H.H. Holmes Murder Castle Site

H.H. Holmes built a three-story murder factory at 63rd and Wallace beginning in the late 1880s with soundproof vaults, hidden chutes, and a basement kiln. The Englewood Post Office now sits on the site, and postal workers avoid the basement, where a section sharing a foundation wall with Holmes's original building produces singing, moving chairs, and the figure of a young woman.

Holmes hired and fired construction crews so frequently that no single worker ever understood the full layout of the building. That was the point. The three-story structure at 63rd and Wallace in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood contained over 60 rooms, 51 doors cut at odd angles into walls, hidden staircases, passages that led to brick walls, and a vault on the third floor lined with soundproof steel. A gas jet inside the vault provided light. Holmes could extinguish it by blowing into an air pipe from outside, and whoever was locked inside would suffocate in the dark.

Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H.H. Holmes, began building the place in the late 1880s, expanding it through 1892. The first floor housed storefronts. The second floor was a maze of narrow corridors and windowless rooms. A trapdoor hidden under a bathroom rug opened to a stairway that dropped into a small chamber with two exits: one to the street, one to a chute that slid down to the basement. The basement had a kiln.

Holmes placed newspaper ads offering jobs for young women. He rented rooms to long-term tenants. When the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition drew millions of visitors to Chicago, he advertised the third floor as hotel space, though historians debate whether it ever actually opened. Sensational tabloid coverage at the time claimed Holmes killed between 133 and 200 people. The more grounded estimate, from historians like Harold Schechter, is closer to nine confirmed murders, mostly people Holmes already knew. Schechter argues that the wilder claims were pure yellow journalism, a product of the 1890s tabloid wars. The truth is grim enough without inflation.

Holmes was caught, tried, and convicted for the murder of his business partner Benjamin Pitezel. He also confessed to killing Pitezel's three children — Howard, Nellie, and Alice — though he was never separately tried for those murders. He was hanged in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896.

In 1895, while Holmes sat in prison, witnesses saw two men enter the Murder Castle late at night. Hours later, the building was gutted by fire. The structure stood as a burned shell until 1938, when it was demolished to build the Englewood Post Office, which still stands at 63rd and Wallace today.

The post office basement is where things get interesting. Part of it crosses underneath the grassy area east of the building, into a section that looks noticeably older than the rest. Postal workers believe this portion shares a foundation wall with the original Murder Castle basement, the one with the kiln and the chute.

Jeff Mudgett, a descendant of Holmes, visited the site and was warned by post office employees: "Don't go down there. It's a terrible, haunted place." Mudgett went anyway. "Before I walked down those steps I was a non-believer," he said. "An hour later, my whole foundation had changed."

Postal workers have reported a woman singing or humming in empty sections of the building. One employee went to investigate a noise in the basement hallway and found a colleague missing. When she came back moments later, chairs that had been lined against the wall were stacked on top of each other. Workers have also reported seeing the figure of a young woman on the grounds where the Castle once stood.

The building above is just a post office. People mail packages, buy stamps, and go about their day at the corner of 63rd and Wallace. But the oldest part of the basement is still down there, and the postal workers who use those stairs know what used to sit on top of them.