H. H. Holmes Quotes

“As best anyone could tell, the owner also was a forgiving soul. [Holmes] did not seem at all concerned when now and then a guest checked out without advance notice, leaving her bills unpaid. That he often smelled vaguely of chemicals — that in fact the building as a whole often had a medicinal odor — bothered no one. He was, after all, a physician, and his building had a pharmacy on the ground floor.”

“I am convinced that since my imprisonment I have changed woefully and gruesomely from what I was formerly in feature and figure…My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil—that the similitude is almost completed.”

“It was a game for Holmes, Geyer realized. He possessed them all and reveled in his possession.”

“Holmes was warm and charming and talkative and touched them with a familiarity that, while perhaps offensive back home, somehow seemed all right in this new world of Chicago—just another aspect of the great adventure on which these women had embarked. And what good was an adventure if it did not feel a little dangerous?”

“I was born with the devil in me,” [Holmes] wrote. “I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”

“Young women drawn to Chicago by the fair and by the prospect of living on their own had disappeared, last seen at the killer’s block-long mansion, a parody of everything architects held dear.”

“The Chicago Times-Herald wrote of Holmes, ‘He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character.‘”