H. H. Holmes, The Killer Hotelier

( words)

Deadly Lodging

The World’s Fair Hotel at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) was built and run by Dr. Herman Mudgett, alias H. H. Holmes.

His hotel offered rooms at low rates with gas jets in many of these rooms that were controlled from Holmes’s office. There were also airtight and soundproof chambers and a hidden chute from the second floor to the basement where a kiln capable of burning human bones was located.

Holmes would kill anyone for pleasure but he was apparently most aroused by the murder of young children and women.  Hundreds of people went missing during the exposition but Chicago, with one of the highest homicide rates in the U.S., hardly noticed.  We will never know how many people fell victim to Holmes.  When convicted and facing execution, he said “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.”

From Stanley Tunkel's "Nobody Asked Me, But ..."