I January, seventeenth of eighteen. Ninety four, a couple stood before a minister at the vendor, hotel in Denver, Colorado, Henry Howard and Georgiana Yoke were about to be married. Standing near them was their witness and name many Williams. The bride had come from Indiana to escape a scandalous reputation and had found work in Chicago at a store owned by her she was a tall slender woman about twenty five years of age with blue eyes and blonde hair, and she was madly in love with Henry. It sounds wonderful, it sounds perfect actually, but there was trouble in paradise even before they met the minister there at the hotel you see Henry was already married.

he was in fact married to two other women and many the woman standing as witness was actually Henry's. Mistress of over a year even Henry's name was fake. real name had been abandoned long before, and it would be months before Georgiana would discover who he really was. Sometimes we think we know a person only to discuss that we were fooled community is built on trust, and I trust allows us to make connections to let down our guard and to feel safe when that trust is broken, no our minds quickly, shifted, disappointment and stress and outright fear sure it happens. Less often now in the age of Facebook and social media, but in the late teen hundreds very little sister

in the way of a person falsifying their identity and Henry Howard or whoever he was prior to that moment in Denver at turn that skill into an art few people knew this about. Henry though, in fact, few people could have imagined what deep dark secrets boiled. Just beneath the surface of this smiling young groom and when the world finally did find out exactly ten, months later. They could barely contain their horror. I'm Aaron Monkey and this is lore. Henry Howard was born in New Hampshire in eighteen, sixty one as Herman Budgets, his parents.

We're wealthy, well respected people in their community and their son was born into that privilege, but from an early age, Herman was a problem child constantly getting into debt. According to much himself as a child. His classmates forced him to view and touch a human skeleton. After learning that he was afraid of the town doktor, there prank backfired. Generating a deep fascination rather than frightening him off, and that obsession with death would only grow. Soon. The boy was expressing interest in medicine. One report claims that he would actually perform surgery on animals along with his excellent performance in school. He was able to pursue that interest and enter metal. School in rolling at the University of Michigan as H, H, homes in eighteen, seventy nine far from home and with access to resources that he previously lacked college allowed homes to get native. It was there that he devised an easy way to make money a drive,

fuel many of his future crimes it involved. Stealing a cadaver from the medical lab homes were disfigure. The corpse plant, the body somewhere that gave at the appearance of being the victim of a tragic accidents and then of days later, he would approach a life insurance company with a policy for his deceased relative and collect the cash is fine insurance window in Michigan netted him twelve thousand five hundred dollars, but he knew his welcome was wearing thin after collecting the money you vanished, abandoning school and his new wife and child who never saw him again. He moved around the country after that doing legitimate work, but also learning his way around the business world

master the art of buying product on credit, avoiding the bills, selling the items and then vanishing with the prophet armed. With that skill, he soon settled in Englewood, just south of Chicago and that's where he met Dr Elizabeth Holden. It was one thousand eight hundred and eighty five Holmes was trying to avoid creditors from all around the country, but rather than vanish into obscurity, he chose to hide in plain sight. He married his second wife, polygamous Lee of course, and took it at a local drugstore owned and run by Doktor Elizabeth Holden, whose husband was dying of cancer homes spent next, two years becoming more and more essential to Holden's business pain. Her for ship in the business and building relationships with customers. When Mr Holden finally passed away, the payments from homes stopped and MRS Holden became upset threatening to end their business partnership, but nothing happened. Nothing happened because Doktor Holden Mister,

Recently vanished when asked about her disappearance homes, Toby authorities that she had moved out West to live with family rights after she had signed over the business to him, of course, and the police bought the lie. Homes operated the drugstore as if nothing had happened, growing the business and continuing his chess game of evading creditors, but when the empty lot across the street became available, he couldn't resist the temptation homes you see had bigger plans. The world's colombian exhibition was scheduled to be hosted in Chicago in eighteen. Ninety three and he envisioned a hotel that could how's the countless visitors who would travel to the area is project was lovingly called the castle, which was it far from the truth. It was fifty feet wide and over one hundred sixty feet, long taking up half a city blue with three stories and abasement, even eventually, over one hundred rooms within its walls and homes. Ever them

Grow manager took on the task of project architect, refusing to share the plans with anyone else, Workers on the building asked questions naturally, but when they did, homes would replace them most of the men. On the project, never lasted more than two weeks all told over five hundred carpenters and craftsmen worked on the castle, true to form homes managed to avoid paying most of them as well. He would accuse them of shoddy work and refuse their wages some suit him, but he managed to put those cases off long enough that they eventually gave up once completed homes, move the drug store to the new buildings, ground floor and rent it out space to other shops. His personal offices were located on the top floor and the remaining space was rented

as temporary living quarters marketed as a boarding house for young single women. The castle was open for business. Unfortunately, not everyone who stayed there managed to survive the hospitality that homes offered them when Missus Pansy Lee arrive from New Orleans. She rented a room at the castle. She was a widow and had traveled all over the United States before arriving in Chicago to settle down, when homes learn that she kept four thousand dollars in cash in the false bottom of her trunk. He kindly offered to keep it in his store vault for her missus dot. Lee decline the offer and vanished a short time later.

While some people came to the castle for lodging, others were looking for work. One of the requirements that homes imposed was that all of his employees there were to have life insurance policies for the sum of five thousand dollars. Homes remember knew the life insured business very well, when seventeen year old Genie Thompson arrive from southern Illinois. Looking for work, homes saw an opportunity. She was young and pretty The exact sort of blonde hair blue eyed beauty that he preferred, and he quickly gave her a job in casual conversation. Jenny let slip at her family didn't actually know where she was. She had told them that she was travelling to New York, but the offer of a good job was enough to keep her right there in Chicago. She told homes that she couldn't wait to tell her parents about her good fortune before. She did, though, be escorted

off to her room, and she was never seen again and one thousand eight hundred and ninety NED Connor arrived at the castle. Looking for work, he traveled with his wife Julia unusually tall for a woman that nearly six and their young daughter Pearl NED was a watchmaker and jeweller and homes hired him right away, but it was NED's wife who captured his interest Must homes soon fired his bookkeeper and gave the job to Julia, not long after it begin, to be obvious that homes was more than a little friendly with nets. Wife NED, for his part, turned a blind eye. It seems he was glad to have a good job with a steady paycheck and a roof over his head. When Juliet became pregnant, though NED took the hint he packed up filed for divorce and left her and pearl in care homes who immediately took out life insurance policies on both of them, but homes had a new problem. Julia knew the business too well, and she presented a three.

To his illicit activities. Homes found a solution. We told Julia that he would marry her, but only if she would have an abortion Leah resisted at first, but finally, on December, twenty fourth of eighteen, ninety one she gave in she asked homes to put pearl to bed, and then he led her to the basement where he had a makeshift operating room. Julia and Pearl were never seen again, that same winter homes summoned demanding Charles Chapel to his office chapel performed odd jobs around the castle. But he had a particular skill that homes required. He was incredibly gifted in the craft of articulating skeleton Chapel arrived in homes led him to a second floor room where the body of a woman lay on a table. According to chattels own testimony to the authorities, the body had been skinned like a jack rabbit. He assumed, since homes was a doctor that he had simply been performing an autopsy on a patient and

pushed his doubts to the back of his mind. Homes would pay chapel thirty six dollars to strip the flesh off the body and prepare the bones for articulation, The finnish skeleton was sold to a doctor Pauling of the handsome in medical college. Doktor Pauling would often look at the skeleton in his private office and marvel at how unusual it was to see a woman nearly six feet, tall. Eventually, homes made a critical mistake by ironically, it was his old love of insurance scams that caught up with him in the end after killing his right hand, man, Benjamin title and attempting to pass the death off as an accident to the insurance company, the authorities caught window. The crime

tracked him down. He was finally arrested in Boston on November, seventeenth of eighteen, ninety four ten months to the day from his wedding ceremony in Denver Hotel before his I'll began. However, the castle was mysteriously guided by fire. Thankfully, the author These had already been able to search the building, and after doing so, they had given its a new name, the murder house. The authorities discovered that, like any boarding house at the time, the key so had a reception room, a waiting room and many rooms for residents to live in, but the building had more inside its walls than was expected. There were secret chambers, trap, doors, peoples and hidden laboratories, aside from the thirty five guest rooms. The second floor was a labyrinth of passages. Some doors opened on brick walls, some could only be opened from one side and others were hidden from sight

cleanly trap door is led to staircases that lead to hidden chambers. There were even alarms in all of the rooms that would alert homes in his quarters if any of his prisoners had tried to escape some of the rooms were windowless and could be sealed off and made air tight if necessary. Some were equipped with gas jets that were fed by pipes from the basement. Others were lined with his best us and had visible scorch marks on the floor, and then there was the vault. It was a room that could fit. A single person, and only then, if they were standing, the walls inside the vault were lined with iron plates, broken only by a handful of gas fixtures and a trap door that led to a shoot on the.

side of the door was a single footprint the size of a woman's boots. It was a homemade gas chamber that was designed to deliver corpses straight to the basement when the police descended to the lowest level of the building. They discovered that homes had expanded the basement beyond the foundation of the building and out beneath the sidewalk He did this to make room for all of his equipment here they found the dissection table still splattered with blood jars of poison filled a shelf and a large wooden box near by contain multiple female skeletons. A crematorium was built into one wall which still contained ash and bone fragments. A search also found valuables that belong to some of the victims, a watch that belong to many Williams, scraps of fabric tintype,

Photographs and a ball of women's hair, carefully wrapped in cloth, the bones of a child were found buried in a pits, and the remnants of a bloody dress were recovered from a wood burning stove. When NED Connor was later ass to identify the fabric, he confirmed it belonged to his wife Julia. A rack designed to stretch bodies was also discovered beneath the dirt floor. They found a vat of corrosive acid and too quick line. Pits used for quickly dissolving the flesh off of corpses. There are human skulls, shoulder blade, ribs, a hip, socket and countless other human remains.

whatever the police had hoped to find that day, they were unprepared for the truth. In the end, they had discovered a medieval charnel house right beneath their feet it's easy to feel safe in our own neighborhood, walking past the closed doors and manicured lawns but what goes on behind those walls is never something that we can be sure of each and every person we meet, whereas a SK and we're only allowed to peek behind it. If they let us decide,

is built on the idea that we can trust the people around us that we can take our neighbours, our family, even our co workers at face value and enter into relationships with them, but with every relationship comes risk, we risk disappointment. We risk pain and betrayal, and for some of us we even risk are very safety. European Matt makers of the fifteenth century would sometimes mark unexplored areas of their maps with a warning here there be monsters, there's danger in the places we haven't explored, and while this is true, then of undiscovered continents, it is.

ways been true of humanity beneath the surface behind the mask hides the monster on May seventh of eighteen. Ninety six. After a final meal of boiled, eggs, dried toast and a cup of coffee h, H, homes was led to the gallows. At my immense in prison, a black hood was placed over his head and as the crowd outside the prison wall, shouted their insults and jeers. He was positioned over the trap door when it opened homes dropped and his head snap to the side, but rather than killing him quickly, the rope had somehow broken his neck and left him alive. The crowd watched for over fifteen minutes as homes hung from the news,

fingers and feet twitching and dancing before his heart. Finally, stop beating Holmes was buried in an unmarked grave in Holy Cross Cemetery, just south of Philadelphia. As per his request, there was no autopsy and his body was buried in a coffin filled with cement homes. You see was afraid that someone would dig up his body and use his skeleton for science and he was probably right. We don't know how many people he killed homes confess to a variety of numbers. Even changing his story again on the hangman's platform, some experts who have studied the missing person reports from the world's colombian exhibition placed the possible death toll is high, is two hundred or so much we. don't know about homes, a man whose entire life seemed to be one elaborate lie built a top another. Like some MA house of cards.

Will forever remain a mystery to us, a monster hidden behind the mask that was painted to look just like you or me, but one last insight into the man can be found in his written confession. I was born. the devil in me. He wrote. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world and he has been with me sense.

The story of H, H homes and his murder house has been thrilling readers and listeners for over a century and its honestly not difficult to understand why, when people settle into a new home whether permanently or temporarily, they tend to assume that their safe. The actions of homes, however, turns that notion on its head. But it's not the first time a larger has found themselves. at risk. In fact, if we go back one more century, there's another chilling example of this sort of deadly betrayal stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

The writer appeared at sunset. His This was in need of care and he himself asked about food food and a room Anyone could tell from the moment the stranger open his mouth that he was french. Adding context is everything right, being French, wasn't abnormal for sure, but being French in Colonial Connecticut in one thousand seven hundred and seventy seven, Certainly was it made it a lot easier for people to guess what your job was to see while the colony to some day become Americans were battling, the british forces each side had brought in allies. The British had there has seen mercenaries hired straight from Germany, while the Americans had help from France, so this writer was at once both a stranger and an ally he stepped inside the horse for tavern ass. The sun was going down and

planted himself and his heavy saddlebags at one of the tables. He probably had every reason to keep to himself and ignore the crowd that was drinking around him, but the legend says that he was more social than that each added drank laughed and eight, and then he retired for the night. They say it was a struggle to claim the stairs to his room. But the saddle bags were heavy and awkward, but as far as any one could tell he made it to his bed, the trouble was it was the last any one would ever see him well sort of Weeks. Later, more frenchmen arrived at the tavern there in Canton they were clearly military officers and they were looking for their missing countryman. According to them, he had been carrying a month's worth of payroll for the french forces gathered in New York. They had been following his trail for days in all of the clues went cold right. There

the horse for tavern. The tavern owner shrugged sure he remembered the traveller. They were probably a dozen or more men who could say the same, but he D, did the following morning, and they never saw him again. So the Frenchman moved on hoping the trail would pick up in the next town. They never found him Or his saddle bags full of gold and silver. Of course, stories like that have a way of evolving into legend and sometimes, as we ve seen through countless examples in history. Those legends take on a more frightening tone. Not long after the Frenchman went missing. A local farmer claim to see the ghostly shape of a writer moving through the fog around

the farming in river, just west of town he claimed the writer was dressed in a french uniform and was making his way toward New York. Even the horse was frightening with eyes that were said to glow, but we don't know if the writers eyes glowed, because according to the farmers who have seen him over the years, he doesn't have a head. The visions still happen today. By the way the number of people have reported seen headless man on horseback out west of town near the river. It said that when their headlights pass over the shape of the writer it just sort of passes right through as if he and the horse are nothing more than a memory and in some ways I suppose that's true. Many years after the Frenchman disappearance the horse for a tavern burned to the ground in the process of cleaning up the debris and making the foundation ready for a new building, workers discovered something grisly there very just

Beneath the surface of what would have been the seller of the tavern was the skeleton of a man. There were no clothes and no other signs. That could definitively pointed this being the answer to the mystery of the vanished frenchmen, but most people felt certain about it, not because of any clue that was hidden among the remains, but because of a clue that was missing. The skeleton you see didn't have a head this

a soda floor was researched, written and produced by me. Aaron Maggie, with music by Chad. Lawson VOR is much more than just a podcast cast. There's a book series available and bookstores in online and two seasons of the television show on Amazon. Prime video check them both out. If you want more lore in your I've I also make an executive produce a whole bunch of other podcast, all of which I think you'd enjoy my production, company, grim and mild. specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of a dark and the historical you can learn about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grim and mild dot com, and you also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, just search for more pine

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