H h holmes wikipedia

H.H. Holmes is notoriously known as one of America's first serial killers who lured victims into his hotel dubbed the “Murder Castle” during the Chicago World’s Fair in According to some claims, he killed up to people inside his macabre hotel that was outfitted with trapdoors, gas chambers and a basement crematorium. But the actual story, while horrifying, may not be quite as sordid.

“There’s a total of about nine [people] that we can say with some confidence he probably killed,” says Adam Selzer, author of H.H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil. “He confessed to 27 at one point, but several of them were still alive at the time.”

The inflated numbers of up to victims likely started, Selzer says, with a pulp book published in , called Gem of the Prairie by Herbert Asbury.

“It had kind of a throwaway line that some people suggested it may have been as many as people,” Selzer says. “Nobody had actually suggested that, in fact. But thereafter everybody else who [retold] the story threw in that same line until people started deciding that that was a real estimate or a real possibility.”

There’s also no evidence Holmes trapped strangers inside his hotel in an attempt to kill them. The nine people he likely killed were all people he already knew, and the buildi