Nick

H.H. Holmes didn’t build the hotel, he got close to an elderly woman, got her to name him in her will, and killed her. She left everything to him, including her hotel.

And then he modded the FUCK out of it.

Beds that dumped bodies into the basement, bricking people in, gas in the bedrooms, deadly mazes…

H.H. Holmes didn’t fuck around.

It wasn’t the ‘elderly’ woman’s hotel. There was a drug store owned by a woman, Dr. Elizabeth Holton, who was actually only two years older than Herman Mudgett, known popularly as H.H. Holmes. There is no proof that she was killed by Holmes so it’s speculated that she gave up the practice to him in 1886 around the time she became pregnant with her second daughter after Holmes had been working there for a while.  And to prove that she was still alive after this time, the Chicago city directories still listed her as a physician living on 6157 S. Honore Street as late as 1900 (her husband still had the railroad job).  She was still on 63rd street, about a block away from the old pharmacy and “castle,” in 1892, when a city voter list has her living at 800 63rd Street. That she was on the voter list at all is somewhat notable - under “remarks,” a section usually left blank, the registrar wrote in “woman.” Also, she did move to California with Frances, her daughter, at some point, presumably after her husband died in 1910. She died there in 1933. SO NO HOLMES DID NOT KILL THE PREVIOUS OWNER AND THE CASTLE CAME ALONG LATER.

Holmes was also a conman in other places and that’s where he changed his name from Herman Webster Mudgett to Henry Howard Holmes (Indiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Canada). He went to Medical School at the University of Michigan and he stole corpses from the school laboratory and would disfigure them and then collect their insurance money (which is how he got the majority of his cash).

The “Murder Castle” came along in the early 1890s and opened as a hotel in 1893. It was located right across the street from the drug store and he had several different builders help build it so he was the only one who truly knew the inside layout. The place was insane. It had diagonal ceilings and doors that would open up to brick walls and it truly was a maze with several floors. He tortured people in many different forms with the motive of taking their insurance money and also the fact that he was a sick fuck and enjoyed it. There were gas chambers and various torture rooms and he would also skin people alive and sell the skeletons to local medical schools which is how he got more money. But in the end, he was unmasked after being found guilty for insurance fraud and one thing led to another and next thing ya know, you’re confessing to 27 murders and hanging from a rope.

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