The Murder Castle

H. H. Holmes was a murderer from 1892-1893. In 1983 in Chicago, he built a hotel that was a block long and three stories tall and intended to serve as a place for his murders. He chose this time because he knew people would need somewhere to stay due to the World Fair (the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing in the Americas.) The bottom floor consisted of a variety of shops and his relocated drug store. On the other two floors he had an office, a vault, and roughly one hundred windowless rooms. These rooms would open up to staircases to nowhere, brick walls, and extremely narrow hallways. Holmes had placed piping throughout the hotel. With the piping, he could send out gas to asphyxiate his victims. There were chutes that lead to the basements. Once the bodies reached this point, he would clean them and sell them to medical schools or burn them. This poem is about a fictional victim in a historical event.