As a cemetery tour guide, on my favorite things is finding great stories that have escaped the history books – it’s often just a matter of finding an interesting headstone and looking up the name. But which stones to choose? The most obvious are the big and impressive ones, but sometimes it can also simply…
Author: adam
Kathryn Evans: Witness to History at Rosehill Cemetery
On a recent walk through Rosehill Cemetery, looking for new stories to tell on tours, I came upon the gravestone of Albert H. Dainty, whose epitaph read “Until the day breaks and the shadows flee.” This was a line from The Song of Solomon in the Bible. Translations vary, but the full line is something…
The Skull and Bones of HH Holmes
In 1898, rumors swirled around Englewood that HH Holmes had survived his execution and was now off growing coffee in San Paranarimbo, South America. No such place showed up in maps, but, hey, maybe it was one of those “It’s not on any chart; true placed never are” situations. Over the summer, I appeared on…
HH Holmes and Jack the Ripper: The Chicago Evidence (with podcast)
Listen to the audio above; or check out the podcast on archive.org or iTunes! Or check out the video version on youtube. My massive new book, HH HOLMES: THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE WHITE CITY DEVIL is out now from Skyhorse Publishing, on the heels of starred reviews in Booklist and Library Journal! In…
The Sad Saga of Jeanette Hoy
Newspaper writers of the early 20th century found lots of amusing euphemisms for LGBT couples – enough that one sees references to a young woman and her “aide” and it’s tempting, at least, to wonder if they were more than friends. Jeanette Hoy and Katherine Davis don’t seem to have been a couple, exactly (to…
Podcast: The Hanging and Burial of HH Holmes
Listen above or on iTunes! Well, it’s been a busy week here! News has broken that HH Holmes is being exhumed from his grave in Philadelphia, where he was interred ten feet down in a giant block of cement. I covered the 1898 rumors that his May, 1896 hanging was a hoax in a blog…
Victorian Criminologist’s HH Holmes Data Discovered
In the middle of researching HH Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil, a podcaster asked me if I’d found everything, or if research was just for completism. If I remember right, I said I was mostly looking for minor details at this point, but you never know what you might find. Only…
Podcast: She Dreamed of a Skeleton
Listen above, at archive.org or check out the podcast on iTunes! In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chicago papers published a number of articles about how many ghost stories there were on Sheridan Road. One of them came up just a bit in my HH Holmes research – the legend of a…