The Devil Baby of Hull-House | A Chicago Legend, 1913
Chicago, fall of 1913. The Devil Baby legend begins when three Italian women come "with an excited rush through the door" of Hull-House at 800 South Halsted and demand to see the baby. Then comes, in Jane Addams's words, "a veritable multitude." For six weeks people pour in from all over the city and the suburbs, all day and late into the night, and the answer at Hull-House is always the same: "No, there is no such baby." No baby was ever found, and no family or birth record has turned up. So why did thousands of people go looking for a child nobody could find, and why that fall?
Zoinks, the gang records in Chicago for Part 1 of a Chicago special. Shane presents to Kim and guest Jennifer, and he walks them through the legend the way Addams wrote it down, as the woman who spent six weeks saying no. The trail leads from an 1856 brick house where second-floor tenants kept a large pitcher full of water on the attic stairs, to the Italian and Jewish versions Addams recorded, to the October 31 newspapers and the phone answers she heard over and over. The heart of this one is the old women who came to that door, and why Addams left whatever she was doing to listen to them. Then the gang sorts out which parts came later: the baby in the attic, the face in the window and the Lady in White are the legend layer, not Addams's own story.
Timeline of Events
1856: A brick house is built at 800 South Halsted Street for Charles J. Hull.
1889: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr move in and turn the house into Hull-House.
1910: Addams writes that second-floor tenants always kept a large pitcher full of water on the attic stairs.
October 31, 1913: The Chicago Examiner runs "Devil Child Still Sought by Thousands" and the Day Book prints its own version of the tale.
November 1, 1913: An Associated Press wire reports that thousands of people have visited Hull House.
June 1914: Addams speaks about the Devil Baby rumor at the women's clubs convention in Chicago.
October 1916: Addams publishes "The Devil Baby at Hull-House" in the Atlantic Monthly.
1946: Louise de Koven Bowen's memoir tells the Lady in White story, which the museum says Addams never told in her own writing.
What You Will Hear
Why the dated papers put the Devil Baby in the fall of 1913, not the spring of 1913 or 1914. The Italian and Jewish versions Addams wrote down, and the third version the Day Book ran on Halloween. The phone answers Addams heard over and over, including "There is no use getting up an excursion from Milwaukee," and the clergymen the Examiner says asked about it too.
The old woman who made her escape from the poorhouse on ten cents borrowed from a bar-keep, and the visit where Addams was tempted to let a bedridden woman keep believing. How the baby in the attic and the Lady in White joined the story later, and why no source backs the claim that Addams admitted to a real baby.
Sources
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) and The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916) Jane Addams, "The Devil Baby at Hull-House," Atlantic Monthly, October 1916 Chicago Examiner and Chicago Day Book, October 31, 1913, via the Chicago Public Library and the Library of Congress Associated Press wire reports, November 1, 1913 and June 16, 1914 Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, "Finding Folklore"
If you liked this: Episode 169, Le Nain Rouge. Another city legend, Detroit's cursed red dwarf, brought to the gang by Jennifer.
The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker
Episode 190 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide
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