Terrifying Death Traps From A Real Serial Killer’s Murder Castle

If there was one thing H. H. Holmes was better at than using a whole house as a murder weapon, it was inventing new ways to asphyxiate people. On the third floor of the Murder Castle, Holmes installed a soundproof, airtight vault lined with steel and equipped with a gas flame, which he claimed was there to provide a light source. By blowing on any of the air pipes connected to the vault, Holmes could extinguish the gas flame, and anyone unlucky enough to be trapped inside would quickly suffocate.

One of his victims, Annie Williams, was tricked into entering the vault when Holmes asked her to retrieve a file for him. Investigators later found claw marks in the vault walls where she had tried in vain to scratch her way to freedom.

Among the many hidden trapdoors and chutes in the Murder Castle was a completely sealed-up chamber in the middle of the second floor. This secret hideaway was disguised as an extra room at the back of a dark closet, but anyone who tried to open the door to the “extra room” would find only a wall. After tearing the wall down, police discovered the real entrance to the room—a trapdoor in the corner of the ceiling, which could only be accessed by climbing through a fake elevator chute.

There was no other way in or out of the pitch-black room, and the ceiling trapdoor opened from the outside. This left only one choice for anyone trapped inside: a slow death by starvation alone in the dark.

Several of the secret rooms in the Murder Castle were lined with iron. In most cases, the iron walls were meant to soundproof the rooms, but in one room, they served a far deadlier purpose. This room was lined not only with sheet iron, but also with asbestos, and investigators who discovered it found evidence of fire. Like many of the castle's other torture chambers, the iron-lined room was also fitted with gas pipes that could be controlled from Holmes's bedroom.

The presence of the gas pipe, the extra asbestos lining, and the signs of fire all suggest that Holmes intended this room to be both fireproof and escape-proof—the perfect place to roast a human alive.

The scariest devices found in the basement of Holmes's Murder Castle were meant for getting rid of dead bodies rather than torturing living ones. For instance, the human-sized stove and vats of acid. Unfortunately, some of his victims were subjected to a particularly nasty exception—a stretching rack. Holmes used the rack, which he called an “elasticity determinator,” to perform experiments that measured how far a person could be stretched.

Victims were slowly stretched and bent until their bones were broken and they eventually succumbed to death. Holmes would then dissolve the bodies in acid or disintegrate them in his giant kiln, never to be seen again.

When Holmes wasn't getting rid of his guests' bodies or subjecting them to excruciating torture in the basement of the Murder Castle, he was busy conducting experiments on them. After sending dead or unconscious captives down a secret chute to the basement, those who weren't dissolved in acid or stretched to death found themselves on Holmes's operating table.

Holmes used his basement laboratory to dissect these victims and perform macabre medical experiments on them with the help of various surgical instruments and poisons. He then removed their organs and cleaned the remaining flesh from their skeletons, which he sold to doctors and medical departments as anatomical models.

Sure, an alarm system doesn't sound like a death trap, but if a serial killer uses it to monitor the movements of guests wandering around his murder hotel at night, it might as well be. The Murder Castle was equipped with a complex system of alarms that sounded a buzzer in Holmes's room whenever a guest opened a door. This meant that Holmes was tipped off whenever anyone left a bedroom in the middle of the night.

It also ensured that even if someone managed to escape from one of the hidden torture chambers scattered throughout the second floor of the building, they wouldn't be able to leave undetected. In effect, H. H. Holmes invented a modern security system just so that he could kill people as efficiently as possible.