Serial Killers and Haunted Places

H.H Holmes

   

At the height of his criminal career, the infamous Dr. H.H. Holmes designed his castle of horrors in Chicago, where he rented rooms to unsuspecting victims visiting the 1893 World's Fair. Further benefiting from his victims, Holmes sold their skeletons to local medical schools.

 He is often credited as America's first serial killer, Holmes's body count is thought to be somewhere between 27 (the number he confessed to) and victims. How is such a thing possible? The simple answer is that Holmes built a a bustling part of in the 1890s, and designed it to be a perfect killing floor for his sick desires. Later called "Murder Castle," it was designed to be a maze of windowless rooms, making escape virtually impossible for those Holmes chose to trap. No one aside from Holmes knew the full layout of the place as he repeatedly hired and fired new builders to construct this killing castle in portions. Some of the weirder attributes of this hotel were doors only able to be opened from the outside, doorways that open on brick walls, a safe big enough to put a person inside (to suffocate them), and a chute that allowed him to dump bodies from the upper floors straight to the basement, where two massive furnaces and large supplies of flesh-stripping acid were stored.