H.H. Holmes’ Hotel of Horrors

Behind it’s outward appearance of normality, secret passages riddled the hotel-room walls, with peepholes for spying on the occupants. Trapdoors led into hidden staircases leading to the street. There were doors opening on to blank walls, an elevator shaft with no elevator, and an elevator with no shaft. One room had been made into an airtight steel chamber, equipped with gas hoses leading to an adjoining room. And in the basement, which was connected by a spiral chute with Holmes’ top-floor office, was a lime filled concrete pit, vats of acid and a series of furnaces.

Whichever way the women died, they all ended up in the basement for disposal. Besides the limepit, Holmes had his ovens, and barrels of acid. Their bones were the only thing that gave him bother. Sometimes he would clean them and sell the skeleton to medical laboratories. Mostly, however, he would stack them in the empty acid barrels, mixing them with animal bones, against the eventuality of being discovered. Women were not the only victims in Holmes’ castle. There was, for example an unfortunate inventor by the name of Warner, who was incinerated alive inside his newly-designed furnace. And there was also Rogers, a wealthy investor from Wisonsin, whom Holmes alternately gassed and starved until Rogers produced a cheque for $70,000. The man was then poisoned and his body sold for dissection.