In 2015, a new season of the popular Tv Series American Horror Story was released called: Hotel. Covering the story of H.H. Holmes who built a murder hotel to lure people into death.
In the series, his character was transformed into James Patrick March.
What happened in the murder hotel?
The Person That Called Himself H.H. Holmes
First of all, it is good to know who this man was.
H.H. Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett and later became known under his nickname and was born in New Hampshire to two English immigrants.
His parents were mostly in the farming industry and when Holmes was 16 years old he went on to get a job in teaching in 1878 he married Clara which wasn’t an ideal relationship.
According to witnesses that saw him regularly at the time, he was very violent towards her.
Holmes Moved To Chicago and Changed His Name
After many affairs and scandals he visited and moved to Chicago where he changed his name to Henry Howard Holmes. He got a job at a drugstore an went on to work there.
In 1887 though, he bought a piece of land nearby the store and started building something — a building that would be used for consumer purposes he said. It would have become a 3-floor building.
It was a rather ugly building as you can see in the images. But it was also very big so the people of Chicago were kind of proud that there was such a big building in their growing city.
We now know it as ‘the murder hotel’ but it was first planned to be a mansion for himself — with stores and apartments to hire.
What we know is that Holmes made his building very big and confusing to anybody who was unfamiliar with it. It is said that he hired all different sorts of people to build it so that they couldn’t know the construction plans of each other.
That way, nobody, except Holmes himself, really knew how his building ‘worked’.
The Horrors Within the Building
Nobody really knows nor has evidence of what happened in the ‘hotel’. There are only claims that he has killed and tortured multiple people in there.
The second floor would have contained all kinds of confusing parts like mazes, weird disappearing stairs, or doors that would lead to a brick wall.
But then there’s the most obscure part of them all: he had gas chambers — we all know what he could have been doing with those.
When Holmes in 1894 was arrested for the first time, the police discovered his weird ‘hotel’ and found out about all the different creepy rooms — some of the rooms didn’t even have a door, to begin with.
It didn’t make sense.
He Turned Into the Devil
In 1896, Holmes was executed by hanging. Before he died he said that he would have been possessed by the devil and that it only got worse.
When they hung him, his neck didn’t break and wasn’t instantly dead — he kept hanging for many minutes before he was really dead.
His ‘murder hotel’ doesn’t exist anymore — it was burned down in 1895.
