The Haunting of Hull House

Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, part of the University of Illinois Chicago, streamed this family-day program in October 2020. After an introduction by curatorial manager Ross Jordan, museum educators Stefan and Nadia Maragha explain how the settlement founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889 came to be surrounded by urban legends.

They tell the Devil Baby story in several of the versions that circulated among the neighbourhood’s immigrant communities, describe the crowds that lined up for weeks hoping to see the child, and explain why Addams disliked the rumour yet wrote about it at length. They then turn to the Lady in White, linked to Charles Hull’s wife, and to Addams’s own account of a water pitcher kept on the attic stairs. Staff, including education manager Michael Romero, share odd experiences of their own in the house, and the hosts point out that many online “ghost photos” of Hull-House are just smudges on windows.

Few haunted sites have a museum this willing to explain its own legends. The educators follow Addams’s lead in treating the Devil Baby as folklore with a purpose: the 1913 rumour, which drew crowds for about six weeks, carried real anxieties about childbirth, infant death and harsh marriages among the neighbourhood’s immigrant families.

The staff anecdotes are offered as personal experiences, not evidence, and the hosts are frank that there is no record of violence at the house. For the history, Addams’s own account of the Devil Baby, which opens The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (1916), is the place to go next.