HH Holmes, one of the first documented American serial killers, unveiled a castle-themed hotel at the 1893 Worlds Fair in Chicago. It wasn’t long until people realized that when guests checked in, they had a tendency not to come back out.
Holmes found an empty lot in Englewood and built a hotel that took up a full city block and climbed three stories into the air. It may seem like an unnecessary amount of space, but Mr. Holmes had built a maze inside the hotel that would’ve made MC Escher green with envy. It featured over a hundred windowless rooms, hallways with distorted proportions, doors leading to brick walls, stairs that ended mid-air, and many more devious tricks to keep his guests confused and scared. If that wasn’t bad enough, he also built it so that he could move the rooms around and change the design layout so that nobody but him knew where anything led at any given time.
After completing this gruesome bit of architecture, Holmes targeted mostly females, luring them in with promises of free accomodations or job opportunities and slowly tortured them to death in a number of sadistic ways such as asphyxiation, starvation, dehydration, and much worse. He was so clever with this design that to this day, nobody can be sure how many people he actually killed with this vacationer’s deathtrap.