H.H. Holmes: The Murder Castle Hidden Inside a World's Fair Hotel

In 1887, Herman Webster Mudgett — medical school graduate, confidence trickster, and soon-to-be serial killer operating under the name H.H. Holmes — began construction on a three-story building at West 63rd Street and South Wallace Avenue in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood. He hired and fired multiple construction crews throughout the build, ensuring no single contractor understood the full layout of what he was making. The result was a labyrinth he alone knew: secret passages, rooms with doors that could only be locked from the outside, soundproofed chambers, chutes that dropped directly to the basement, and gas jets piped into bedrooms that allowed the occupant to be asphyxiated while asleep. In the basement he installed a kiln large enough to cremate a human body and a tank of acid. Holmes timed the building's completion to coincide with the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. With 27 million visitors flooding the city, he advertised it as a hotel and used the chaos of the Fair to draw in victims: young women he romanced and swindled, employees he required to carry life insurance policies naming him beneficiary, and travelers who simply answered his advertisements. He sold many of their bodies to medical schools, continuing the grim economy that Burke and Hare had pioneered sixty years earlier and fifty years earlier. His unraveling came not from a murder investigation but from insurance fraud. Arrested in 1894 for a horse swindle, investigators began connecting him to the disappearances of his business associate Benjamin Pitezel and, ultimately, three of Pitezel's children. At trial, Holmes confessed to 27 murders and later claimed 133. Researchers have been able to confirm approximately nine victims with certainty. He was hanged on May 7, 1896, and took the precaution of having his casket filled with cement to prevent the very posthumous dissection he had so freely inflicted on others. The "Murder Castle" was gutted by fire in 1895 under circumstances that remain unexplained, and the building itself was demolished in 1938. Its former site is now a U.S. Post Office. Holmes remains America's most mythologized serial killer, though the line between documented fact and yellow-press exaggeration has never fully been untangled.