I’m sitting here, with a notebook in my hand.  The power is out and I’m listening to the sound of tree limbs breaking under the weight of accumulated ice and snow.   They say that the power won’t be restored for several days.  To make my sense of isolation complete: the phone lines are down.** 

To add to the gloomy atmosphere, I’m reading a story about a serial killer.  The book is called The Devil in the White City, which tells the story of America’s first serial killer: H.H. Holmes.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Holmes, these are some the facts of his story:  In the late 1800’s a murderer moved to Chicago and took over a drug store in the suburb of Englewood.

He was a very charismatic person: soft-spoken and good looking. Often he could disarm someone with a smile or a touch.  He employed these traits to swindle unsuspecting businessmen out of their money, and to lure his victims to their deaths. 

Shortly after taking up residence in his new store, he began building a structure that would capture the public’s imagination when his crimes were uncovered, and would influence popular visions of horror from The Texas Chainsaw Massicare, to Saw, to Arcade’s Murder World in the comic book The X-Men. 

Holmes’s castle, as it became known, was a three story building that took up an entire city block.  The first floor held a drugstore, restaurant and various (mostly fraudulent) business ventures.  The second and third floors were a mixture of offices, living quarters, apartments that could be rented out and rooms designed for the torture of unsuspecting victims.  Hidden among the rooms was a greased chute that dropped from a third story room into the basement, and a gas chamber.

In the basement Holmes hid a crematory, a dissection table and vats of quicklime, which he used to dispose of the victims that he didn't sell for scientific or medical study.

Though Holmes built the castle prior to the announcement of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, he planned for and took full advantage of the event.  Hundreds of thousands of people came to Chicago over a six-month period.  A percentage of which vanished, never to be heard from again. 

By the time Holmes was caught, he could be linked to nine deaths.  One man, four children and four women.  He was suspected of killing many more. 

But the story dosen’t end there.  In his memoirs, Holmes claimed that he had been born with the devil inside of him.  He said that he couldn’t help himself.  That even as he wrote his story, he could feel his head elongating to resemble that of a demon’s. 

Just because Holmes thought he had the devil in him doesn’t make his story a paranormal one.  Or does  it?  Shortly after Holmes’s execution, the detective who uncovered Holmes’s crimes fell ill.  The warden at the prison where he was held committed suicide.  The foreman of the jury was electrocuted.  The priest who administered last rites was found dead under mysterious circumstances.  The father of one murder victim was disfigured in a boiler accident.  And the District Attorney’s office burned down, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.

Perhaps Holmes did have the devil in him.  Or perhaps the coincidences were just that: Coincidences.

There is another story out there that is similar to Holmes’s.  This one involves another very charismatic murderer.  One who also posed as a merchant.  One who, along with her family, would lure unsuspecting travelers into her home.  One who used her home to trap and murder these people.

This person was Kate Bender.  Her family, known popularly as The Bloody Benders, were responsible for the deaths of many unsuspecting travelers in the rural Kansas area.

In 1872 (14 years before Holmes arrived in Chicago.  16 before Jack The Ripper became infamous for his killing spree) the Bender family (Ma and Pa, Katie and John Jr.) constructed a home between the settlements of Thayer and Galesburg, Kansas.  The home consisted of a one-room building over a cellar, with a trap-door on the inside.  The room was divided with a canvas curtain.  The front part of the house became a general store and a wayside inn for travelers. 

Over the next eighteen months, The Bender family murdered many of these travelers, looted the corpses and then buried them on the family’s land.  Travelers were often drawn in by the charismatic Katie Bender – who became known in the area as a talented medium.

The Benders seated their victims with their backs to the canvas curtain.  A ‘place of honor’ at the head of a table.  Then while Katie distracted them, Pa Bender would sneak up to them from behind the curtain, and hit them from behind.  Then, much like Holmes would in later years, the Benders would hide the bodies in the cellar until such time that they could bury it in the orchard. 

It was relatively easy to vanish out on the Kansas prairie at that time.  If a relative came looking for their missing family member, the Benders would offer their condolences, and suggest that perhaps the missing traveler was delayed.  “Or perhaps the Indians got him.”

Eventually, the disappearances in the area became so frequent that the members of the nearby Osage township voted to have a house-to-house search in order to find evidence that someone was causing the disappearances of travelers.

Within a few days of the meeting, neighbors of the Benders noticed that their farm appeared abandoned.  A search of the homestead was conducted to determine if the family was the latest victims.  Instead, the searchers found something far grizzlier:

More than two dozen bodies were found on the Bender property.  Most of them were buried in the well-tended orchard.  It is suspected that there may have been more lying in undiscovered graves. 

By 1886, the Bender home was reduced to a hole in the ground.  Relic seekers had stolen everything that could be pried up – including the stones that lined the cellar where the Bender’s victims met their fate.

But many curiosity seekers claimed to have been scared away by ghosts that haunted the land.  First the house, then the hole where the cellar stood.  Some even say that the ghost of Kate Bender is among them. 

Back here, in the 21st century, I can’t help but think about that last similarity between the stories of the Bloody Benders and H.H. Holmes. 

Are the stories merely tragic tales, or are they truly paranormal?

As is often the case in stories like this, we fail to comprehend the reasons why.  Are we ourselves tacking on the supernatural element to help us explain the mystery?  To help us classify the unexplainable?  To give a face to an un-faceable horror?

Do the cases that haunt us truly Haunt us?  Or do we just want them to?

What do you think?

**Lest people think I sat there, like an author in a Stephen King novel, banging on a typewriter while isolated from the world in a frozen shack: shortly after I finished writing this longhand, the electricity was repaired, as were the phone lines. 

Sources:

http://www.prairieghosts.com/bender.html
http://www.kshs.org/cool2/benderknife.htm
http://www.leatherockhotel.com/BloodyBenders.htm
http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/devilinthewhitecity/