13 Horrible Things H.H. Holmes Did to Victims in His Nightmarish Murder Castle

H.H. Holmes, also known as Henry Howard Holmes, was born Hermann Webster Mudgett in 1861. He changed his name after graduating from high school and embarking on a medical career that provided him with the skills needed to conduct his twisted experiments and gruesome crimes. 

What H.H. Holmes did to his victims lives on in infamy, as he is credited with being one of the first serial killers in America. Holmes built his murder castle - named for its specific purpose of providing him with a place to kill his victims - in Chicago, and opened its doors to tourists visiting the nearby World's Fair in 1893. Some, if not all, of those tourists never made it home from the White City. What did the Devil in the White City do to them?

Holmes was arrested in 1894 for insurance fraud, although the charges against him quickly expanded to include mass murder. He was sentenced to death, and was hanged in May of 1896. It's believed that he killed around 200 people, even though he only confessed to killing 28. These H.H. Holmes facts are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

As Holmes himself once stated, "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."

Holmes used the money that he received from committing insurance fraud, and, with his drug store as collateral, constructed his "murder castle." It was technically a three-story hotel, complete with a uniquely constructed second and third floor. There were gas chambers, trap doors, hidden rooms, disorienting maze-like hallways, chutes leading down into the basement (perfect for dumping a dead body), and other horrific features. In some rooms, blowtorches would set victims on fire, while another was dubbed "the hanging room." He also had each floor set up so if someone moved around on it, an alarm system would sound.

In order to avoid detection, Holmes hired and fired three different construction crews. The structure was technically a hotel, but after his arrest, it quickly became used as a machine for murder.

Holmes killed the Pitezel children's father, Benjamin, in order to collect on his life insurance policy. Benjamin's grieving widow then allowed Holmes to take three of her five children away. The youngest, a baby, and the oldest, a teenager, stayed with their mother. The others - Alice, Nellie, and Howard - supposedly went with Holmes to live a better life in Chicago. However, he killed them all while in Toronto, and buried them in a steamer trunk.  

Annie Williams was the sister of his wealthy fiancée, Minnie. Unlike Minnie, who vanished, the body of Annie was later recovered from Holmes's murder castle. His hotel had been designed with a bank vault on the first floor, which he used to keep records, store valuables - and commit murder. He asked Annie to go into the vault and retrieve some files for him, and then he swung the door shut, sealing her inside. She died of suffocation, after slowing using up all of the oxygen in the vault. Investigators found scratches from her fingernails showing that she had tried to claw her way out.

The death of Benjamin Pitezel was a tricky one, since he was one of Holmes's co-conspirators as well as one of his victims. He and Holmes arranged for Pitezel to fake his own death so that Holmes could collect his life insurance money. Some of that money would then go to Pitezel himself. However, the plan went awry when Holmes actually killed Pitezel, knocking him out with chloroform before setting his body on fire while he was still alive. Holmes then ran off with several of Pitezel's children. 

Julia Smythe was one of Holmes's mistresses. He had four wives and never divorced any of them, so each marriage after his first was bigamous and illegal. Smythe, one of his pharmacy employees, was married when the affair began. Her husband found out and ran off, leaving her and their daughter, Pearl, in Holmes's clutches. Smythe discovered that she was pregnant with Holmes's child, after which he killed her with an overdose of chloroform. He then killed Pearl, and told his tenants that both went to Iowa for a family wedding. In reality, he cut their bodies into pieces and gave them to Charles Chappell to hold onto. 

One of the most disturbing rooms in the murder castle was the hanging room. This room was on the second floor, and was yet another way for Holmes to kill his victims, by hanging them from the neck with a noose attached to a ceiling joist. Once the person was dead, their body was dumped into a chute that led to the basement. 

Holmes met Minnie Williams while out of town on a business trip. He was in Boston when he met the young railroad heiress. They entered into a relationship, and she moved to Chicago to be with him. Her sister Annie joined them, too. Holmes proposed to Minnie, and suggested that she give him ownership of her property in Fort Worth, Texas. She mistakenly did, and after the transfer went through, she disappeared without a trace. Only some of her belongings, including a distinctive gold chain, were ever found. 

The basement of Holmes's murder castle was fully outfitted with two large furnaces that he used to incinerate bodies. It is unknown how many victims - or parts of victims - found their way there. When police investigators arrived to search the building, there were so many bodies in one place that there was no way of knowing the identities of the people who went missing down there, especially given the lack of proper criminal investigative techniques in the 1800s.

After Holmes killed some of his victims, they wound up in his basement laboratory, where their bodies were dissected and then sold to medical schools. He sold their organs, their bones - and in some cases, their fully articulated skeletons. This made it tough to determine exactly how many people he'd killed. 

The murder castle was filled with all kinds of deadly spaces. The rooms had well-sealed windows and doors that made it easy for Holmes to turn them into gas chambers. All that he had to do was lock the door and turn on the gas jets that he had built into the space. There was also a room that had no windows or doors. The only access to it was via a trapdoor in the ceiling. Holmes would drop a victim down there, seal up the trapdoor, and let his victim die of thirst and starvation.