H.H Holmes
CHILDHOOD
In 1861, Herman Webster Mudgett was born in New Hampshire. He was born to his mother and father, who were both higher middle class. Ever since a young age, he was obsessed with skeletons and death. Mudgett decided when he was young that he was going to go into the medical field to be able to fulfill his obsession with death. He graduated high school when he was 16 years old. Shortly after he graduated high school he changed his name to Henry Howard Holmes, and then after he committed his crimes he became known as H.H. Holmes (Johnson).
This is Holmes's childhood house, it is speculated that he got the inspiration for his murder mansion from his childhood house.
Education
Holmes went to a small school in Vermont to study medicine and then transferred into the University of Michigan Medical School. While Holmes was in medical school it was suspected that he was stealing cadavers from the laboratories. He would take the bodies home and dismember them, burn them, dissect them, and then make it seem like an accident and plant the bodies in a public place. The way in which Holmes would make money is before he would place these bodies he would take out insurance policies on these people and collect the money if they were “killed”(Johnson).
This is what researchers assume the house would have looked like back in the 1920s during the prime of Holmes killings.
The Scheme of the Murder House
Through it all, Holmes traveled throughout the U.S. committing insurance scams with his accomplice, Benjamin Pitezel. Once the World’s Fair had ended, Chicago’s economy was in a slump; therefore, Holmes abandoned the Castle and focused on insurance scams – committing random murders along the way. During this time, Holmes stole horses from Texas, shipped them to St. Louis, and sold them – making a fortune. He was arrested for this swindle and sent to jail (Johnson).
This is the outline of the Murder Castle, this is all the twist and turns of the trapped doors and cut-off staircases and shows where all the trap doors and chutes are and where the chutes lead too.
The Castle of Murder
After Holmes become the owner of his family-run drugstore, a couple of months later he would purchase a lot of land across the street and would begin construction on a Murder mansion. Which the neighborhood would go on and call the “castle”. Construction on the Castle started in 1889 where Holmes hired several construction crews so that no one would catch onto what he was building. The construction was complete in 1891 and he placed ads in the local newspaper offering jobs for young women and also advertised the mansion as a hotel. He also went on the place ads for a wealthy man looking for a wife or a “special friend” (Johnson). The construction of the house was done on three different levels. The first level of the house was done by one of the many construction crews which had over one hundred different rooms and were also used as sleeping quarters for the employees and for Holmes. Some of these rooms were soundproof but also contained gas lines so that Holmes would be able to asphyxiate his guests if he felt like it. Also throughout the Castle, there were many false stairways, peepholes, and trap doors. There were also chutes that led into the basement. The basement was also used as Holmes laboratory where he would send bodies of people down the chute where he would eventually dissect them, strip them of flesh and sell them as human skeletons to medical schools, or he would cremate them or put them in barrels of acid (Johnson).
H.H Holmes Investigation
The police investigation spread through Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toronto. While conducting their investigation in Toronto, police discovered the bodies of the Pitezel children, who had gone missing sometime during Holmes’ insurance fraud spree. Linking Holmes to their murders, police arrested him and he was convicted of their murders. He also confessed to 28 other murders; however, through investigations and missing person’s reports, it is believed that Holmes is responsible for up to 200 murders. In May 1896, one of America’s first serial killers, H.H. Holmes, was hanged. The Castle was remodeled as an attraction and named the “Holmes Horror Castle”; however, it burned to the ground shortly before its opening (Johnson).b