The Extra "H" Is For "Homicidal": H.H.

Holmes
"To parallel such a career one must go back to past ages and to the time of the
Borgias or Brinvilliers, and even these were not such human monsters as Holmes
seems to have been. He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so
unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character. The story, too,
tends to illustrate the end of the century."
-- Chicago Times-Herald, May 8, 1896

Sensational book subtitles aside, he wasn't America's first serial killer (that dubious
honor likely belongs to William and Wiley Harpe in 1790s Tennessee). Eclipsed in his
own century by Jack the Ripper and in the next by Al Capone, the name of Herman
Webster Mudgett, alias H.H. Holmes, no longer strikes an immediate chord; no
frisson of terror ripples down the spine at his mention. But it should.

Perhaps it's just perverse hometown pride, but H.H. Holmes' Chicago Murder Castle
has always struck me as something unique, something extraordinarily full of portent
and dark potential for horror gaming. Seemingly sprung from a freakish combination
of Edgar Allan Poe and the Brothers Grimm, in its endless twisting labyrinth dozens
-- perhaps hundreds -- met their deaths at the hands of the man who was to
murder what Rockefeller was to oil, a Robber Baron of homicide. And its corridors
can perhaps lead us down some interesting paths of our own. Watch that first step.
It's a doozy.

"There really was no end to its windings -- to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It

was difficult, at any given time, to say with any certainty upon which of its . . .
stories one happened to be. From each room to every other there were sure to be
found three or four steps either in ascent or descent."
-- Edgar Allan Poe, "William Wilson"

Even the beginning of Holmes' life is a lie and a mystery -- he was born Herman
Webster Mudgett in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, in an unknown year. (1858 and
1861 are the likely candidates.) He attended medical school in Vermont and at the
University of Michigan, where his education seems to have flourished mainly in
dissection, grave-robbing, and postmortem destruction of flesh. Expelled from the
University for cadaver theft (likely for use in insurance fraud schemes), Mudgett
traveled across the Midwest running short cons and insurance frauds, and beginning
a career of bigamous marriage for money. (Like the number of his victims, the
number of Holmes' wives may never be known.) In 1886, using his new sobriquet of
"Harry Howard Holmes" and his medical training, he applied for a job in the
drugstore of the widow Mrs. E.S. Holden in the Englewood section of Chicago. His
skill and drive turned the store into a thriving operation and Ms. Holden into his lover
and possibly his first Chicago victim, in short order. With the proceeds from her
store, her life insurance policy, and the sale of her skeleton to a medical school,
Holmes began construction on an edifice truly worthy of his ambitions.

Between August of 1888 and May of 1890, a crew of 800 workers under Holmes'
personal supervision began building a three-story turreted, battlemented
combination storefront, offices, apartment complex, and mansion at 701-703 West
63rd Street. Few workers remained on the job for more than two weeks; Holmes
fired anyone who asked too many questions about the purpose of the gas-jets in
the guest rooms, the elevator shaft with no elevator, the hidden passages, the
soundproof asbestos-lined vaults, the alarm bells activated by opening apartment
doors, the stairs to nowhere, the kilns and quicklime pits and trapdoors and full
chemical laboratories and peepholes and everything else in the 105 rooms covering
the entire city block including a nine-room basement illegally hooked up to the city's
gas mains and tunneled under the alley. In this Gormenghastly palace, Holmes
flourished, killing his secretaries and office-girls, a series of wives, and at least 50
paying guests, many of whom arrived for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition
held in nearby Hyde Park. Holmes dissected the bodies, performed his chemical
experiments upon them, saved important pieces in his vaults, and dissolved the rest
in quicklime or burnt them in a glass-bending furnace. Among the victims disposed
of thusly was Wade Warner, the furnace's designer.

"The case of Holmes illustrates the practical as well as the purely ethical value of
'honor among thieves,' and shows how a comparatively insignificant misdeed may
ruin a great and comprehensive plan of crime."
-- H.B. Irving, A Book of Remarkable Criminals

In the Murder Castle, Holmes was in his element. Unfortunately, the Castle cost a
fortune to operate -- Holmes gave the figure of $50,000 -- and due in part to its
unorthodox construction, was showing its shoddiness early. Holmes torched the
third floor for insurance -- only to balk at the adjuster's reasonable request to see
the inside damage. He attempted to marry one Minnie Williams, a rich Texas heiress,
to solve the problem, but her sister interfered, and Holmes wound up killing them
both for nothing when the Texas courts refused to transfer their property to him
without death certificates. Broke, Holmes returned to the old "unknown corpse"
insurance scheme, talking his sidekick Benjamin Pitezel into faking his death for
money. The fake turned real, and Holmes followed up by killing Pitezel's children.
Arrested when he tried to claim the money, Holmes wound up in grave trouble as the
Chicago Police finally broke into the deserted Murder Castle and found some of
Holmes' gory trophies. The Castle burned down on August 19, 1894, before a
complete search could be made (and before the police detective in charge could
turn the building into a "murder museum"). Convicted of Pitezel's murder (though
never charged with any of his other, possibly 200+, killings), Holmes was hanged in
Philadelphia's colonial-era Moyamensing Prison, under the gaze of a man-shaped
iron gibbet frame. Following pronouncement of last rites by Father Henry MacPake,
Holmes again denied killing anyone but "two women," recanted his confession, and
died at 10:25 a.m. on May 7, 1896, after dangling from the noose for 13 minutes.

Ironically, Allan Eckert's true crime novel The Scarlet Mansion makes the case that
Holmes was hung for one of the few deaths in his acquaintanceship he didn't cause
-- that Pitezel really did commit suicide, but being an idiot, screwed that up, too. Of
course, Harold Schechter's equally well-researched study Depraved says, with the
jury, that Holmes was indeed guilty as charged. You pays your money and you takes
your choice; me, I'm with Schechter on this one, but both works repay the reader
with grue aplenty.

"Take your time, Alex. You know I'm in no hurry."

-- last words of H.H. Holmes

But in your game, of course, that's another beautiful area of fog, another dark room
in the metaphorical castle of Holmes' potential. If, for instance, Holmes was
innocent in Pitezel's death, it might explain the "Holmes Curse." Oh, come now, you
knew there'd be a curse, right? Apparently Holmes, or his "malign influences," killed
coroner's physician (and key prosecution witness) Dr. William K. Mattern by blood
poisoning, Father MacPake by a mysterious savage beating, informant Marion
Hedgepeth by gunshot, Moyamensing Prison Superintendent Perkins and Murder
Castle custodian Pat Quinlan by suicide, and jury foreman Linford Biles in an
electrical fire. Fire crackles through the stories, seemingly carried by sparks jumping
from the blazing Castle -- the insurance claim office that balked at paying off the
Pitezel claim was gutted in 1896, one of Holmes' fathers-in-law burned in a gas
explosion, and the World's Fair White City that fed the Castle itself went up in 1894.
Even today, multiple serial killers operate in Englewood, the neighborhood where the
Murder Castle stood, and where a recent Chicago Police survey found over 600
abandoned or burned-out buildings -- any one of which could have a strange back
door into 1893 in your game.

"She took then the little key and opened [the door] in a very great trembling. But
she could see nothing distinctly, because the windows were all shut; after some
moments, she began to observe that the floor was all covered over with clotted
blood, on which lay the bodies of several dead women ranged against the walls."
-- Charles Perrault, "The Bluebeard," in Tales and Stories of Times Past (1697)

But be careful when you open strange doors, as the bride finds out in the old fairy
tale of Bluebeard -- he of the closet full of dead wives, the only room in his castle
his bride is forbidden to enter. You'll find it in Perrault and Grimm, although its origin
is a mystery. Many authorities consider the story of Bluebeard a mythologization and
socialization of the mass murders of Gilles de Rais, the pedophile alchemist of the
15th century (and subject, for sure, of his own column some time in future). Others
point to the legend of St. Triphine and Cunmore the Cursed, about the holy wife of a
6th-century uxoricidal Breton noble. Still others adduce the "forbidden bride" stories
like the swan-may or Cupid and Psyche, although the absence of piles of dead exes
is a significant difference. Bruno Bettelheim calls the stories fears of cuckolding;
feminists call them fears of childbirth. It's all about the bloodstains on that key, or in
some cases, an egg. Before we leave the realm of the archetype and the urban
legend, does the Murder Castle remind anyone else of the -- quite accurately-
depicted -- warren of rooms in the Cabrini-Green housing project in the movie
Candyman? Thought it might. The story is quite old; it seems that Holmes (and
Gilles de Rais) may have been playing parts in a drama of mythical power -- a very
old Greek story tells of Death's habit of feeding his former wives to his newest bride,
and being vanquished with his own name.

"I am convinced that since my imprisonment I have changed woefully and

gruesomely from what I was formerly in feature and figure . . . My head and face are
gradually assuming an elongated shape. I believe fully that I am growing to resemble
the Devil -- that the similitude is almost completed."
-- from the confession of H.H. Holmes, April 10 1896
Which brings us to Mudgett/Holmes, and the peculiarity of naming. Was Holmes just
following a standard con-man practice, or was he putting on and taking off ritual
masks? Inductees into a magical lodge take new names, and so do married couples.
(Marriage itself, of course, is an alchemical consummation; perhaps Holmes' anima
needed constant infusions of feminine, lunar energy.) The triplicity of "HHH"
screams magickal intent -- and the Druidic meaning of the hawthorn-"H" is death,
purification by fire, and the month of May -- when Holmes completed the Castle.
Holmes also died in May, recall, and following his request, his body was encased in
a solid block of concrete.

Who did Holmes fear? In his confession, he claimed that "the Evil One" had been
"standing as my sponsor" since birth -- and in his autobiography he repeatedly
mentions a mysterious accomplice, one "Edward Hatch." Hatch never existed,
although (Bluebeard) Holmes' parallels with another Evil One, Blackbeard, pop to
mind -- especially since "Edward Thatch" was a name used by the sadistic pirate.
Plenty of other serial killers, from the "Son of Sam" to Richard Ramirez, have been
convinced of help or inspiration from Below, and in your game the claims of a
nationwide ring of Satanic murder-cultists might stretch back a century. They might
even be accurate. And if so, what better place for the cult to begin than the twisting
corridors and hellish basement of the Murder Castle of H.H. Holmes?

Past Columns

Article publication date: August 6, 1999

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