Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 201: H.H. Holmes Part II - Nothing But Trouble

Episode Date: November 20, 2015

Our series on H.H. Holmes continues with the actual construction of his murder castle, exactly how he used it to kill and dispose of his victims, and the terrible, vicious things that happened within.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? He's dog meat. But that's what I'm saying, you're dog meat, so you don't even need the video game. Your whole life's a video game. I need it, man. Is this being recorded?

I just don't understand how one video game is better than another if it doesn't pay you money or get you laid. You can be a competitive video game or you can go to the game or conventions and get a lot of money for killing people in fake worlds. He's not, though. Alright, should we go on to part two of H.H. Holmes? Let's do it. Alright. I play Sudoku. Oh my god, whatever.

And welcome to the last podcast on the left. I'm doing it. Welcome to the last podcast on the left. I'm Ben Kissel. That's Marcus Parks. This guy over here to my left, he's been, he's a little ill, he's a little sick. Come on, come on. Let's go ahead and write my will, if you would.

What do I get? Henry's basket of sound mind and body, do bequeath my Batman hat to my corpse. You can't will your corpse. I have a basket and I take the two eighths of weed I bought the other day from a man and I met on the street, which is true. I'll bequeath those to my corpse in my casket and my thousands of dollars I bequeath to my corpse. You're just, you're gonna die like an Egyptian barrow? Yes. You're just gonna take all your shit?

The items I have, the things that served me in life will serve me after the veil. Thousands of dollars, two eighths of weed and your Batman hat. Yeah, that's all I need. Okay. When I'm in heaven, tap dancing with Sammy Davis Jr. He could tap dance. Right, he tap dancing. Oh, he could do it all.

Who's the other one? Who could do it all? It was Crispin Glover, not him. Daniel Glover, Damien Glover, that's the son. Who's the guy that tap danced the black guy? It was on Sesame Street. Oh, yeah, Gregory Hines. Gregory Hines.

Yes, he was very talented. Yeah. Yes, rest in peace. God, I miss him. Every day I miss Gregory Hines. Do you think he was gassed to death in an airtight vault by an 18th century killer? Maybe, you never know. So now we're going on to H.H. Holmes, his murder house.

We're gonna discuss it being built and things like that. Oh, yeah, man. Let's start with the construction of H.H. Holmes' murder castle. Now, this guy was a real Martha Washington. Why do you say that? He just did it by hand. This guy, I mean, just when we go into describing this house, you just forget how like killers these days, they don't put the work in.

No. You know what I mean? Yeah, the domers spent hours trolling the gay bars. Yeah, Gacy learned three rope magic tricks. Right. And that takes hours because it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert in this. Oh, was that right? Yes.

10,000 hours of practice. Wow. And so Gacy put 10,000 hours of practice into murdering little boys. Yes, sure. But H.H. Holmes, in order to kill, the first thing he did was build a three-floor house. Right. The Labyrinthian rooms. It's insane.

It is. If you just think about it, this is a fixer opera. Yeah. Of a kill. This guy has got his eyes on the prize. This is a real Steve Jobs of a killer. I would love to see this on Property Brothers or some sort of home improvement show. Oh, flip that house.

That would be great. That show. Remember Flip That House? Flip That House. Yeah, Flip That Murder Cast. That's right. And it's a hell of a lot better than Gacy's. Well, he just had a crawl space, right?

He never really built out. It was a crawl space and it had been built for him. He didn't build anything out. Holmes, he took an empty lot that was across the street from his pharmacy and built it from the ground up. Everything was from scratch. It's very interesting if you look at killer's layers, right? If you take a look down the line, again, look at Dahmer and the idea of that apartment.

This is really the final resting place for these people. They have the basement crawl space. Gacy has got the basement crawl space. Albert Fish had his rooms marked off from his mother's rooms. Ed Gein had his rooms marked off from his mother's rooms and shit like that. Now this is the real supervillain's fucking layer and he built it all as a tribute to death. Yeah. He sketched the architectural plans himself from scratch.

Even though there was an architect right down the street, he was like, no, no, no. People said, why don't you go down and ask that guy to sketch the plans? He's like, no, no, no. I have a vision. I'm going to be doing it myself. Nobody saw the actual architectural plans. He would just simply tell guys it's like, okay, so you need to build this hallway from this side down to this side. There's going to be a guy working with you over here.

He's going to be working on the door frame. But oh, wait, that guy is gone now. Now this other guy is going to be working on it because what H.H. Holmes would do is that he was the only one that had the entire vision of the entire murder castle in his mind. He never told anybody what they were actually working towards. He would tell the guys like, okay, you're going to build a door frame here. You're going to put in a little gas pipe there. Oh, is that for murder? Absolutely not.

Absolutely not. No. No, it's for gas delivery systems so I can deliver each person who stays here in my lodging house their own personal packet of housing gas. Okay. What's housing gas, you say? Oh, well, it helps them sleep forever. No, no, no, no, no, no. Only semi permanently.

Yes, step, step, step, step. He has a two-fold plan here. Yes, part of it is to keep the mystery of the house so nobody knows the interior of the house. But also there's a very practical matter of H.H. Holmes was just pretending to be a rich person the whole time. And so what he would do is he would hire somebody like four or five days, have them build a stairwell, and then fire them by telling them that they're doing a shitty job and then not pay them in order to get out and not paying anybody. Well, to be fair, can we be fair? They were doing a shitty job. Whether they knew it or not, they were making a house of mayhem.

You also will find out later on that the house actually was shoddily put together. Yeah, of course, he wasn't an architect and he was just telling dudes to put shit up. He was just hiring a bunch of drunks. He actually was because in Chicago at the time and in America in general, the economy was not fantastic. In fact, we were kind of on the edge of a great, not the Great Depression, but a big economic collapse. So a lot of these people, just like the women, these men were flocking to these urban centers, especially in the Midwest. They're all going to Chicago to find work, only to find that there were thousands of other men who had the exact same idea. So homes could put and add in the paper, say carpenters wanted, and ten guys would show up the next day and he can say, like, okay, you come on, do the work.

And then after a couple of days, he could tell them to fuck off and there would be ten more guys waiting right there behind. Absolutely, and you can, it's very interesting. The way construction jobs even work to this day, especially if you're doing day labor stuff, they only pay you at the end of the day or the end of the project. So it's a great way of getting out of pay for things and I will say this. When I was trying to make it in New York and I couldn't do it, I got to tell you, this is a quick little tip. If you don't, if you need money and you got to get it, just get credit cards from department stores and max them out. Because then they come looking for the money and then you just say you don't have the money. That's a good idea. Good advice, Henry.

You just say you don't have the money. Yeah, I won't be able to own a house or a boat or a car for about 21 years. Seven. Hey, I mean, actually, I think it is longer than seven because I did do serious damage to my credit. And if you are a person that is a debt consolidator, please contact Last Podcast on the left because I am trying to figure out my financial problem. I know the fun time talking to those debt collectors. They're all in Texas. Isn't that nice? How's the weather? Washington, D.C., Delaware. Don't answer those numbers when they pop up on the cell phone. But it's just, you know, all you got to do a lot of times to get out of something, H.H. Holmes kind of invented it. You just say, I don't got the money.

And then you charm them because that's what H.H. Holmes would do. Smile. You smile a lot because he would have, I mean, dozens of people coming to collect debts from him every week. He'd come. These people would show up to his door. They'd be extremely pissed off at first. And then what people would say is that they would always leave with H.H. Holmes patting on the back telling you a joke, thinking that he was your best friend in the entire world. I've got to tell you it's that mustache. Oh, yeah. That's what he had. He had a different, that mustache made him better because it's like, what did Gacy have again? Who could compare him again?

A clown costume? Yes. Not charming. Jeffrey Dahmer had a good wiggle dance and you could put him up in a cage and he'll dance around and boys will throw dollars at him and that's fine for a while. But then you get him in the fluorescent lights of the lobby of the hotel where he's staying and you're like, ooh. Talk marks. Yeah, he's got hypno eyes. Yeah.

This guy had a very thick, modio type mustache. Dahmer had a good mustache though. Let's give a little credit to the Dahm Stash. Oh, no. Dahmer had an awful mustache. I like the Dahmer mustache. No, no, no, no. He had a $10 blowjob mustache. Well, this is sort of what he was going for.

No, he had a H.H. Holmes had a full thick aristocrats mustache. Yes. You could fit two ladies on either side of that mustache and that's what that's for. You see, he's like, I've got parking on the left and on the right for all your poom taste. They're like, oh, this guy's something special. I don't know why everybody even needs this. That's the girl. That's more Jack the Ripper type, which by the way, Jack the Ripper was going on at the same time in England as the H.H. Holmes stuff.

And of course, just as a small aside, the grandson, I think it's Gray Gray grandson of H.H. Holmes. His last name is Mudget. He takes the original name of H.H. Holmes, Herman Webster Mudget. And he claims that H.H. Holmes was actually Jack the Ripper. And I want to thank, of course, science officer Megan Fierro Root for reading Mudget's awful book and surmising that it is 1,000% both. No, no, no, no. There's no way that obscure Gray grandson of an ancient serial killer is trying to just make money. You don't think he's trying to profit off of that? No, no. These people only crave truth.

Oh yeah, yeah. I heard that about grandchildren of serial killers. Just them, Kylie Jenner. Just true, just beacons of honesty. Just needing to share what lipstick shades they're wearing. Right. And how good their bibble bobbles look in a mesh tank tan. So H.H. Holmes is just grabbing construction workers. They're all over the place. He has the pick of the litter. Yeah, it took him a year and a half to construct his castle. And by the time he was done, over 500 workers had come and gone without a single one of them figuring out what the true purpose actually was. Now looking back on the high side, especially well over 100 years in the past, it really seems like to us it seems impossible that nobody noticed that there was some fishy shit going on.

Like for example, the sleeping pipe. It's very odd that nobody noticed that it was weird that he was installing gas pipes that went nowhere except into the room in almost every room in the second floor. But yeah, but there's complete, I mean, but I would say there is complete validation to the greased shoots that would go down from the rooms into the, what he also, were giant lime pits at the bottom of it. Because what he said to them is that it was for butlers to have fun. He said it's like a slide and needed a butler can just slide down the chute straight into a lime pit. And then, you know, you bring a martini down there. You could just dip your martini in it. Oh, give it a citrus taste. Oh, that does sound good. There were a couple of signs here and there. There was something a little fishy going on. There was one bricklayer that said Holmes approached him and just casually said,

You see that man down there? Well, that's my brother-in-law and he has got no love for me, neither I for him. Now it would be the easiest matter for you to drop a stone on that fellow's head while you're at work and it'll give you $50 if you do. That's kind of a fun thing before the game Angry Birds. Yeah, but in real life it's murder. Right, right, right. Yeah, it's just throwing rocks at people. Killing birds. Yeah.

So any good psychopath or any good, I guess you'd say con man needs a wheel man. What I do like about this part of the story is that it's true and it really elevates HH Holmes to a serial killer. It's like you could say Gacy maybe had accomplices, but he really did. He had a fucking goon. HH Holmes had a goon. The guy's name was Benjamin Peitzel. He came into Holmes' life in the fall of 1889 after answering a call in the newspaper for carpenters. And Holmes, he was one of those guys and he was the consummate con man.

He could see a dupe from a mile away. Well, especially if you're a useful dupe. The thing about Peitzel, too, is that he had this, he had just one of those backgrounds where he was, he grew up, again, described as very handsome. Like, very kind of like, a lot going for him growing up as a kid and then it all just went to shit. And so it's this perfect thing of like, you've got horrible alcoholic. Yeah, he just looked at him and he was like, this guy had a lot of stunt and potential. Yeah. From back in the day and I can ride this drunk now.

Now that he's a complete drunk, I can use him to do whatever I want. Yeah, he was a fairly good looking guy and he also had seven kids. So he was desperate. You know, not only was he a bit of a goon, but he was also absolutely desperate to do pretty much anything that Holmes wanted in return for a paycheck. And Holmes, they also described Holmes as having a mesmerizing gaze. That's what, later, that's how they described him. They described him as having the devil's gaze. That he could make almost anybody do anything, almost a supernatural power.

It's very interesting because mostly I think it's got to do with the desperation. Like, because as they say about Pytoles, he truly did love his family. Yeah. But what happened was is that because he kept going from weird odd job to odd job and each thing kind of falling out from underneath him, his morality changed as well. Well, they got to be up celebrated every time he gets fired by having a new kid. I mean, seven kids? Take it easy, buddy.

Yeah, I mean, they were just going at it like a couple of Irish in a bog over there. Insanity. Yeah, seven kids. I don't know. That always seems to go hand in hand, the drunk and the brood of children. Well, it's because he loved it. Sometimes, you know when you're real drunk and you're just like, let's just go in there without a pilot. You know what I'm saying?

And then she said, but most people are like, no. Most people should just be like, no. No, yeah, yeah. Don't do that. No, no, no. But then, yeah, when you're drunk, your pull out game, as the kids say, is a little weak. Pull out game's weak, yo. I don't think the kids are saying that.

The pull out game is ratchet, dude. Yeah. Ben, I've seen it in memes. Oh, right. Yeah, bae. Oh, my goodness. Oh, right. Hashtag bae.

I can't deal with it. Am I talking to the kids now? Yes, you're talking to the kids. You're my bae, dog meat. We can ask, later on, we can ask senior youth correspondents, Sonya Sells, if we're doing this properly, which I think we are. Let's think we're nailing it. That would be quite ratchet of her. Okay, I'm going to freak out here.

So, Pyzel's got seven kids. He likes to get drunk and bone his wife. And as far as we know, he's not a very clever man. He's a very dedicated man, not necessarily clever. And as far as we know, he never caught on to or just chose to ignore Holmes' murderous hobbies, what Holmes got up to when nobody was looking. But years later, the Pyzel's, right now, Benjamin Pyzel is playing a very supporting role in the story of H.H. Holmes. But once we get near the end of it, the Pyzel's would be the main characters in H.H. Holmes' downfall. And it's also entirely H.H. Holmes' fault.

Yes, it absolutely is. So the murder castle itself, sight to behold on the outside, people in the neighborhood saw it as a monument to men's success. Like, they said, like, oh, that H.H. Holmes, he's such a go-getter. Look at what he's constructed. And on the first floor, everything was cool. Of course, the first floor, there were shops, restaurants. There was a barber shop. There was a jewelry store.

There was, of course, H.H. Holmes' kick-ass pharmacy. But when she got up to the second and third floors, those were used for lodging both short-term and long-term. Holmes also had his office up on the third floor. The second and third floor had a decidedly different flavor from the glitzing glamour of the first. It's very interesting. If you look at the blueprints, that's what I would do while you're listening to this if you're at home. Like, look up at the blueprints of the second and third floor. It's crazy.

Again, it's just like, he's a supervillain. It looks really fun. It does look kind of fun if, I mean, the gas didn't kill you. It could be, like, romantic to chase your girlfriend around. Except if there was a man who eventually closed the vault door. And you're like, hey, all right, okay, I paid my 25 bucks. I'll look down at this warehouse. And it's just like, as soon as I'm done ejaculating.

Now, please spasm with suffocation. So I may complete my fortification. That does bring up the question. Did he, when he would go and look through the people at these people, was he rock hard? He did masturbate. Did he masturbate? Yeah, he was all up. Because you don't hear that much about him sexually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He definitely masturbated. He spills his seed in the parlance of the town. Spills his seed like a milkman tripping on the job? And just spills the milk everywhere? I mean, cosmetically, a very similar type of situation. It's called dripping the spats. Oh, I see.

Making the bad pancake. Ain't nothing wrong with that pancake. The rooms on the third floor were completely normal on the inside, but the layout of the floor itself was confusing to say the very least. The hallways were all narrow, angled at very odd places in the only light outside of the rooms, came from widely spaced, barely working gas lamps. Dead ends were the norm around here, as were stairways that led nowhere, and locked doors for which only homes had the key.

And the second floor was even worse. It had 51 doors in six hallways, which criss-crossed through each other, and behind the 51 doors were 35 rooms. The second floor also held the rooms that homes had made custom for his purposes. Some had been sealed airtight with asbestos-covered steel plates. Irresponsible. My grandfather died of asbestos poisoning. He got cancer.

And he died of being a Nazi. No, he died of old age. God, that must have been so tough being a janitor at Dachau. Asbestos hanging out. I have two parents, you know. Oh, I forget. One was a liberty. A liberty.

A daughter of liberty or something like that? What is it? Daughter of the American Revolution? No, he was just a North Dakotian carpenter. He's like Jesus. And a good man, I'd imagine. Yes, he was. The rooms in the second floor were soundproof, and some had been made claustrophobically small.

So most of the rooms, especially the airtight ones, had, as we said earlier, small gas pipes outfitted somewhere out of sight. And the controls for each of these gas pipes were up on the third floor in Holmes' bedroom where he could turn on the gas and kill any guest he wanted to at any time. Now, wouldn't it be cool? If H.H. Holmes instead was Jamaican, and what he did instead of killing all those people was rollin' my big old blunt and just like, get a bunch of tubes and be like, Okay, everybody, it's time for that good morning job session.

And everyone's like, you're right. And then he's just like, goo goo. And then like legalize it. Starts like playing over an intercom system and ever just fucking gets high shit and having a great time. I mean, at this point, I don't even think weed was illegal yet. No, absolutely not. You don't even got to sing legalizes. We were just doing it.

We were doing the boring shit with it like they do now. I mean, I got to say, I hate hemp cloth, but we'll get into it. God, that's a hell of an idea for a hotel, though, Henry. Legalize it. Call it the waking bacon. You're just forced to get stoned. I would dress just like H.H. Holmes, but in green. Yeah.

And I have like a big fucking gold weed leaf on a fucking chain around me. That's all I do. And I carry a cane that was just one long blunt. Oh, that's amazing. Man, that's what I'm gonna do. That continental breakfast would taste very good. Oh, H.H. Holmes had all kinds of access to narcotics. I mean, he had a late 19th century pharmacy.

Downstairs, you've got cocaine for your teeth. You've got laudanum for headaches and laudanum being pretty much methadone. And I got to say, coke and laudanum still work great for your teeth and headaches. Because you stop thinking about your teeth and the headaches. Right. So to keep the guests from escaping if they sense something was wrong, Holmes installed locks only on the outside of these special rooms. If he wanted to witness the woman inside asphyxiating,

each room was outfitted with a secret peephole. Oh. God damn. That's a lot of work that they put in the peepholes in each room. It's just like, it just seemed once you get in the hotel room, it would take a lot of convincing just to keep you in the hotel. Like as soon as I got in there and he's just like, I'll lock the door, but first let me watch you to make sure you're comfortable.

And I'd eventually be like, you know, there's a Marriott, like right down the block, Cynthia, and I know you wanted to stay in the castle because you felt like a princess, but can't help but think, and I don't mean to be a negative Natalie, but I can't help but think we're in a bit of a murder fucking castle. I think this is a murder building. Yeah. They just wanted to go on a vacation.

You never take me out. You never do what I want. That's right. Yeah. And Ben, they just wanted to go on a vacation and you know, they found nothing but trouble. That's sad. The Bound Machine.

So both the peepholes and the rooms were accessed by a series of secret passageways concealed by sliding panels hidden in the walls. And once the victim had either completely expired or was close enough, Holmes now had the task of taking the body elsewhere. Of course, he couldn't just pick up the dead girl, carry her down the hallway, down his flight of stairs, down to his cellar. He had to have some secret means of disposing of the bodies. And in this, and of course, as we say, in all matters murder,

Holmes showed enormous foresight. Like he thought this entire thing through step by step by step. The secret passageways were connected to his cellar, and you may think that Henry was joking about this earlier. He seriously did have greased shoots going down from the second floor where all of the custom-built murder rooms were. Grease shoots going from there down into the cellar. But this reminds me of like, do you ever do that as a kid?

Because I remember being as a kid, I would take these big sheets of paper and draw like super elaborate like UFO versus military fights. Like I would do this big, you know, like huge, huge pictures. And it just feels like a kid doing that, but with murder. And it's the only thing that he really thought out. When you will go through the rest of his frauds and all the different insurance claims and fake shit that he did, like all the con jobs. But he kind of just fucked with those where when it came to this murder hotel,

he really, like he really figured it out. Greased shoots, it also sounds like what you get after you have too much Taco Bell. Greased shoots. Destination XL. You're a large get back to me, DXL. What's happening? Yeah, he did show. It was like con man was his job, but murder castle was his passion.

Yeah, it's nice to see. It's good to have both. Because you got to have the thing that supports the passion. You know, like, I mean, podcasting for me just pays the bill. I'm a big oil painter. Oh, is that right? Yes, yes. And I've just been doing oil paints in my house.

What are you working on? I have this big thing it's just it's all black and it says in it's what I'm tentatively titled. It's called inside my ass. It's kind of dark in there, huh? Yeah, yeah, but one little two little p-holes of light at the very end, which are my nostrils. Oh, it gets up there. The tube. You should rename it the tube.

Fuck. He's the artist, Mark. Just let him name his own work. It's so much better than my idea. It's fine. It's a great idea. Right? You want to just come and paint it?

So once the bodies arrived in the brickwalled cellar, the bodies met one of three fates. The first was a chemical fate in which the bodies were dissolved either in acid tanks or quick lime vats, which of course he got installed in his own cellar. The second was through cremation, which he achieved through a furnace that was ostensibly installed for glass bending. And they kept saying like, because when they put it in, they were like, oh, this is much too small for glass bending. It's only three feet wide by eight feet long. It's like he'd be using this to burn up a person or something. That's fun.

That's funny. Well, no, that's exactly what happened. Yeah. Oh, okay. And then they did laugh about it. Man. Oh, how they laughed at that. They're all complicit.

No, I mean, it's really strange how much people just sort of, they just, you really see the attitude of people at the times that they just don't believe this stuff. Like they, of course, they joke about it. They're like, of course, like that's more of a human sized furnace. And then they just laugh about it and they're like, yeah, but there's no way anybody would install a cremation furnace in their basement. Yeah, why would you do that? It's like they built an entire hotel devout devoted to murder. Huh. And it's not only that.

Holmes even asked him, he even asked him like, so anything I burn in here, it's going to burn the smell too, right? Because, you know, I don't want the glass smell to go up through my hotel. It's weird, there's not really much of a glass smell, but yeah, I suppose it would burn the smell out of something, especially if you're going to do something like burn up a bunch of human corpses. I keep repeating the joke because it's just funny. We keep laughing about it. Yeah, gotta have a good chuckle every day. Um, it is, it's very insane. Again, it's about doing things with confidence.

Doing things with a certain Elon, where you, you just step in and you make this murder hotel and no one questions you because it's such an insane idea. And then once the evidence comes out in the end, it just, that's what you find out. Literally hundreds of people made this possible. Yeah, 500. Over 500. Over 500. Yeah, the other seemingly innocent installation. Of course, you know, he installed, it was all this stuff with confidence.

And of course, if someone would have seen the full picture, then they might have thought something was a little weird. But the other seemingly innocent installation was a safe that was adjacent to Holmes' office on the third floor. Of course, it did serve its intended purpose. However, the safe was also airtight and fitted with a gas pipe controlled from a valve in Holmes' bedroom closet. And like most of the things in the castle, Holmes had scammed the vault into his possession. He'd bought it on credit at the beginning of construction. And when the creditors came to repossess it, the vault had long since been built into the structure. Holmes said, you know what? Of course, you can take away the safe, but any damage that you do to my building, I'm going to sue you for. The creditors weighed how much they would actually lose from just letting them keep the safe and how much they might lose from being sued and they just let them keep the safe.

Which is very interesting because then you see how far his thought process had went is that he had known that because that safe is what he uses primarily to kill. I think it's like 10 women, like specifically his wives. His wives and women who worked for. Yes, they would all end up in that safe and he kind of knew because then also it had a viewing port that he could slide open to a glass plate and he could watch. I would like to see a Ocean's Eleven type heist movie. We're like, we're going to go into H.H. Holmes' safe. We're going to take all the money. Yeah, and they get gently in there and then finally they're like, oh, fuck. Oh, shit. This is a murder safe.

Meanwhile, Jet Lee's inside tonight. We come outside, we look for diamonds. Hey, come rip me out. Hey, hey, hey, buddy, hey, guy, where you go? Hey, guy, I find no diamond in here. Hey, guy. Oh, no. Oh, something kind of, oh, still rags. Oh, just, you know, I have a stress that gets in the wrong time. Meanwhile, Edgy Chong's just out front. Just loving it. It took the Ocean's Fifteen. It's going to be a good film. Go back in time. So the last odd installation that Holmes had in his house was also the most mocking because that's another thing that he loved. He loved doing all this in plain sight. He got off on tricking people. He got off on manipulating people. We'll talk about a superiority complex of all time.

Like, again, where we would compare him to sort of like a Hitler, where he comes in here, he literally built a three-floor monument to death. So you're saying that Hitler was just hiding in plain sight? Technically, he stood up on all those podiums. You know what I mean? Yeah, big posters of himself everywhere. You know? That whole Nuremberg thing. They could have gone up at any time. The reverse hiding, hiding. We didn't have to go find him? I mean, like he was right there. We could have scooped him up. Carmen Sandiego'd him. That's where if Carmen Sandiego really should have put down the differences between herself and the American government and taken the helicopter over there,

lifted up Hitler and took him to America, and then we could have spanked him as a punishment. And if Germany would have won World War II, that would have been a great game show for children. Where in the world is Adolf Hitler? Oh, he's everywhere in our homes, at the viewing tubes. They'd watch as our every move. So he had, both in a room on the second floor and down in his cellar, he had installed operating tables. Because, see, here's the thing about H.H. Holmes. Like I said earlier, a great con man and great psychopath, these people have creatures. They have people that do their work for them and people that they can mesmerize and get them to do anything they want. Of course, we know that in, say, like CEOs, high-powered people, high-powered business people, we know that their level of psychopath is much higher than the general population.

Something like 4% of CEOs are psychopaths as compared to 1% of the general population. There's also something about big towers of personality that attract people to them. Look at Donald Trump, look at Steve Jobs, look at Bill Gates, these kind of people that kind of attract. They become, they're not necessarily the smartest man in the room, but they attract all these other people that work for them and build them up. And there's something about that where H.H. Holmes, as we're going to see in hindsight, has become so important to the 20th century in terms of being like the first example of a madman that we have in America. A true American bread-man man that's not like Jack the Ripper, who's an industrialist, who's like a man who really wants something out of life. And we made this man, and they just attract employees, and it's almost like he willed himself into being. It's very interesting, again, very different than modern-day serial killers, like in the 60s and 70s, where it was about an inner turmoil that then became an outward expression.

With the government regulation, you can't build a murder house anymore. I mean, Donner tried, Donner wanted it, right? He wanted a whole, like, altar built to death, but he just didn't have, he had idle hands. He just didn't, he couldn't get the balls to fucking put it together. Over-regulation. So, Holmes, his other creature was a man named Charles Chapel. And just like Benjamin Pytzel, Charles Chapel was one of the skilled laborers that came around when Holmes was building the Murder Castle. And we don't really know how this conversation was struck up, but Holmes discovered through small talk that Chapel had done contracting work at Bennett Medical College. He furthered his line of questioning and found out that Chapel, while working there, had picked up the skill in the college anatomy lab of articulating skeletons.

We brought this up last week when we basically talked about how, like, medicine, like, medical school at this time was basically, like, butcher school. And you kind of had to half be a psychopath to just, because, like, they were just hacking up bodies, like, seeing how they worked. So I bet, at this time, it's totally fine to talk about the workings of the human skeleton, and not, like, modern times, when something like dog meat begins his expertise of the human skeleton, and it leads him to be alone. Yes, yes, that's true. But these medical schools literally bred these Dickensian-type villains. This is a man who brags about how good he is about stripping the flesh off a body to make it into a sellable skeleton. It's like that micro-show on CNN, somebody's got to do it, and he's just doing it. So Holmes, brazen as ever, of course, doing it with complete confidence, took Chapel up to the second floor of his murder castle, where he showed him a partially dissected corpse.

He had a dead body in the murder castle. Chapel said that the body looked, quote, like a jackrabbit that had been skinned by splitting the skin down the face and rolling it back off the entire body. Considerable flesh had been taken off, which only made my job easier, and my chuckle a little bit looser that day. Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra. H.H. Holmes gets it started, and he just has these guys come and finish the work, huh? Yeah, yeah. Interesting, because this shows a pattern that's going to later on fuck H.H. Holmes, where J.H. Holmes finds these allies that he thinks he can tell parts of his plan to. Think about this.

That, the skeleton man, got to go up into the second floor and live. Most people did not. Most people who made it to the second floor were basically already dead. Like, because that's what he would do. He would sort them. The third floor, because that was his office, was the more hotel rooms. The second floor was really the death floor. And it's very interesting where he met this guy who was like,

You understand my devilry, come see my handiwork. So you're asking why, like, why Chapel didn't think anything was weird about this guy having a partially dissected body on the second floor of his hotel? He knew that Holmes was a quote unquote doctor, and assumed that he was just doing a post-mortem on a patient who would die. And yeah, you know, every autopsy always involves slitting the face open and peeling the skin off the skull, right? Right doctors who listen to the show? So without asking any follow-up questions, Chapel took a payment of $36, had a trunk delivered to his house with the body inside, took the partially dissected body into his home, stripped the body of its remaining flesh,

re-articulated the skeleton in a way that could be hung in a quite pleasing-to-the-eye way. I love to have an articulated skeleton. But anyways, he took the skeleton back to H.H. Holmes, Holmes took the skeleton to Hanuman Medical College, where he sold the skeleton for nearly $200 in 1895 money. Making money on top of money. Making money, making money. And also, they didn't actually put in how Chapel delivered the skeleton to Holmes,

with it sort of tied to his body, like in front of him, like he was some sort of Boon Raku Japanese shadow puppet, and he danced a weird skeleton dance to the song, the... And then, yeah, that was... And then Holmes just sat and just, you know, clapped his cane to the ground, just going like, yes, yes, yes, my favorite joke.

All right, let's go to the medical school, make $200 selling this dead woman's corpse that I killed all the way to the medical school. I say to a woman's corpse, I mean, I'm a doctor, everybody just, here's another $36. $200 for a skeleton, that's a hell of a price, though, isn't it? See, I'd sell a skeleton for $200 even in this economy. Yeah, absolutely. Just for $200, that's all you're gonna sell a skeleton for?

How much is that in 1880 money? That's what I'm looking for right now. I think in 1880 money, it's gonna be quite a bit, it's gonna be a lot higher than you think it is. Unfortunately, the inflation calculator only goes back to 1913, but even in 1913 money, that's $5,000. Whoa! Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so it had to have been a little bit more... Damn!

Back then, yeah, so five grand for a skeleton, because these people were desperate for skeletons. They were, they really were, they were desperate for skeletons, and they were desperate for bodies of any sort. In fact, at this point in history, grave robbing for the purpose of selling the corpse had actually become a lucrative profession. Even doctors themselves,

when there wasn't enough guys coming around just offering up bodies, the doctors themselves would go out and rob graves. In fact, after a raid on a graveyard at an insane asylum in Kentucky, because insane asylums were, they were very popular places to rob graves, because of course, nobody cared about these people. They were just a complete faceless, nameless, crazy folk. And you got a bunch of cool, different types of skeletons. Yeah, big, big-headed ones.

So, Chapel the Skeleton Man, he wasn't the only person who remained blissfully ignorant of Holmes's suspicious behavior. This is what a drugist named Erickson said. I sometimes told him chloroform nine or ten times a week, and each time it was in large quantities, I asked him what he used it for on several occasions, but he gave me very unsatisfactory answers. At last, I refused to let him have any more unless he told me,

as I pretended that I was afraid that he was not using it for any proper purpose. I'm huffing it, okay? I'm a goddamn huffer. Well, thank God you said something because, buddy, let's ride that dragon. It's been lonely long enough. Do you want to play some strip poker and huff some chloroform? Do I! Holmes told him that he was using it for, quote-unquote,

experiments. Which is not a lie! These doctors are just like, doctors are just crazy people. Yeah. But when Holmes came back for more, and the drugist asked him how his, quote-unquote, experiments were going, Holmes just gave him a blank look and said,

I'm not performing any experiments. God, you just got to write it in a journal, man. Yeah, remember your lies. But this is, again, his superiority complex was so big that he forgot that he would lie, he just wouldn't care. He would say whatever it was in the moment to get out of it. It's a true psychopath. He was like a goldfish, and what we're going to see later on, too,

he built this three-floor castle devoted to death, and he eventually gets bored with it. Like a true psychopath. Once he gets through the world's fair and all that shit, he's kind of like, oh, I need a new thing in my life. Yeah. Crocheting. He's got to franchise.

I could crochet naughty things. Yeah, that's true. I really believe that if, I mean, I've been yummy to joking, but I think that if he wouldn't have gotten caught, because he didn't get caught for the murder castle, I think if he wouldn't have gotten caught, he would have been committing these types of murders, building murder castles all across the United States

well into the 20th century. Oh, that would be so much fun to chain like Roy Rogers. It's so great. It's so great. That would be fun, though, but then eventually he'd grow, they'd stop becoming murder castles. They'd stop becoming and just be like fun places to go. Yeah.

We could have gotten ourselves a really cool bunch of hotels. Yeah. We had just let him live. We had just let him be and let him get it out of the system. Yeah, they would have become weaker and weaker versions of the original murder castle. By murder castle five, it would just be a great time to bring your family for the weekend

and scare the hell out of your kids. Yeah, just a board 15-year-old with the fake HLH homes like mustache on and like a paper top hat on. Oh, here you hear he everybody take they'd re-shoot to death only five parcels. All right. You gotta go on and keep your hands inside a car at all times and then people was like, wee, they're going through the fucking

re-shoots. A golf son's popping his bubblegum too loud, unimpressed. Also, I feel like- Jeremy! Jeremy, we are at, hey, this is a Holmes castle. We're having a very nice time. Not even scary. It's not even close to scary.

I also think it's a good- it's a- the gree shoot would have been a great predecessor for how fat Americans had become and helping replace the dreaded stairs. Oh, we're gonna get rid of elevators. It's all gonna be gree shoots. Elevators are too tough. You gotta stand in them. Well, as far as letting him do his own thing,

I mean, the druggist that was selling the chloroform to him, he may- this is how blissfully ignorant he remained even after Holmes had gotten caught, even after all of the horrible things that he did came out and were in the newspapers every day. This is what Erickson said about him. I could never make him out. Oh, yeah?

Like, oh, just, you know, this guy that came in, you know, about chloroform, nine or ten times a week, and, you know, apparently he had this murder castle and, you know, murdered children and, you know, almost murdered an entire family, but, you know, I could never really get a beat on the guys. You know, we might as well have just said different strokes for different folks.

But he paid the guy. Yeah, he paid the chloroform guy. He knows you to pay. Yeah, he does know, well, I mean, he'd eventually, all payments stop. Yeah. That's the problem is that all the money runs out. Yeah.

And so, yes, he knew of all the people you gotta pay, you gotta pay the chloroform guy. You pay your dealer. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because he's the one who knows, if he cuts you off, you're gonna have to just start strangling people. Right. And that wasn't his bag, man.

He didn't like the strangling. He liked, what H.H. Holmes liked, he liked getting the chloroform, like he'd soak a rag and chloroform, and he'd put it over the woman's mouth, and what happens when you chloroform someone is they'll slowly drift off into sleep, and then the body will start spasming,

like you're having a running dream. The body would start spasming, and he would have to hold the body down, and it was the body, the last death, the death throes of a woman's body. That's what made him hard. That really made him spill his spats. Yeah.

Like he absolutely, because you'll find out it was a big thing about sex. He fucked a lot. Yeah. Like that's the thing about H.H. Holmes is that he had many different wives, like every time he would hire a new Buxom young cashier, he was porking her immediately.

And so, again, of all of them, this is probably the most juiced killer out of any one of them. He's got like a bone zone, multiple different meanings. Which is why you could see them compare him to Jack the Ripper because of the sexual nature of the woman sometimes,

but he just didn't have the same amount. Like Jack the Ripper just loved cut them titties off. And that makes me sad, because I like titties all on the woman. Yeah, that's where they belong. Well, the guy that wrote the Jack the Ripper is H.H. Holmes book. What he said, it's the dumbest thing in the world,

is that he said that the Jack the Ripper murders were actually committed at H.H. Holmes's behest by an assistant, possibly Benjamin Pytzel, who went over to England and got Benjamin Pytzel to do the Jack the Ripper murders as a smoke screen. I don't think serial killers normally are big like delegators or responsibility. No, no.

They don't really build a team of rivals to help them out. So as far as people getting a little suspicious, but not really, people in the neighborhood, they noticed that an unusually high rate of turnover in the staff on the first floor of Holmes's murder castle. One neighbor remarked how the mostly young and attractive women who worked for Holmes

seemed to just leave without warning. And not only would they leave without warning, they would leave all their belongings behind in their rooms that were always on the second floor. It's just so weird about how every single time he had a new employee, he'd make them fill out some crazy insurance claim and list him as the dependent. Yeah, actually, that is true.

Holmes's favorite scam was the insurance scam. And he tried to get anybody that he could to try the insurance scam. But the scam will come later on. Police started receiving letters from parents looking for missing daughters. Private detectives would come to Chicago for the same reason. And if a girl had sent out a letter to her family

with the return address of the murder castle, the detective would go to the murder castle. He'd talk to Holmes, and Holmes would, you know, he'd him and ha, and, like, oh, it's just such a horrible thing that these women are disappearing. I see it every day. Every day I have women coming in and out of here. And, you know, who knows what happens to them.

And none of the detectives. Because Holmes was, that's what kind of personality he was. The detective would go and they would think, oh, well, you know, he was such a helpful person. Yeah, yeah, it seems like this is such a fine man of industry. He would never be a part of this plot. Even though he'd go in, he's like, be careful. In the hallway, I just have to, all these piles of ladies' shoes.

I just need to clean this out. This is just, this is the wrong place for these piles of missing women's shoes to be. All right? And Pytzel, and he's like, you smashed back. You know, meanwhile, the plexus of detectives are just watching it all day, meaning, like, this is totally normal.

Totally normal. Yeah, because they saw him, he was, H.H. Holmes was the man's man of the late 19th century. He was what the American aspired to be. I would put him at, like, he was as, like, Teflon as, like, O.J. Simpson. Mr. Holmes, just one last question. What do you use in your mustache?

Oh, I'll tell you, it's, uh, fine. It's a self-made potion I'd like to call lady blood. Oh, wonderful. It's just a normal wax, I mean. Um, anyways, is anyone like toasted bread? I've invented a machine that uses an inner fire within to make bread from white to brown. Just a hell of a mustache on that age, it does.

He actually was quite fond of contraptions. He, uh, he did actually invest in something called the ABC copier that was an ancestor of the mimeograph. And he also ran mechanical scams where he told men that he had a contraption, he had constructed a contraption that could turn water, clear tap water into gas. And so he would bring all these men down to his basement

and he would show them. He had, the contraption, of course, was a scam. It was a flam flam contraption, flam flam machine. Uh, and he would turn it on and, of course, water would go in and he had a gas pipe connected to the machine and gas would come out and, of course, all these men were so taken in by Holmes' personality, they invested the equivalent of, in today's money,

$10,000 in this machine. So it was like an alchemy type thing? Yes. It was just water into gas? Yeah, he was like, well, if you see I have this defibrillator that goes into the glonk-a-monk and then after this... Of course, of course, science, of course, of course. Tell me, you have at least four dead girls in the basement, right?

For science? Oh, it's for science, all right. Science is wonderful. I feel like everyone was just pretending to be very smart. Yes. And then they were just like, oh, absolutely, that makes all the sense in the world. Absolutely.

I electrocuted my horse yesterday just to see it die. But that was for fun. Now, Thomas Edison did that. Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant to death to prove that his way of electricity was better than Tesla's. Rockefeller did it, didn't he? No, no, no. No, it was Edison.

But he did that whole thing. That was a whole fraud thing and they stole it from Tesla and Tesla got those ideas from aliens. We'll talk about that in a different episode. That's actually true, though. He did speak, he did have psychic connection to grace and they told him about wireless electricity. That is actually true.

That is true. And did you know that the Tesla, the actual new vehicle, is made using Tesla's original battery? That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Alien ideas, alien bread. We're fucking reverse engineering this shit. It's been going on since Eisenhower.

The Gay to Trudy is real. We're fucking in cooperation. We are not even close to talking about aliens. I'm just excited. I just thought, just thinking about it makes me excited. Yeah. No, it's extremely exciting. You guys think ISIS is real?

I got a flimflam machine to sell you. Now Holmes, he did use his operating table for actual medical purposes in the form of illegal abortions. Hey, hey, hey, and that's just helping society. Well, 100 supposedly visited his cellar for the operation and not all survived. And any woman who ended up dying on the operating table ended up having their skeletons displayed in doctors' offices

around the convention. I also think it's important for any lady, if you are going to get an abortion performed, I believe it's your right to choose what you want to do with your body. But if the abortion machine has bicycle pedals, don't do it. Don't do it. If he has to get on it and roll it around and you have to stick your feet up in the air

and stick some tube up inside of you, it's a flimflam machine. Right. And then it kind of pulls out the fetus. You're like, whee, whee. And just him making baby noises in an old recording off to the side. He was here, baby, and was like, whee, whee. Mommy, no. Mommy, no.

Oh, off to heaven, that girl. And then he's like, abortion has been done. Get out of my office. You're a slut. This Apple Watch is like, and my heart rate is up. This is good. This is good. Now, there was one piece of equipment in Holmes' cellar

that couldn't be explained away. This was a contraption that he called the elasticity determinator. Ooh, what is that? He said that the purpose of that was to produce, quote, a race of giants by stretching people to twice their normal length. But in reality, it was just a torture act. Torture act. Yeah, yeah, that's all it was.

Kissle. Did you? I wish that would have worked and I could have friends. Did your mom and dad do that to you? No, they didn't. That's a baby. But you know, we did have one of those machines where you lie upside down like your Batman and it stretches out your back.

I use that quite regularly. Really? Gravity stretched me out. Because your dad had a, like, to be honest, your dad had a very bad back. Yes, he did. All right. That is a true kissle family. That is a true kissle fact.

He was a truck driver. Bad back. That's right. So despite all the various irons Holmes had in the fire, he still had time for love. Now, we talked about Myrta Z Beltknapp in the first episode, but she would be far from Holmes's last romantic conquest during his time in Chicago. And unfortunately for a man named Asilius T. Connor,

a.k.a. Ned. Wait, what? So everyone just like was just like, your name is too hard to pronounce. So you're Ned now. Everybody started with shitty names. Right. And then in order to make it in America at the time, you had to change your name to a shorter, easier name.

Was this the beginning of idiocracy? Whether it's Asilius is a far too difficult name, you're Ned. Well, unfortunately for him, the conquest that H.H. Holmes would have after Myrta would be with his wife, a much more unfortunate woman named Julia. Now Julia was described as a very buxom tall, intelligent fierce woman. Six feet tall. Yeah.

And that she was like, her family was so disappointed that she ever was with Asilius, a.k.a. Ned. They fought the marriage, but it was just like she could rule this guy's life. So she did. Yeah. So Asilius, a.k.a. Ned had taken over the operation of Holmes's pharmacy with Julia working there as well. And then Holmes, she was not there on accident.

Holmes had seen her come in and was like, gonna bang it. And that's what he did. Well, compared to Ned, Holmes was, as Harold Schecter put it, a bastard figure, a bold, dynamic businessman, dapper of the globe. That's Harold Schecter. Yeah, I like that.

He sounds like, he's more like a Kermit. He sounds like Kermit. Yeah, yeah. The dashing figure, a bold, dynamic businessman, dapper and glib. Much like I have been described. So it took Asilius, a.k.a. Ned the better part of a year to figure out that Holmes was sleeping with his wife. Yeah, man.

He had been sleeping real deep in a bed that was made out of denial. Yes, indeed. H.H. Holmes was just wrecking that bush. Oh, yeah. At the time he couldn't stand the affair any longer and sued for divorce, Holmes had already grown tired of Julia. See, Julia and Asilius, a.k.a. Ned, already had a child named Pearl. And just like Murdozie Belknap,

Julia, who worked with Holmes, horned in on his flirtation time. Yeah, it was being a real boner crusher. I see. And to make matters worse, after Holmes had already gotten tired of her, Julia got pregnant in November of 1891 and expected Holmes to marry her.

And Holmes, he said that he wouldn't be able to take care of both her existing child and a new baby. So we told her, yes, yes, yes. I will make you my wife, but only if you get an abortion and only if I perform it. Absolutely, though. You know, but in the end, he's taking responsibility.

Is that right? Absolutely. I think every boyfriend, if you insist that your girlfriend get an abortion, you got to do it. Oh, I see. Yeah, and especially, nothing makes a woman more at ease for him to be like, just sit here, let me get my abortion machine going.

That's a leaf blower. That is just a leaf blower. Just get in my safe. So he told her, he said, hey, in college, I did it a dozen times over. Absolutely, like building an apple bomb. Right. He said, you got nothing to worry about.

I can take care of it. And for one reason or another, I don't know who chose the date to do this, but they decided they were going to do it on Christmas Eve, 1891. So is this the inspiration for the Ben Folds 5 song, Brick? It might be. I believe it is, actually, yeah. Actually, ain't it, though?

Yeah, yeah. Ain't it, though, Marcus? Ain't it, though, Henry? I would say an abortion. Christmas Eve, an abortion on Christmas Eve is, like, a little inappropriate. A little bit. But I would say, you know when it's most inappropriate?

July 4th. Yeah, that's America's birthday. That would be a bad one. Yeah, yeah. You can't do it on America's birthday. No, I truly love America. Or Thanksgiving. You can do anything on Thanksgiving.

I'd say leave for an abortion. Make it, like, on a Tuesday. Is Planned Parenthood open on holidays? Well, I'm going to find out this year. I don't know what that meant. So in Christmas Eve, Holmes left Julia in her room saying he would put her baby daughter, Pearl, to sleep himself, which he did with a fatal dose of chloroform.

He returned and led Julia down a hidden staircase to the cellar that she, despite living and working in the castle for almost a year, had never known about before. So I would, at that point, would just be like, I am having second thoughts. It's kind of cool if you don't know that it's a murder castle and it's got all these secret stairways and things like that.

Women like a man of mystery. That kind of mystery? Well, I mean, I don't know if she knew what kind of mystery it was. So Holmes telling her that he was putting her under for the operation, he once again administered a fatal overdose of chloroform, stripped her bones of their flesh, by the way, that corpse that Holmes took chapel up to look at on the second floor, that was Julia Connor.

And she was the first skeleton to be sold to medical science and would not be the last. Her bones eventually ended up in the office of a private surgeon named Pauling, and he was known to remark to visitors that the skeleton, almost six feet tall, must have been a fine-figured woman when she was alive. Which is a really creepy thing for so many to say

about a skeleton they had in their office. How many skeletons did he sell? We don't know exactly how many. It wasn't the most popular form for him of body disposal because, of course, if you start selling a lot of skeletons, it's going to raise a couple eyebrows. But if you sell like a baker's dozen, they just think that maybe you're just pretty good at grave robbing.

If you order 12 skeletons, though, and you get 13, you're just sort of like, I can just go for the 12. What do you do with an extra skeleton? I don't know, it just seems like in the end, there's a lot of people not answering, asking any questions. No, no questions whatsoever. No one asked any questions about the only questions that anyone ever asked of H.H. Holmes

was when they came to collect the debts. I'm fairly certain they don't use real skeletons any longer, right, in the doctor's offices. Most of these things are synthetic. Yeah, unless they're Chinese. What? The Chinese, yeah, the bodies exhibits. Yeah, the Chinese still sell skeletons.

You can still buy bones from them. And those were war criminals, or to the Chinese, they were war criminals. Well, political prisoners. Yeah, maybe war criminals to you, Ben. Hey, you know what I'd say? It's better to make money at home. Use your own personal resources,

and they have a lot of political prisoners. Yeah. And that's great. That's easy money, kid. Yeah. And you can will, I suppose, Henry, with your will, you could will your skeleton to a university or something. Yeah, to medical science.

You can will it to a mortuary sciences school, but mortuary sciences schools, they actually usually get cadavers from the homeless and people who don't claim bodies. Oh, yeah, the underneaths. Yeah, exactly. And here's another fun fact about mortuary sciences school, is the underclassmen, they get the river bodies.

Oh, nice. The bloated ones, huh? Yeah, they get the bloated ones, the super decomposed ones. They might just get an arm or a leg. You have to be there for a year or two before you get the full cadaver. I couldn't even dissect the worm in biology class.

I don't think I do very well. I threw up when I dissected a kid. A child. A child. A child. You dissect it again. Oh, yeah, we got to really upset. Yeah, well, it's good.

Did you ever do it again? Every single time I see one. I will say my skeleton will be saved to haunt my family. That's very nice. So that's the end of this episode. We're going to get deeper into the full mischief of H.H. Holmes next week. The individual mischiefs.

Just really cool. You know, with Mengele and things like that, we did actually learn some things in a bizarre sort of way. Did H.H. Holmes teach us any true facts about medicine? Maybe in a roundabout sort of way. I mean, it could have been that the people that studied one of the corpses or the skeletons that he sold, maybe one of those people discovered something

that was of value. He was also the first person to be a free form architect. That's true. He was a real abstract house builder. Right, right. Well, I mean, really, doctors at this time, they didn't have Grey's Anatomy. They didn't have a reference book that you could look back upon.

Oh, I thought you were talking about the TV show. No, they didn't have that either, Ben. They didn't have Sex in the City either, Ben. They didn't. I'm a Miranda. I thought Dr. Hoddy was that. It wasn't Hoddy with the body. Yeah, yeah.

McStuffins. Yeah, something like that. They didn't have those. So they needed these skeletons for reference points. They could look and they could say like, okay, if this person, say this person got shived in an alley, I can look here and I can see that his ribs end at this point and I can see that the lungs are located at this point on the body.

And so I know if the lung has been punctured or not. So you wonder if he did sort of validate what he was doing because he felt maybe, everyone thinks that they're doing something good. I wonder if he was sort of validating it a little bit with being like, I am helping science. I am helping medicine and also craving my desire for murder. Well, my question is, let's ask people, we have a lot of scientists that listen to this show.

Like, if you do something really good with your job that day, do you calm your pants? Well, who knows, maybe. Like, do you finish a research paper and just go, and then they're like, yeah, scientific method has been achieved. Yeah. All right. Well, wow.

This is so exciting. We're learning a lot about A.H. Holmes here. Yeah, absolutely. And the next episode, we're going to get into a couple of like individual murders that he actually confessed to himself because we'll see that he has three separate confessions and we'll get into some of the murders that came straight from the horse's mouth and we'll get into the scam that eventually led to his downfall,

the chase across America in search of the children that he took along with him and his eventual trial. This is a good old-fashioned family story. I love it. It's like National Ampun's vacation. It is. Yeah, going to Wally World. All right.

Well, you can find Marcus on Twitter if you want to reach out and talk to him about these things on the Internet. Please do. Yeah. I love talking about things. Marcus Henry is on Twitter at Henry Zabrowski. Watch Heroes Reborn on Thursdays at 8 p.m. on NBC. Yeah.

And I'm at Ben Kissle, which is kind of exciting. And the big thing that we are announcing this week by popular demand, which is fucking awesome that you guys want to help us out so much, we're launching a full-on Patreon campaign next week. It'll either be Monday or Tuesday, maybe even Wednesday to coincide with the new episode. We're going to be offering some super cool premiums for you guys. If you get each level has a different premium.

We've got plenty of bonus content. We've got the last podcast reading series, which is going to be fun. I'm going to read the Bible from beginning to end. Mm-hmm. And we've also got, I think we're going to have access. You're reading the Bible from beginning to end? 30 minutes at a time. It's a lot of that.

Nice. Yeah. Yeah, of course. And we're also going to be, I've got maybe some bone-related prizes for a lot of people. Henry's pointing at his ass hole right now. He'll literally point it at his butt like a child. I have to shit so bad.

All right. So thanks for supporting the show here on Season 2. So yeah, the Patreon campaign starts next week. Henry is pointing at his butt. I thought you were talking about maybe like a butt hole. No, no, I have to shit. That's great. Make a last podcast with Cave Comedy Radio.

CaveComedyRadio.com slash merch is where you get your last podcast on the left. T-shirt. And the last, the live show this month is going to be right at the Saturday after Thanksgiving. We're going to be doing it. Henry's back for the first time in months. It's going to be fucking awesome. And Hio Gein, everyone. Hail Satan.

I'll have to shit that day as well. All right. Hail yourselves. Check out top at Page 7. Sixth time of human activities. Roundtable of gentlemen. And I think that's it. I think that's a magustillation.

Magustillations. No shit. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to CaveComedyRadio.com.