Lore - REMASTERED – Episode 8: The Castle

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Let’s all revisit the hunting grounds of one of America’s most horrific—and prolific—serial killers: H. H. Holmes. This Remastered edition includes fresh narration and production, music by Chad Lawson, and a brand new Epilogue tale at the end. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On January 17th of 1894, a couple stood before a minister at the Vendome Hotel in Denver, Colorado. Henry Howard and Georgiana Yoke were about to be married. Standing near them was their witness, a woman named Minnie Williams. A bride had come from Indiana to escape a scandalous reputation and had found work in Chicago at a store owned by Henry. She was a tall, slender woman, about 25 years of age, with blue eyes and blonde hair, and she was madly in love with Henry.

It sounds wonderful. It sounds perfect, actually. But there was trouble in paradise even before they met the minister there at the hotel. You see, Henry was already married. He was, in fact, married to two other women, and Minnie, the woman standing as witness, was actually Henry's mistress of over a year. Even Henry's name was fake. His real name had been abandoned long before, and it would be months before Georgiana would

discover who he really was. Sometimes we think we know a person, only to discover that we were fooled. Community is built on trust, and that trust allows us to make connections, to let down our guard, and to feel safe. When that trust is broken, though, our minds quickly shift to disappointment and stress and outright fear. Sure, it happens less often now in the age of Facebook and social media, but in the late 1800s, very little stood in the way of a person falsifying their identity, and Henry

Howard, or whoever he was prior to that moment in Denver, had turned that skill into an art. Few people knew this about Henry, though. In fact, few people could have imagined what deep, dark secrets boiled just beneath the surface of this smiling young groom, and when the world finally did find out exactly ten months later, they could barely contain their horror. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Henry Howard was born in New Hampshire in 1861 as Herman Mudgeit. His parents were wealthy, well-respected people in their community, and their son was born

into that privilege. But from an early age, Herman was a problem child, constantly getting into trouble. According to Mudgeit himself as a child, his classmates forced him to view and touch a human skeleton after learning that he was afraid of the town doctor. Their prank backfired, though, generating a deep fascination rather than frightening him off, and that obsession with death would only grow. When the boy was expressing interest in medicine, one report claims that he would actually perform surgery on animals.

Along with his excellent performance in school, he was able to pursue that interest and enter medical school, enrolling at the University of Michigan as H.H. Holmes in 1879. Far from home, and with access to resources that he previously lacked, college allowed Holmes to get creative. It was there that he devised an easy way to make money, a drive that would fuel many of his future crimes. It involved stealing a cadaver from the medical lab. Holmes would disfigure the corpse, plant the body somewhere that gave it the appearance

of being the victim of a tragic accident, and then a few days later, he would approach a life insurance company with a policy for his deceased relative and collect the cash. His final insurance swindle in Michigan netted him $12,500, but he knew his welcome was wearing thin. Collecting the money, he vanished, abandoning school and his new wife and child, who never saw him again. He moved around the country after that, doing legitimate work, but also learning his way around the business world.

He mastered the art of buying product on credit, avoiding the bills, selling the items, and then vanishing with the profit. Armed with that skill, he soon settled in Inglewood, just south of Chicago. And that's where he met Dr. Elizabeth Holden. He was 1885. Holmes was trying to avoid creditors from all around the country, but rather than vanish into obscurity, he chose to hide in plain sight. He married his second wife, polygamously, of course, and took a job at a local drug

store owned and run by Dr. Elizabeth Holden, whose husband was dying of cancer. Holmes spent the next two years becoming more and more essential to Holden's business, paying her for ownership in the business and building relationships with customers. When Mr. Holden finally passed away, the payments from Holmes stopped and Mrs. Holden became upset, threatening to end their business partnership. But nothing happened. Nothing happened because Dr. Holden mysteriously vanished. When asked about her disappearance, Holmes told the authorities that she had moved out

west to live with family, right after she had signed over the business to him, of course. And the police bought the lie. Holmes operated the drug store as if nothing had happened, growing the business and continuing his chess game of evading creditors. But when the empty lot across the street became available, he couldn't resist the temptation. Holmes, you see, had bigger plans. The World's Columbian Exhibition was scheduled to be hosted in Chicago in 1893, and he envisioned a hotel that could house the countless visitors who would travel to the area.

This project was lovingly called The Castle, which wasn't far from the truth. It was 50 feet wide and over 160 feet long, taking up half a city block. With three stories and a basement, it would eventually have over 100 rooms within its walls. And Holmes, ever the micromanager, took on the task of project architect, refusing to share the plans with anyone else. Workers on the building asked questions naturally, but when they did, Holmes would replace them. Most of the men working on the project never lasted more than two weeks.

All told, over 500 carpenters and craftsmen worked on the castle. True to form, Holmes managed to avoid paying most of them as well. He would accuse them of shoddy work and refuse their wages. Some sued him, but he managed to put those cases off long enough that they eventually gave up. Once completed, Holmes moved the drug store to the new building's ground floor and rented out space to other shops. His personal offices were located on the top floor and the remaining space was rented

out as temporary living quarters marketed as a boarding house for young single women. The castle was open for business. Unfortunately, not everyone who stayed there managed to survive the hospitality that Holmes offered them. When Mrs. Pansy Lee arrived from New Orleans, she rented a room at the castle. She was a widow and had traveled all over the United States before arriving in Chicago to settle down. When Holmes learned that she kept $4,000 in cash in the false bottom of her trunk, he

kindly offered to keep it in his store vault for her. Mrs. Lee declined the offer and vanished a short time later. While some people came to the castle for lodging, others were looking for work. One of the requirements that Holmes imposed was that all of his employees there were to have life insurance policies for the sum of $5,000. Holmes, remember, knew the life insurance business very well. When 17-year-old Jeannie Thompson arrived from Southern Illinois looking for work, Holmes saw an opportunity.

She was young and pretty, the exact sort of blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty that he preferred, and he quickly gave her a job. In casual conversation, Jeannie let slip that her family didn't actually know where she was. She had told them that she was traveling to New York, but the offer of a good job was enough to keep her right there in Chicago. She told Holmes that she couldn't wait to tell her parents about her good fortune. Before she did, though, he escorted her up to her room, and she was never seen again.

In 1890, Ned Conner arrived at the castle looking for work. He traveled with his wife Julia, unusually tall for a woman at nearly six feet and their young daughter Pearl. Ned was a watchmaker and jeweler, and Holmes hired him right away, but it was Ned's wife who captured his interest the most. Holmes soon fired his bookkeeper and gave the job to Julia. Not long after, it began to be obvious that Holmes was more than a little friendly with Ned's wife.

Ned, for his part, turned a blind eye. It seems he was glad to have a good job with a steady paycheck and a roof over his head. When Julia became pregnant, though, Ned took the hint. He packed up, filed for divorce, and left her and Pearl in the care of Holmes, who immediately took out life insurance policies on both of them. But Holmes had a new problem. Julia knew the business too well, and she presented a threat to his illicit activities. Holmes found a solution.

He told Julia that he would marry her, but only if she would have an abortion. Julia resisted at first, but finally on December 24th of 1891, she gave in. She asked Holmes to put Pearl to bed, and then he led her to the basement where he had a makeshift operating room. Julia and Pearl were never seen again. That same winter, Holmes summoned a man named Charles Chappell to his office. Chappell performed odd jobs around the castle, but he had a particular skill that Holmes required.

He was incredibly gifted in the craft of articulating skeletons. Chappell arrived, and Holmes led him to a second-floor room, where the body of a woman lay on a table. According to Chappell's own testimony to the authorities, the body had been skinned like a jackrabbit. He assumed, since Holmes was a doctor, that he had simply been performing an autopsy on a patient, and pushed his doubts to the back of his mind. Holmes would pay Chappell $36 to strip the flesh off the body and prepare the bones for

articulation. The finished skeleton was sold to a Dr. Pauling of the Hanniman Medical College. Dr. Pauling would often look at the skeleton in his private office and marvel at how unusual it was to see a woman nearly six feet tall. Eventually, Holmes made a critical mistake. Ironically, it was his old love of insurance scams that caught up with him in the end. After killing his right-hand man, Benjamin Pytzel, and attempting to pass the death off as an accident to the insurance company, the authorities caught wind of the crime and tracked

him down. He was finally arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894, 10 months to the day from his wedding ceremony in a Denver hotel. Before his trial began, however, the castle was mysteriously gutted by fire. Thankfully, the authorities had already been able to search the building, and after doing so, they had given it a new name, the murder house. The authorities discovered that, like any boarding house at the time, the castle had a reception room, a waiting room, and many rooms for residents to live in, but the building

had more inside its walls than was expected. There were secret chambers, trap doors, peep holes, and hidden laboratories. Aside from the 35 guest rooms, the second floor was a labyrinth of passages. Some doors opened on brick walls, some could only be opened from one side, and others were hidden from sight completely. Trap doors led to staircases that led to hidden chambers. There were even alarms in all of the rooms that would alert homes in his quarters if any of his prisoners had tried to escape.

Some of the rooms were windowless and could be sealed off and made airtight if necessary. Some were equipped with gas jets that were fed by pipes from the basement. Others were lined with asbestos and had visible scorch marks on the floor. And then there was the vault. It was a room that could fit a single person, and only then if they were standing. The walls inside the vault were lined with iron plates, broken only by a handful of gas fixtures and a trap door that led to a shoot. On the inside of the door was a single footprint, the size of a woman's boot.

It was a homemade gas chamber that was designed to deliver corpses straight to the basement. When the police descended to the lowest level of the building, they discovered that homes had expanded the basement beyond the foundation of the building and out beneath the sidewalk. He did this to make room for all of his equipment. Here they found the dissection table, still splattered with blood. Jars of poison filled a shelf and a large wooden box nearby contained multiple female skeletons. A crematorium was built into one wall, which still contained ash and bone fragments.

A search also found valuables that belonged to some of the victims. A watch that belonged to Minnie Williams, scraps of fabric, tin type photographs, and a ball of women's hair, carefully wrapped in cloth. The bones of a child were found buried in a pit and the remnants of a bloody dress were recovered from a wood-burning stove. When Ned Connor was later asked to identify the fabric, he confirmed it belonged to his wife Julia. A rack designed to stretch bodies was also discovered.

Beneath the dirt floor, they found a vat of corrosive acid and two quick-lime pits used for quickly dissolving the flesh off of corpses. There were human skulls, a shoulder blade, ribs, a hip socket, and countless other human remains. Whatever the police had hoped to find that day, they were unprepared for the truth. In the end, they had discovered a medieval charnel house, right beneath their feet. It's easy to feel safe in our own neighborhood, walking past the closed doors and manicured lawns.

But what goes on behind those walls is never something that we can be sure of. Each and every person we meet wears a mask, and we're only allowed to peek behind it if they let us. Society is built on the ideal that we can trust the people around us, that we can take our neighbors, our family, even our coworkers at face value and enter into relationships with them. But with every relationship comes risk. We risk disappointment.

We risk pain and betrayal. And for some of us, we even risk our very safety. European map makers of the 15th century would sometimes mark unexplored areas of their maps with a warning. Here there be monsters. There's danger in the places we haven't explored. And while this is true then of undiscovered continents, it has always been true of humanity. Beneath the surface, behind the mask, hides the monster.

On May 7th of 1896, after a final meal of boiled eggs, dried toast, and a cup of coffee, H.H. Holmes was led to the gallows at Moyamensing prison. A black hood was placed over his head, and as the crowd outside the prison wall shouted their insults and jeers, he was positioned over the trapdoor. When it opened, Holmes dropped, and his head snapped to the side. But rather than killing him quickly, the rogue had somehow broken his neck and left him alive. The crowd watched for over 15 minutes, as Holmes hung from the noose, fingers and feet twitching and dancing, before his heart finally stopped beating.

Holmes was buried in an unmarked grave in Holy Cross Cemetery just south of Philadelphia. As per his request, there was no autopsy, and his body was buried in a coffin filled with cement. Holmes, you see, was afraid that someone would dig up his body and use his skeleton for science. He was probably right. We don't know how many people he killed. Holmes confessed to a variety of numbers, even changing his story again on the Hangman's

platform. Some experts who have studied the missing person reports from the World's Columbian exhibition placed the possible death toll as high as 200. There's so much we don't know about Holmes, a man whose entire life seemed to be one elaborate lie built atop another, like some macabre house of cards. He will forever remain a mystery to us, a monster hidden behind a mask that was painted to look just like you or me. But one last insight into the man can be found in his written confession.

I was born with the devil in me, he wrote. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world. And he has been with me since. The story of H.H. Holmes and his murder house has been thrilling readers and listeners for over a century.

And it's honestly not difficult to understand why when people settle into a new home, whether permanently or temporarily, they tend to assume that they're safe. The actions of Holmes, however, turns that notion on its head. But it's not the first time a lodger has found themselves at risk. In fact, if we go back one more century, there's another chilling example of this sort of deadly betrayal. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. Gifting the Glenlivet says, I know I wasn't always the easiest child.

It says after everything you've done for me, you deserve better than novelty socks. It says, the best parent in Canada deserves the best single malt scotch in Canada. Parents give their best, why not return the favor and give the gift of the Glenlivet this Father's Day. Discover the single malt collection at theglendlivet.com. Please enjoy responsibly. The writer appeared at sunset. His horse was in need of care and he himself asked about food, food, and a room.

Everyone could tell from the moment the stranger opened his mouth that he was French, adding context is everything, right? Being French wasn't abnormal for sure, but being French and colonial Connecticut in 1777 certainly was. It made it a lot easier for people to guess what your job was. You see, while the colonists who would someday become Americans were battling the British forces, each side had brought in allies. The British had their Hessian mercenaries, hired straight from Germany, while the Americans

had help from France. So this writer was at once both a stranger and an ally. He stepped inside the horse for tavern as the sun was going down and planted himself and his heavy saddlebags at one of the tables. He probably had every reason to keep to himself and ignore the crowd that was drinking around him. But the legend says that he was more social than that. He chatted, drank, laughed and ate, and then he retired for the night.

They say it was a struggle to climb the stairs to his room, that the saddlebags were heavy and awkward, but as far as anyone could tell, he made it to his bed. The trouble was, it was the last anyone would ever see of him. Well, sort of. Weeks later, more Frenchmen arrived at the tavern there in Canton. They were clearly military officers, and they were looking for their missing countrymen. According to them, he had been carrying a month's worth of payroll for the French forces gathered in New York.

They had been following his trail for days, and all of the clues went cold right there at the horse for tavern. The tavern owner shrugged, sure, he remembered the traveler. There were probably a dozen or more men who could say the same, but he departed the following morning and they never saw him again. So the Frenchmen moved on, hoping the trail would pick up in the next town. They never found him, though, or his saddlebags full of gold and silver. Of course, stories like that have a way of evolving into legend, and sometimes as we've

seen through countless examples in history, those legends take on a more frightening tone. Not long after the Frenchmen went missing, a local farmer claimed to see the ghostly shape of a rider moving through the fog around the Farmington River, just west of town. He claimed the rider was dressed in a French uniform and was making his way toward New York. Even the horse was frightening, with eyes that were said to glow. But we don't know if the rider's eyes glowed, because according to the farmers who have seen him over the years, he doesn't have a head. The visions still happen today, by the way.

A number of people have reported seeing a headless man on horseback out west of town near the river. It's said that when their headlights pass over the shape of the rider, it just sort of passes right through, as if he and the horse are nothing more than a memory. And in some ways, I suppose that's true. Many years after the Frenchman's disappearance, the horse for tavern burned to the ground. In the process of cleaning out the debris and making the foundation ready for a new building, workers discovered something grisly.

There, buried just beneath the surface of what would have been the cellar of the tavern, was the skeleton of a man. There were no clothes, and no other signs that could definitively point to this being the answer to the mystery of the vanished Frenchman, but most people felt certain about it. Not because of any clue that was hidden among the remains, but because of a clue that was missing. The skeleton, you see, didn't have a head.

This episode of lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy.

My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi.

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