H H Holmes part 2

Aaaaand we’re back! Here’s the second part of the H.H.Holmes story. This is the part where we focus on the hotel and the strange goings-on that went on. So, like I stated in the previous post, Holmes began building the hotel in 1887, while he was still scamming and murdering his way around America and Canada.

During the construction of the hotel, Holmes was accused of not paying for the labour and equipment. Not surprising really. It was said that he would fire builders' mid-job so they didn’t know the full extent of the building layout. The building had three floors and a basement – all of them had there uses. The first floor housed the pharmacy, jewellers and a general store. The third floor housed Holmes’ apartment and office. The second floor and basement were the locations for all the wrong stuff that he did. 

We’ll start on the second floor, purely because everything leads to the basement at one stage or another. So, on this floor, there were laundry chutes but they weren’t used for laundry – Holmes shoved dead bodies down them! There were doors that would lead to brick walls and staircases that lead to nowhere. One room had no windows, lights and you were locked in as soon as the door closed. One bathroom on the floor had a trapdoor in, which is what every bathroom needs right?? There was a full-sized bank safe on this floor where Holmes would lock his victims in and wait for them to suffocate. There was also a secret hanging room that only Holmes knew the location of, because every hotel needs a secret hanging room. All the rooms on this floor were alarmed, so if anyone tried to leave during the night Holmes would know and stop them. 

While in another room in his wonderful creation, Holmes had the room built with gas fixtures in the vents; so, when guests were in there, he would turn the gas on and wait to see what would happen. In another, it was completely airtight which meant he could lock someone in and watch them suffocate to death. Then he would shove their dead bodies down the laundry chutes and straight down to the basement. 

Now to the basement. This is where the really f***ed up stuff happened. So, some of the bodies would make their way to the basement through the laundry chutes, others were carried down the stairs. This is where the remains of Howard Pitezel were said to have been found by police. Down in the basement, Holmes would dissect the bodies, clean the bones and sell them onto medical institutions or the black market for money. If there wasn’t a need for the body, Holmes would dispose of them either by cremation in the human-sized oven that was down there, by submerging the parts in vats of acid or in pits of quicklime.