Today In Ghoulish Delights

by Alexandra Molotkow

H is for Dr. H. H. Holmes. Holmes built himself a hotel in 1893, in Chicago, that boasted, in the words of the crime writer Connie Fillipelli, “iron-plated rooms, secret passages, hidden chutes that ended in the basement directly above zinc-lined tanks, sealed rooms with gas jets, stairways that led nowhere . . . trapdoors, a dissecting table, surgeons’ tools.” The building was a blueprint for every carnival and amusement park haunted house to come. It’s believed Holmes murdered more than a hundred people there. Then he went on the lam, landing in Toronto. He buried more bodies in the basement of a house near Barrie, Ontario. Pinkerton detectives shadowed him. Again he fled. They nabbed him in Boston, tried him in Philadelphia. In 1896 he was hanged.

Derek McCormack, if you’ve never read, is a strange and wonderful writer and Halloween Historian whose works include The Well-Dressed Wound, to be published later this month with Semiotext(e). Read his “Halloween ABCs” here, c/o Dennis Cooper and Taddle Creek.