The Devil Baby of Hull House
The legend of Hull House is commonly known to the people of Chicago. Hull House was a settlement house back in the early 1900s for immigrants. A woman gave birth to a child whose father was the devil. The mother, disgusted by the child, abandoned the baby at Hull House. The owner, Jane Addams, hid the baby in the attic and raised the child. The child died at a young age. Now, if you look into the second floor window of Hull House, you will see the face of the devil look back at you.
In 1889, Jane Addams founded Hull House as a shelter for hapless women and children in one of Chicago’s worst neighborhoods. A rumor spread through the Italian immigrant population that a devout Catholic woman hung a picture of the Virgin Mary on her wall and her atheist husband tore it down, proclaiming he’d rather have the devil himself in residence. Soon after, the woman became pregnant and gave birth to a hideously deformed child-some say with scales, horns, and cloven hooves.
To spare it from community torment, she left the creature at Hull House.
Here the stories diverge. One claims members of the Hull House staff took the infant to be baptized, but that it danced and laughed and broke away from the priest before the ceremony was completed. Thereafter it was incarcerated in the upper floors of the house, where its ghostly image can still be seen in the upper windows. Another version states Addams herself planned to baptize the baby after the priest refused, but when she turned her back on it whilst making preparations in the church it vanished and was never seen again.
Stories of the Devil Baby (which are allegedly the basis for the film Rosemary’s Baby) persisted for years, people would come to Hull House demanding to see the child. Jane Addams devoted forty pages of her autobiography to debunking the story, but did report therein that footsteps were heard and an apparition seen in one of the upper rooms.
Hull House is considered to be one of Chicago's most haunted buildings. Although the nature of the building was for all intents good there have been several times throughout the years where events have been on the grim side.
The building itself was built at 800 South Halstead Street in 1856 by Charles J. Hull (hence the name of the building). The neighbourhood was seen to be quite 'fashionable' and life looked to be good for Hull, his wife and their children. Unfortunately Hulls wife passed away leaving him to care for their two children who also passed away within a decade of another and quite young.
Hull eventually moved to another part of Chicago but it would seem his deceased wife chose to stay, haunting the room she died in.
The house itself survived the Chicago Fire of 1871 but the neighbourhood did not fair so well. Soon the area became filled with immigrants and the reputation of the area dropped significantly. In the mid 1870's the house became a home for the elderly poor and no doubt saw more deaths during that time.
Although many more mysterious events took place in the building (small unexplainable fires, the appearance of a woman in white, figures seen about the halls, curtains refusing to stay closed in one of the empty rooms) it was not until 1913 that an event began that saw Hull House enter the more mysterious side of Chicago's history.
In 1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Starr co-founded Hull House, a 'settlement house' where the immigrants from many nationalities and cultures could come and be socially reformed. It was here that these working class people could come and take part in programs and education to allow them a better footing in their new country. The programs were a success and more buildings were taken on by the founders in order to spread the program wider and further afield.
But it was one day in 1913, after many years of successfully running this settlement house, that events took on a strange and possibly sinister turn...
Three Italian women entered the building with much fuss and excitement. They demanded to see the devil baby!
The residents (Hull House volunteers) stated they had no idea what they were talking about but the excited women persisted. They knew the devil baby was in the building and they kept demanding to see it.
If there was a devil baby on site the residents would surely know about it as it was unmistakable with its cloven hooves, tail, pointed ears and ability to speak even at that early age.
Although the Italian women eventually left they were but the first of many, many people who made their way to the house in order to see this devil for themselves. Hundreds, thousands of people from the neighbourhood all made attempts to see the devil baby, some even offered to pay for the opportunity. However none were able to see the child for the residents stated time and time again that it never existed.
It was not just the poor or superstitious who made the journey to the house but even physicians who had heard of the child wanted the opportunity to study it. Soon people from outside of the Near West Chicago area were calling by, people from all over the country wanted to have a good look.
For about six weeks there was a heavy flow of traffic throughout the neighbourhood as people made their way to Hull House, all to be told to leave that the story was just an 'old wives tale', albeit one that had gotten some pretty good legs under it.
As for who this devil baby was and how it came to be at Hull House... well there are several different versions of the story but two seem to have the most tellings:
A devoutly Catholic woman hanged a picture of the virgin Mary on the wall but her aethiest husband tore it down. He stated that he would rather have the devil himself in residence in the home rather than that picture on the wall. Several months later the woman gave birth to a deformed child – hooves, claws, tail, pointed ears. The shock was too much for her to bare and she passed away, the husband took the child to Hull House and left it on the door step.
The other version concerns a man whose wife gave birth to six daughters. The husband was enraged by the lack of a son and cried out one night that he would rather her give birth to the devil than another girl... and you can guess what happened next.
From here the stories converge with the child being taken into care at Hull House. The child was said to be quite a little fiend and was capable of the greatest of blasphemies. The heads of the organisation took it upon themselves to have the child baptised in order to sooth it of its demonic afflictions but the baptism did not go to plan. The child escaped their clutches at the waters edge and took off skipping across the tops of the pews.
They were able to recapture the baby and then had it locked in the attic of the house.
From there it is not known what happened except somehow this story got around and now thousands of people were turning up to get a look.
The visitors and the story seemed to run out of steam and the legend was all but forgotten
That's not quite all there is to this tale. Though it might not be connected, when the house was being renovated near the turn of this millennia there were a number of reports concerning the sounds of a child's cry coming from the attic and gardens...
Jane Addams, although bothered by the near ending flow of visitors, did find this event in the homes history to be interesting, so much so that she wrote quite a long and extensive article about it in the Atlantic Monthly way back in 1916.
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