The Devil in the White City
Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City masterfully intertwines two true and astonishing stories set during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. It chronicles the grand ambition of Daniel Burnham, the architect racing to create the magnificent "White City," while simultaneously trailing the dark deeds of Dr. H. H. Holmes, America's first serial killer, who used the fair's allure to lure victims to his elaborate "Murder Castle." This gripping historical narrative juxtaposes the heights of Gilded Age innovation with the depths of unimaginable evil, all in one unforgettable time and place.
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- 1. Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.
- 2. I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.
- 3. Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, while others prefer to kill.
Chapter 1: A City of Ambition and a Gathering Darkness
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, America was a nation brimming with raw, untamed energy, and nowhere was this more palpable than in Chicago. A city reborn from the ashes of its Great Fire, it was a place of soaring ambition and profound ugliness, a landscape of stunning new skyscrapers piercing a sky thick with the soot of slaughterhouses. It was a city desperate to shed its reputation as a crude, provincial hub of hog butchering and to announce its arrival on the world stage. The opportunity arrived in the form of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a fair intended to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. The competition to host it was fierce, a battle of civic pride against the established cultural dominance of New York City. When Chicago, against all odds, won the bid, the city’s elite felt a surge of triumph quickly followed by the crushing weight of expectation. They had promised the world a spectacle that would eclipse the 1889 Paris Exposition and its magnificent Eiffel Tower, and they had precious little time to deliver it.
At the heart of this monumental undertaking were two men who represented the pinnacle of architectural genius in the city: Daniel Hudson Burnham and John Wellborn Root. Burnham was the pragmatist, the organizer, a man of immense physical presence and unyielding will, driven by the maxim, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.” Root was his perfect counterpart: the artist, the dreamer, a sensitive and versatile genius who could sketch a masterpiece on a dinner napkin. Together, they were the city’s preeminent architectural firm, and the fair was to be their magnum opus. The challenge laid before them was staggering. They had to transform Jackson Park, a desolate, 600-acre swath of swampy, windswept shoreline on Lake Michigan, into a dream city of gleaming palaces, serene lagoons, and enchanting landscapes. The deadline was unforgiving, the political infighting was vicious, and the very ground beneath their feet seemed determined to swallow their aspirations whole.
While these two men prepared to build a city of light, another man, a far different kind of architect, was quietly making his way to Chicago. He was handsome, charming, and possessed a disarming gaze of startling blue. He called himself Dr. Henry H. Holmes, though his true name was Herman Webster Mudgett, a name he had shed along with his past. Holmes was a creature of the new, anonymous urban landscape, a predator who understood that a bustling, chaotic metropolis was the perfect environment in which to operate. He saw in the city’s indifference not a threat, but an opportunity. Arriving in the suburb of Englewood, just a few miles from the future fairgrounds, Holmes moved with a chilling, methodical purpose. He quickly charmed the owner of a local drugstore, Mrs. Holton, and just as quickly took over her business, her strange disappearance barely causing a ripple in the neighborhood. He was a master of manipulation, a virtuoso of deceit, weaving intricate webs of lies around everyone he met, particularly women. He married multiple times without the inconvenience of divorce, promised love and prosperity, and then, once he had what he wanted—their loyalty, their money—they would simply vanish.
As Burnham and Root began the colossal task of designing their White City, Holmes embarked on a construction project of his own. Across the street from the pharmacy, he acquired a large, empty lot and began building a structure that would become his personal abattoir. To the outside world, it was to be the World’s Fair Hotel, a place to house the millions of visitors expected to flood the city. But its design was a grotesque parody of a normal building. Holmes hired and fired construction crews constantly, ensuring no single person understood the full, nightmarish layout of the interior. The second floor was a labyrinth of over a hundred windowless rooms, connected by twisting hallways and staircases that led nowhere. Doors opened onto brick walls; others could only be locked from the outside. He installed trapdoors in closets, peepholes in walls, and a complex system of gas pipes that fed directly into the sealed rooms. From his office, he could control the flow of gas, turning his hotel into a giant death chamber. An alarm system would alert him if a guest tried to escape. For those who succumbed, a greased chute, hidden behind a false wall, led directly to the basement. There, Holmes had assembled the final tools of his trade: a dissecting table, a furnace large enough to hold a human body, and pits of acid and quicklime. While Chicago’s finest architects sketched blueprints for a temporary paradise, H. H. Holmes was laying the foundation for a permanent hell.
Chapter 2: Blueprints for Heaven and Hell
The dream of the White City was nearly extinguished before the first foundation was even laid. In the brutal winter of 1891, a shadow fell over the enterprise that threatened to plunge it into chaos. John Root, the artistic soul of the fair, the man whose boundless imagination was meant to give the city its form and beauty, fell ill with pneumonia. As a blizzard raged outside, Daniel Burnham kept a desperate vigil at his partner’s bedside, but it was no use. Root died, his final, fevered words a plea: “Do you see now what I have been trying to do?” His death was a devastating blow, not just to Burnham personally, but to the entire project. Burnham lost more than a partner; he lost his other half, the visionary who tempered his own relentless drive. The press speculated that the fair would die with him. But in his grief, Burnham found a new, steely resolve. He would not only complete the fair; he would make it a monument to his fallen friend. He declared, “I will work you all to death,” a promise that was both a threat and a vow of his own dedication.
Now solely in command, Burnham shouldered a burden that would have crushed most men. He knew Chicago alone could not produce the architectural grandeur required. In a move that was both brilliant and politically risky, he summoned the nation’s greatest architects to the city—men from the East Coast establishment, like Richard Morris Hunt and Charles McKim, who looked down on Chicago as a cultural backwater. He gathered them in a single room, a conclave of titanic egos, and through sheer force of will, bent them to a unified vision. They would create a Court of Honor, a stunning collection of massive, neoclassical buildings, all built to the same cornice height and all painted a brilliant, uniform white. This decision would give the fair its iconic look and its nickname: the White City. It was to be a vision of order, harmony, and classical beauty, a stark contrast to the grimy, chaotic city that surrounded it. To shape the land itself, Burnham enlisted the legendary Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park. Now aging and frail, plagued by depression and failing health, Olmsted saw the fair as his last great masterpiece. He battled the unforgiving landscape of Jackson Park, dredging lagoons from the muck, planting thousands of trees, and sculpting a sylvan paradise from a desolate swamp. The construction was a war against time, nature, and finance. A national economic crash, the Panic of 1893, threatened to cut off funding. Labor strikes, led by men like the charismatic union leader Samuel Gompers, brought work to a standstill. And the unforgiving Chicago weather, with its savage winters and torrential rains, relentlessly sought to undo their progress.
As thousands of men toiled to raise this gleaming city from the mud, H. H. Holmes was perfecting his own dark creation just a few miles away. His building, which locals had begun to call “the Castle,” was a marvel of perverse ingenuity. Each floor was a testament to his meticulous planning for murder. On the ground floor were legitimate storefronts—including his own relocated pharmacy—that provided him with an income and a veneer of respectability. But the floors above were a killing factory. The labyrinthine second floor, with its soundproofed rooms and gas jets, was the heart of his operation. The third floor contained more apartments and guest rooms, but the true purpose of the building was revealed in its hidden infrastructure. The secret chute delivered his victims to the basement, a subterranean workshop of horrors. Here, Holmes could indulge his darkest impulses without fear of discovery. He used his surgical skills to dissect the bodies, stripping them of their flesh and selling the articulated skeletons to medical schools. What remained was dissolved in acid or incinerated in his custom-built kiln, so powerful it could reduce bone to fine ash.
Holmes’s genius lay not just in the design of his Castle, but in his manipulation of the systems of modern life. He was a master of credit and debt, charming suppliers into providing him with the materials for his hotel—furniture, steel for a walk-in vault, a massive kiln—and then refusing to pay. He buried his creditors in lawsuits and leveraged the inefficiency of the courts to his advantage. He exploited the desires of the young women who came to him seeking work, independence, or love. He hired them as his stenographers or assistants, seduced them with promises of a life they could only dream of, and often “married” them. One such woman was Julia Conner, the wife of an employee in his building’s jewelry store. Holmes seduced her, and soon both she and her young daughter, Pearl, moved in with him. Before long, both of them vanished forever. Another was Emeline Cigrand, a beautiful and ambitious woman he hired as his secretary. He proposed to her, and she excitedly told her family of her impending marriage to the wealthy and handsome doctor. Then, her letters stopped. When her family inquired, Holmes would calmly explain that she had married another man and moved away, a lie made believable by the transient nature of the city. He was a phantom, hiding in plain sight, his evil perfectly camouflaged by the era’s optimism and the city’s chaotic energy.
Chapter 3: In the Glow of a Thousand Lights
On May 1, 1893, after years of frantic construction, political battles, and seemingly insurmountable odds, the World’s Columbian Exposition opened its gates. Though still unfinished in parts, what the public saw was a miracle. It was a vision of a utopian city rising from the shores of Lake Michigan, a dream rendered in staff, a mixture of plaster and jute fiber that gave the buildings their brilliant white facade. For visitors stepping off the grimy elevated trains from downtown Chicago, the first glimpse of the Court of Honor was breathtaking. Here was a world of monumental scale and sublime harmony, a collection of palaces surrounding a Grand Basin of shimmering water that reflected the sky. It was a testament to Daniel Burnham’s indomitable will and a symbol of America’s soaring confidence. President Grover Cleveland pressed a golden telegraph key, and in an instant, the fair came alive. Thousands of electric lights, a novelty that still felt like magic to most, blazed to life, outlining the buildings in fire. Fountains erupted, and the colossal gold-leafed Statue of the Republic, standing serene in the basin, seemed to bless the entire endeavor.
The fair was a sensory explosion, a showcase of the marvels of the modern age. Visitors could ride the world’s first moving sidewalk, listen to music from John Philip Sousa’s band, and marvel at exotic dancers like “Little Egypt” on the Midway Plaisance—the fair’s mile-long avenue of entertainment and ethnographic displays. But one attraction soon came to dominate all others, becoming the fair’s enduring icon and America’s defiant answer to the Eiffel Tower. It was the invention of a young engineer from Pittsburgh named George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. His creation, a colossal rotating wheel, was a feat of engineering that many had deemed impossible. It stood 264 feet tall, a delicate spiderweb of steel that could carry over 2,000 passengers at a time in its 36 luxurious cars, each the size of a Pullman train car. A ride on the Ferris Wheel offered a god-like perspective, lifting passengers high above the White City, providing a panoramic view of the gleaming fairgrounds, the vast blue of the lake, and the smoky, sprawling city beyond. For Daniel Burnham, the successful launch of the wheel was a moment of profound relief and vindication. It was the one piece of pure, unapologetic engineering spectacle that the fair needed to truly capture the public’s imagination. The White City was not just beautiful; it was thrilling.
This magnificent spectacle, this beacon of progress and civilization, created the perfect shadow for Dr. H. H. Holmes to conduct his work. The fair drew millions to Chicago, flooding the city with an unprecedented tide of humanity. Among them were countless young, single women, lured by the promise of employment and the adventure of a lifetime. They were secretaries, teachers, and shop girls, many leaving their small towns for the first time, filled with a sense of hope and a naivety that made them tragically vulnerable. They were untethered from their families and communities, and in the sheer anonymity of the crowds, their disappearance would go unnoticed for weeks, if not forever. For Holmes, this was the hunting ground he had always dreamed of. His World’s Fair Hotel, conveniently located near the train lines that ran to Jackson Park, was perfectly positioned to ensnare them. He was a master of the first impression, his handsome face, expensive clothes, and professional title as a doctor inspiring immediate trust. He would offer them a room, a job, perhaps even a proposal of marriage. He preyed on their loneliness and their aspirations, making them feel seen and special in a city that so often made people feel invisible.
Once inside the Castle, his victims were utterly at his mercy. The building itself was his accomplice, a disorienting maze designed to confuse and trap. A young woman might check in, write a letter home full of excitement about the fair and her charming new acquaintance, and then simply cease to exist. Her last moments would be spent in a soundproofed, sealed room, the hiss of gas a soft prelude to oblivion, or perhaps locked in the suffocating darkness of Holmes’s massive bank vault near his office. Minnie and Anna Williams, two sisters from Texas who had come into a small fortune, were among those who fell under his spell. Holmes charmed Minnie, convinced her to sign her inheritance over to him, and then murdered her. When her sister, Anna, grew suspicious and came to Chicago to investigate, he met her at the station with a warm smile, took her on a tour of the glorious fair, and then led her back to the Castle to meet the same fate. He was both the charming host and the patient spider, and the dazzling glow of the White City’s thousand lights made it all but impossible to see the darkness of the web he had spun just a few miles away.
Chapter 4: Beneath the Gilded Facade
The White City was more than just an architectural marvel; it was a carefully crafted illusion. It presented a vision of a clean, orderly, and harmonious America, a powerful counter-narrative to the grit, crime, and social unrest of the nation’s rapidly industrializing cities. For the six months of its existence, it was arguably the safest place in the country, patrolled by its own dedicated police force, the Columbian Guard, and kept immaculately clean by a sanitation crew that worked through the night. It was a temporary utopia, a stage set where the nation could act out its highest ideals. Yet, this perfection was a fragile veneer. The gleaming palaces were not made of marble but of staff, a temporary material designed to last only for the summer. The fair was a fleeting dream, and its very existence highlighted the profound and often brutal realities that lay just beyond its gates. It was a world of sharp, irreconcilable contrasts: the classical beauty of the Court of Honor versus the gaudy, commercialized chaos of the Midway; the celebration of technological progress versus the exploitation of the workers who built it; and the brilliant light of human achievement versus the profound darkness lurking within the human soul.
This duality was nowhere more evident than in the life and crimes of H. H. Holmes. He was a product of the same modern, ambitious age that had produced the fair. He was intelligent, entrepreneurial, and exploited the latest technologies and systems—from the science of chemistry to the intricacies of the legal and financial worlds—for his own horrific ends. He was a creature of utter artifice, constantly reinventing himself, adopting new names and personas as easily as he changed his suits. His Castle was a microcosm of this Gilded Age deception: a respectable-looking commercial building on the outside, a factory of death within. While the world marveled at the new wonders on display at the fair, Holmes was engaged in his own kind of industry. He was not just a murderer but a prolific fraudster. He bought goods on credit with no intention of paying, sold worthless "cures" for alcoholism from his pharmacy, and developed an elaborate insurance fraud scheme that would ultimately lead to his downfall. He would take out life insurance policies on his associates and female acquaintances—often with their complicity, as they believed it was a harmless scam—and then murder them to collect the payout. His victims became commodities, their lives valued only for the cash they could generate.
His most important accomplice in these schemes was Benjamin Pitezel, a carpenter and loyal, almost pitiable, follower. Pitezel was a man with a family, a drinking problem, and a weak will that made him susceptible to Holmes’s charismatic manipulation. He became Holmes’s right-hand man, helping him build some of the strange contraptions in the Castle and assisting in his various swindles. Holmes, Pitezel, and a lawyer they brought into the scheme, Jeptha Howe, concocted a plan to fake Pitezel’s death in a lab explosion to collect a $10,000 insurance policy. The plan was for Pitezel to go into hiding while they used an anonymous cadaver from a medical school to stand in for his body. Pitezel’s wife, Carrie, was even made aware of the plan, believing it was the only way to secure her family’s financial future. But Holmes had no intention of letting Pitezel live. In Philadelphia, instead of procuring a substitute corpse, Holmes rendered his loyal associate unconscious with chloroform and then set him on fire, making the death look like an accident. He then proceeded to identify the charred remains as Pitezel’s, fooling both the insurance investigators and Pitezel’s own unsuspecting wife.
Having collected the insurance money, Holmes’s cruelty reached a new, almost unimaginable level. He went to the grieving Carrie Pitezel and, with a performance of profound sympathy, convinced her that her husband was still alive and in hiding in London. He told her that he needed to take three of her five children—Alice, Nellie, and Howard—with him, ostensibly to reunite them with their father later. The distraught and trusting widow agreed. This was the beginning of a grim, nomadic journey across the northern United States and into Canada. Holmes dragged the three children from city to city, all while sending placating letters to their anxious mother. The children were living witnesses to his crime, a dangerous liability he had to manage. They were the last, innocent souls to see the true face of the man behind the charming mask, the devil who had flourished so freely beneath the gilded facade of a proud and progressive age.
Chapter 5: When the Lights Go Out
As the autumn of 1893 deepened, the magic of the White City began to wane. The crowds thinned, the weather turned cold, and a palpable sense of an ending settled over the fairgrounds. On October 28th, a day designated as “American Cities Day,” Chicago’s beloved and charismatic mayor, Carter Harrison, delivered a rousing speech at the fair, a triumphant capstone to the city’s great achievement. “I am proud of Chicago,” he declared. “Chicago is a sublime city... In the name of Chicago I drink to the nations of the earth.” That evening, as he returned home, a disgruntled and mentally unstable office-seeker named Patrick Prendergast slipped into his house and shot him dead. The news of the assassination ripped through the city, turning celebration into mourning. The planned closing ceremonies for the fair were canceled, and a mood of profound shock and sorrow descended. The dream had been shattered. The fair, which had begun with such hope and splendor, now ended under a dark cloud of violence, a grim reminder of the unpredictable chaos that lay just beneath the surface of civilized life. The lights of the White City, which had burned so brightly for six months, were extinguished, plunging the magnificent Court of Honor into darkness.
The aftermath was swift and bleak. The fair’s transient utopia dissolved almost overnight. The crowds vanished, the concessionaires packed up, and the vast, empty palaces were left to the mercy of the brutal Chicago winter. A deep economic depression gripped the nation, and the city was flooded with unemployed men who had come to work on the fair and now had nowhere to go. The fairgrounds became a desolate landscape of peeling paint and silence, a ghost of the vibrant metropolis it had once been. Within months, a series of mysterious fires began to break out, and one by one, the great buildings that had formed the Court of Honor burned to the ground in spectacular, fiery conflagrations, as if the city itself were trying to erase the memory of its fleeting dream. For Daniel Burnham, the fair’s chief architect, the end was bittersweet. He had achieved the impossible, creating a spectacle that had redefined what was possible in architecture and city planning. The fair would influence a generation of architects and give rise to the “City Beautiful” movement. But the personal cost had been immense, and the tragic assassination of his friend, Mayor Harrison, cast a permanent shadow over his triumph.
As the White City’s legacy was being debated and its physical presence erased, H. H. Holmes was becoming a ghost of a different sort. With the fair over, his hunting ground had vanished, and his intricate web of debt and deceit was beginning to unravel. Creditors were closing in, and the insurance company that had paid out the Pitezel policy was growing suspicious. Holmes fled Chicago, a fugitive moving restlessly across the country. He took with him the money and, most chillingly, the three Pitezel children: 15-year-old Alice, 11-year-old Nellie, and 8-year-old Howard. He expertly managed their mother, Carrie Pitezel, from a distance, shuttling her from place to place and feeding her a steady stream of lies about her husband being alive and their eventual reunion. All the while, he was traveling with her children, who were becoming an increasing burden. In his letters to Carrie, Holmes projected an air of paternal concern, while in reality, he was plotting their disposal.
His journey with the children was a horrifying odyssey. He first took them to Indianapolis. There, he rented a small cottage on the city’s outskirts. He took young Howard to the house alone, and the boy was never seen again. He then traveled with the two girls to Toronto. He rented a house at 16 St. Vincent Street, telling the landlord he needed a place for his sister and her two daughters. A neighbor, seeing him digging a large hole in the cellar floor late one night, asked what he was doing. Holmes, ever plausible, replied that he was digging a space to store potatoes for the winter. Shortly after, he checked out of the house, leaving behind a large, heavy trunk. With all three children now gone, Holmes continued his travels, his trail of deception growing more convoluted by the day. But his luck was running out. A Pinkerton detective, hired by the suspicious insurance company, was now on his trail, and an old cellmate from a brief stint in a St. Louis jail, a train robber named Marion Hedgepeth, had tipped off the authorities to Holmes’s insurance scam. The net was closing. When the lights went out in the White City, the darkness that had thrived in its shadows was finally about to be dragged into the unforgiving light of day.
Chapter 6: An Unmasking in the Dark
The capture of H. H. Holmes in Boston in November 1894 was not the end of the story, but the beginning of a final, horrifying chapter. While Holmes sat in a Philadelphia jail, confidently expecting to beat the charge of insurance fraud, a Philadelphia detective named Frank Geyer was tasked with a far more dreadful mission: to find the three missing Pitezel children. Geyer, a veteran of the force who had lost his own wife and daughter, brought a somber dedication to the case. He began a methodical, soul-crushing journey, tracing the killer’s winding path across North America. It was a new kind of police work, a painstaking reconstruction of a man’s movements through hotel registries, rental agreements, and the faint memories of strangers. He was not just hunting a man; he was hunting for the ghosts of children, following a trail that grew colder and more desperate with each passing day. His investigation led him first to Indianapolis, to the small cottage Holmes had rented. After a difficult search, he found what he was looking for: buried in the cellar were the horribly burned remains and bone fragments of a young boy, later identified as Howard Pitezel.
The discovery was grim confirmation of the police’s worst fears, but Geyer pressed on, his resolve hardened by the horror. He followed the trail to Toronto, to the house on St. Vincent Street where Holmes had stayed with Alice and Nellie. The current residents told him of the previous tenant and the large, heavy trunk he had left behind. Geyer, along with Toronto police, unearthed the trunk from a corner of the cellar. When they pried it open, a sickening smell filled the air. Inside, they found the naked, decomposing bodies of the two Pitezel girls, crammed together in the small space. Alice had been placed in the trunk first, and Nellie on top of her. A hole had been bored into the trunk’s lid, and a rubber hose led to it from a gas pipe, revealing Holmes’s cruel and calculated method. He had gassed the two sisters to death. The discovery of the children’s bodies caused a media sensation. The story of the charming doctor who was secretly a monster, and the dogged detective who unmasked him, captivated and horrified the nation. The public, which had so recently been enchanted by the technological marvels of the White City, was now confronted with a marvel of human depravity.
The focus then shifted to the source of the evil: the Murder Castle in Chicago. As police began a systematic excavation of the building, the full, unbelievable scope of Holmes’s crimes came to light. They uncovered his soundproofed hanging chamber, the walk-in vault where he had asphyxiated his victims, and the greased chute leading to the basement. In that subterranean hell, they found the dissecting table, the giant furnace with scraps of human bone still inside, and vats of acid. They found remnants of jewelry and clothing belonging to dozens of missing women. The Castle was a factory designed for the efficient disassembly of human beings. While Holmes confessed to 27 murders, the true number of his victims was likely far higher, possibly numbering in the hundreds. The transient women who had vanished during the fair, their disappearances written off as the common tragedies of a big city, were now given a terrifying, anonymous monument.
Holmes’s trial for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel was a spectacle. He was calm, articulate, and utterly without remorse, firing his own lawyers and conducting his own defense with unnerving confidence. He lied pathologically, spinning contradictory stories and confessions, seemingly reveling in the attention. He was the ultimate performer, a man who had built his entire existence on a foundation of lies, and he continued the performance until the very end. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang. On the gallows, his neck did not snap instantly; he died slowly, a final, gruesome end to a life of calculated cruelty. In the end, the story of the 1893 World’s Fair is one of two architects. One was Daniel Burnham, who, despite personal tragedy and immense obstacles, marshaled the forces of ingenuity and collaboration to build a beautiful, ephemeral city that inspired a nation. He would go on to shape the modern American city, his legacy written in the grand urban plans of Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. The other was H. H. Holmes, an architect of darkness, who used the very same forces of modernity—anonymity, technology, and ambition—to construct a private empire of torture and death. The Devil in the White City is a powerful, chilling testament to the two extremes of human potential that converged in one place, at one time. It reveals that in the shadow of the greatest light, the deepest darkness can flourish, and that the gleaming promise of progress will always be haunted by the capacity for evil that lies within the human heart.