% to everything here, and also...ghost/supernatural stories on another plurk account? [perks hopefully]
Oh yes, also it appears Leonardo DiCaprio will be playing Mr. H. H. Holmes in a Devil in the White City movie
I'm usually not into serial killers but wowza this was like a bad trainwreck I couldn't look away from
a fascinating trainwreck
thank you so much for sharing!
i clicked in here wondering if that name was Murder House guy and i was not disappointed
A+++
draconic: OH MAN, I'm excited to learn about this guy!
Thanks so much for the rec, this is cool. And sometimes less murder is perfectly fine. I am a big fan of less murder in general.
Actually that's the reason I've held back on a couple of topics... They're very fun, but there's been an awful lot of murder lately...
ANYWAY...
less murder is generally good, yes! and the book is definitely an interesting read!
Matrixrefugee: Oh wow... That's so interesting! I'm sorry for the Friend's Mum, but this is the second time I've run into families changing their names just to get away from its associations...
I think it just seemed like a thing that only happens in movies... But nope, that's a real thing people totally did and still do...
D21Jaydee: He sure sounds like it, doesn't he? I'm hardly a psychologist and guessing profiles is bad practice, but... yeah he really did sound like a total sociopath.
I'm hardly a psychologist and guessing profiles is bad practice, but... yeah he really did sound like a total sociopath.
Or something.
LadyotRings: That's EXACTLY it, yeah! 
I don't normally look into serial killers because I like being able to sleep at night sjdfksldfjs
I don't normally look into serial killers because I like being able to sleep at night sjdfksldfjs
But good lord, at some point the story gets... so absurdly and unbelievably horrible that it's impossible to NOT get sucked into it...
He turned the dial to 11 and KEPT GOING...