Without a single trace to prove it, it is more than likely that the passer-by who walks through Englewood does not realize that one of the parcels that populate the streets of the Chicago neighborhood was once one of the most sinister places in the city: the murderous castle. A building that will be the center of the next series that Martin Scorsese will produce.
We are talking about ‘The Devil in the White City’, an adaptation of Erik Larson’s book that tells the story of an architect and a serial killer whose destinies intertwine in this World Fair of the Windy City. A project that has Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio as producers and Keanu Reeves in talks to star in it.
But let’s go to the origin: what is true and what is legend in the history of this gloomy building and what has recently been considered the first documented case of a serial killer in the United States.
A world’s fair and a serial killer
For this we traveled to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, a golden opportunity for the city of the wind to show itself as a modernized citythriving and fully recovered from a raging fire that destroyed much of the place decades later.
In this context, the city grew and many new buildings were built and many others were expanded. An ideal breeding ground for a charismatic swindler named H. H. Holmes (apparently homage to Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective) had a multi-story death trap.
Formerly known as Herman Webster Mudgett Holmes was born in New Hampshire in 1861. At the age of twenty-five, he would leave his wife and children to start a new life (pseudonym included) in flourishing Chicago. working in a pharmacy near the chosen place to host the World’s Fair.
In the mid-1980s and with irregular financing (according to what is said between scams and not very honest banks) the construction of a building began, which It would consist of a first floor with shops and a second floor with apartments..
Already on the eve of the World’s Fair, Holmes would expand the building with an additional floor as a hotel for tourists coming to the city. However, according to reports at the time, that third floor was never finished. Be that as it may, the company did not last long and the building began to raise suspicions… but almost more due to non-payments and scams to suppliers than due to the gruesome reasons that followed.
Holmes would flee Chicago in October 1893 and would be arrested in Boston accused of the murder of his partner and his sons. And this is where reality begins to mix with fiction, painting the swindler and murderer as a true monster.
the building of death
According to the tabloids of the time, the “Killer Castle” it had soundproof rooms, secret passageways, labyrinthine corridors and false stairs, trapdoors that the victims were thrown into a basement —which had acid tanks, quicklime pits and its own crematorium— and a long etcetera.
A building designed to disorient innocents, kill them and hide their bodies. Or at least that is the narrative of the press, determined to link the disappearances that occurred during that year to the existence of the murderous castle.
At that time there was talk of how Holmes seduced young women who got fully into this building. However, there is much more myth than reality, fueled in part by the press and on the other hand by Holmes himself, who confessed that he had murdered about two hundred people.
An unbelievable figure and, in fact, some of the victims were alive at the time of the confession. Finally, the authorities managed to attribute and formally accuse him of the murder of nine people, none of them in the murderous castle. He was executed (hanged) in 1896 ending the life of a disturbed man who would write things like this:
“I was born with the devil in me. I couldn’t help the fact that he was a killer, not so much as the poet finds the inspiration to sing. I was born with the Evil One being my godfather at the bedside where I was brought into the world and he has been with me ever since.”
While Holmes was serving time, the infamous building would burn down in 1895. Five years later it would be demolished, ending his story but not the legend.