I finished the book The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson this past weekend and must say I really enjoyed it. It is the story of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and H H Holmes - the first serial killer in US history. Holmes killed scores of young women at his World's Fair Hotel in the South Side Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. I had wanted to read the book ever since I saw a short feature about the story on WGN Television News one night (see it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kntRF16RMy0). A WGN reporter interviewed Jeff Mudgett, the great great grandson of Holmes (Holmes real name was Mudgett), and followed him on a tour of the Englewood Post Office, the site of Holmes' "torture castle." It seems to me that Mudgett and the reporter implied the Post Office was the actual building where Holmes did his killing. If I had paid closer attention, I would have heard a local historian saying that the original building was just east of the present post office. Which means of course that I was right about one thing - those ghostly, agonized screams coming from the basement of the post office are not from Holmes' victims but from the ghosts of postal employees past.
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