Holmes Murder Castle
Holmes Murder Castle
The block-long, three-story building, called "The Castle" by neighbors, that Holmes built in order to torture and murder his victims. On the bottom floor of the Castle were shops he rented and his personal office. The upper floors were made up of a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, stairways leading to nowhere, doors that only opened from the outside, and other maze-like constructions. He opened his "Castle" as a hotel for the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Over a period of three years, Holmes selected mainly female victims and tortured them in soundproof and escapeproof chambers fitted with gas lines that permitted Holmes to asphyxiate them at any time. Once dead, he sent the victims' bodies down a secret chute to the basement, where they were either dissected, stripped of flesh, or crafted into a skeleton model. They were then sold to medical schools or cremated. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a rack to create a race of "giants".
