Hull-House

Real-estate developer Charles J. Hull built his Italianate country house on Halsted Street in 1856, when the Near West Side was still semi-rural. By 1889, when Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr chose it for their experiment in social reform, the neighbourhood had become one of Chicago’s most crowded immigrant districts, home above all to newly arrived European immigrant families. Hull-House grew into a thirteen-building complex offering classes, clubs, a theatre, a kindergarten and a base for campaigns on child labour, sanitation and women’s rights; Addams, its head resident until her death in 1935, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Today the original mansion and dining hall survive as the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, part of the University of Illinois Chicago.

The house already had a ghost when the women moved in. Addams wrote in Twenty Years at Hull-House that tenants kept a large pitcher of water on the attic stairs, apparently because the attic was believed to be haunted – perhaps, she guessed, from the old belief that ghosts cannot cross water. The ghost was said to be Melicent Hull, Charles Hull’s wife, who probably died of tuberculosis in the house in 1860. Addams’s friend Louise de Koven Bowen later recalled that guests in one second-floor room often asked to move, and that Addams and Mary Rozet Smith once saw a woman in white at the foot of the bed there who vanished through a locked door.

The most famous story arrived in October 1913, when the Chicago Examiner reported that thousands of people in the 19th Ward believed a “devil child” was being kept at Hull-House. For about six weeks crowds came to the door, some offering money to see it. In the version Addams traced to her Italian neighbours, a pious woman’s atheist husband tore down her holy pictures, saying he would rather have the devil in the house – and their child was born with hooves, pointed ears and a tail; other communities had their own versions. There was, of course, no baby.

Addams took the rumour seriously as folklore. In a 1916 essay in The Atlantic and in The Long Road of Woman’s Memory she argued that the tale gave the neighbourhood’s women – many of them overworked, grieving children lost to disease and short of medical care – a way to voice their hardships and to rebuke cruel husbands, and that it briefly restored elderly women’s authority as keepers of moral tradition. The museum continues that approach, presenting its ghost stories as urban folklore and running evening “Haunting of Hull-House” folklore tours each October.

A lady in white identified as Melicent Hull, seen standing and watching in Addams’s bedroom and office, in the galleries and on the staircases; according to legend, the face of the “Devil Baby” at the attic windows; and the old attic haunting that led tenants to keep water on the stairs.

The second-floor rooms, especially Jane Addams’s former bedroom, the staircases and the attic of the original 1856 mansion at 800 South Halsted Street.

The Devil Baby is one of Chicago’s most-studied urban legends, analysed by Addams herself and by folklorists since. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum runs October “Haunting of Hull-House” folklore tours, and the house appears in many Chicago ghost-tour routes.