It was a cool and clear day in Chicago around the turn of the 19th century when a group of detectives walked down the dark steps into the basement of a looming three-story building owned by a man named H.H. Holmes himself had been a mystery.

Stories about a charming man with a string of missing women connected to him had traveled all around Chicago,

and now Holmes himself was missing. Could this place hold any clues, they wondered?

The basement was huge, and it was dark. But investigators noticed it was also full of strange

things, like surgical tools and old rags. There was even

a surgical table tucked away in a dark corner. What on earth did a guy need a surgical

table in his basement for? Next to it, there was a patch of churned up earth like something

had recently been buried there. The detectives all had a really bad feeling

about what may have occurred here, and one of them ended up going upstairs to Holmes' office

where his walk-in vault was. But when he opened the door to the vault, he found a room with

no shelves, no money, just barely big enough for someone to turn all the way around in.

And there, inside on the vault door was a footprint.

Like someone had been locked inside and kicked the door as hard as they could in a desperate attempt to get out.

The detective pictured a young woman stepping inside the vault, laughing maybe because

Holmes had told her to try the acoustics, and she wanted to be polite. He could see the door swinging

shut behind her, the latch turning, and then her pounding on the door as she desperately tried to

escape in time. The truth was, there were clues

all over this place about what happened to Holmes and the women who went missing in his wake.

And it wouldn't be long before it was dubbed by the media as a murder castle shortly after

they made this discovery. But who was H. H. H. Holmes, the man at the center of this mystery.

And how did he come to build a murder castle? Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of

Horace Hontings and Mysteries. And as always, I'm your host, Kailen Moore. Today, we are going to

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