Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

In 1913, thousands of Chicagoans lined up at Hull-House to see a rumored "Devil Baby" with horns and hooves, which Jane Addams spent six weeks denying existed. The 1856 mansion also harbors the ghost of Millicent Hull, who died in the house and still appears hovering over beds in an upstairs room that Addams herself had to abandon.

In the spring of 1913, busloads of people arrived at Hull-House from as far away as Milwaukee, lined up down the block, and offered money to see a baby with horns, hooves, red scaly skin, and a full head of hair. Some versions of the story claimed the infant could smoke a cigar. Others said it was already speaking profanities at a few months old.

Jane Addams spent six weeks turning people away. The "Devil Baby" panic, as it came to be known, overwhelmed Hull-House at 800 South Halsted Street on Chicago's Near West Side. The legend arrived in two versions tailored to the neighborhood's immigrant communities. In the Italian Catholic version, a young bride's atheist husband tore a picture of the Virgin Mary from the wall, and their next child was born a devil. In the Jewish version, the father already had six daughters and declared he'd rather have the Devil than another girl. He got his wish.

Neither version was true. But the crowds came anyway, at all hours. Addams wrote about it three years later in The Atlantic, analyzing why the story captivated immigrant women in particular. She saw it as a folk tale about cosmic justice, about terrible husbands getting what they deserved. The women who came weren't gullible. They were hopeful.

The building had its own ghost stories long before the Devil Baby. Charles J. Hull, a wealthy real estate developer, built the mansion in 1856. He lived there only four years. His wife and two sons died inside the house, and Hull couldn't bring himself to stay. He kept ownership until his death in 1889 but relocated with his surviving daughter, leaving the house to tenants who reported a woman in the bedroom upstairs.

When Addams and Ellen Gates Starr rented the mansion in 1889 to found one of America's first settlement houses, the existing tenants warned them about that bedroom. Addams took the room anyway. She was woken in the night by a woman hovering over her bed and heard conversations in the empty room. Guests she hosted reported the same thing: a woman standing over them while they slept. Addams closed the room and converted it to storage. The previous tenants had left buckets of water outside the door because they believed spirits couldn't cross water.

Staff and visitors at the Hull-House Museum still identify the ghost as Millicent Hull, Charles's wife. She appears as a lady in white, usually in or near that same upstairs bedroom.

The courtyard between the surviving buildings has its own legend. A circular concrete slab sits where a fountain used to be. People on ghost tours call it a portal. The fountain appeared in some photographs but not in others, which fed the story. The University of Illinois at Chicago, which demolished the original 13-building Hull-House complex in 1963 to build its campus, removed the fountain without explanation.

Beyond Millicent and the Devil Baby, visitors report hearing children running in the upstairs corridor and the courtyard, sometimes called "the fountain girls." Dark figures in what look like Catholic monk robes have been seen walking in and around the building, though nobody has identified who they might be or why they'd be there.

Two buildings survive from the original complex. The Hull-House Museum runs ghost tours in October, and in 2024 hosted a screening of the "Ghost Files" episode about the Devil Baby. The museum leans into its supernatural history. It's one of those rare places where the ghost story and the real history are both worth the visit. Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for her work here. The Devil Baby drew bigger crowds.