Herman Webster Mudgett, one of the first recorded serial killers in the currently accepted sense, was better known as Dr. H.H. Holmes, a pharmacist. In 1886, he purchased a drug store in Chicago, later buying up property around it until he owned the block itself. The buildings were remodeled into a hotel, named the Worlds Fair Hotel in time for the 1893 Worlds Fair. Holmes had no intention of running a proper business, though. Although the influx of tourists and new citizens brought in by the Worlds Fair was absolutely the target audience of his enterprise, Holmes wasnt after their money. The hotel had been constructed by a motley crew of workers, none of whom knew the full layout and all of whom were sacked before completion to ensure their complete ignorance of the structure. Most of the rooms had no windows. Doors and stairways went nowhere, hallways were cul-de-sacs. Gas jets were built into the walls of some of the rooms, blowtorches in the walls of others, and a chute led from the upper floors to the basement, where there were two furnaces big enough to incinerate a corpse or three. The whole place was decked out for torture and murder, with a side order of sick mind games to go. Hed entice a horrifying number of hapless indigents (usually young women) back to the house of horror, killing them and disposing of their bodies via the ovens, lime pits or acid, often selling on the remains to medical schools using contacts accrued during a lifetime working in and around medicine. When he was eventually caught, hed confess to 27 murders, but the real total could be seven or eight times that. Convicted and sentenced to death, Dr. H.H. Holmes was hung but the rope didnt break his neck, and hed hang there being slowly strangled for twenty minutes before finally succumbing. Good.
"I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing I was born with the 'Evil One' standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since." H. H. Holmes
The Murder Castle, as his huge monument to terror and pain eventually became known, was mysteriously gutted by fire in 1895, and the shell of the building was finally demolished in 1938.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
