Story
by Mark Bergeron Devil Baby artwork by Ricardo
Pustanio © 2006
Many a tale of horror
is associated with that of Jane Addam's
Hull House, One of America's most famous
haunted houses. Founded by Jane Addams in
1889 on Chicago's Near haunted West side,
this now world famous social settlement
has become a museum dedicated to Jane Addams
and her many works. The house is in a community
where, long ago, immigrants fought in the
streets to find their place in Chicago.
Hull House is rumored to be the most haunted
place in the area... Some hear footsteps,
voices are often heard, and a cold touch
or bump by an unseen specter. The stories
told time and again by both staff and visitors.
The most notorious
inhabitant of Hull House might be the Devil
Baby of Hull House. That is if, in fact,
one ever existed. Even though Jane Addams
did everything within her power to persuade
people, both in person and in print, that
this child was just myth, to this day some
still believe the Devil Baby remains trapped
in the attic of Hull House.
Who
was the Devil Baby?
The
Devil Baby of Hull House
A SCULPTED
HEAD OF THE DEVIL BABY BY ARTIST RICARDO
PUSTANIO
The most famous American
Devil Baby has to be the Chicago’s
Devil Baby of Hull House. At least, this
is certainly the most widespread legend.
Hull House represented
the life’s work of Nobel Prize winning
philanthropist Jane Addams. It was a place
envisioned as a stepping-stone for underprivileged
and impoverished members of Chicago’s
poor immigrant society. Because of Addams’
particular interest in suffrage and women’s
and children’s rights, it was natural
that immigrant women and mothers would be
attracted to the beacon of Hull House.
Despite Addams’
fervent denials (she dedicated more than
40 pages to the legend and its impact on
her life in her autobiography) the story
persisted that Hull House was the home of
a creature not of this earth.
Originally, the rumor
was just a whisper among the large immigrant
population of late 19th century Chicago.
Mostly superstitious and uneducated, it
is certain that they brought with them from
their homelands many ethnic and cultural
beliefs that shaped their perception of
their new foreign world. However, the “facts”
were no fabrication: Most sources agree
that Jane Addams, out of charity, took in
the female who would bear the burden that
would plague the good woman for generations
to come.
The mother of the Devil
Baby, though nameless, is said to have fled
to Hull House to escape a brutal marriage.
This is a central part of the story and
an important one: evidently the young immigrant
woman found herself pregnant once again
and the husband, already having too many
mouths to feed on his meager income, is
said to have ruthlessly beat his wife, all
the while cursing the unborn child. When
the young woman fled to the shelter of Hull
House, she found an understanding matron
who was prepared to take her in and to protect
her through the difficult pregnancy.
And it was a difficult
pregnancy, according to the written accounts
of Hull House servants who rendered firsthand
descriptions of the notorious events. The
mother-to-be complained of unusual pains
throughout the pregnancy, of hearing voices
and of having vivid, frightening nightmares.
Jane Addams and the Hull House physicians
put this down to the tormented life that
the woman had led prior to escaping to Hull
House, exacerbated by the continuous efforts
of her husband to gain access to her.
As the time of her delivery
came due, the horrible nature of what she
had carried and nurtured for nine months
was finally revealed. A writhing monster
child full of scales and reptilian coldness
with gleaming, black eyes, clawed hands
and feet, and the protrusions of tiny horns
on its forehead.
Legend has it that the
mother died on the spot, mercifully released
from this world. But in an unexpected turn
of events, it is said that Jane Addams was
overcome with such compassion that it moved
her to take the child into her care.
Thus the story grew up
over the years, whispered in every quarter,
that behind the walls of Hull House an evil
was growing.
This infant grew to a
child – a monstrous lump of a human-like
creature – that prowled the darkness
and had full run of the dreaded third storey
of Hull House. It is said that the child
would peer from the windows, envious of
the other children with whom it was not
allowed to associate. Children and other
residents of Hull House often awoke in the
night to strange scrabbling noises and furtive
breathing near their faces, only to discover
in the lamplight that they were completely
alone.
Eventually, Jane Addams
died, but the legend of the Devil Baby of
Hull House lives on and even today passersby
and visitors to the location report seeing
the shadow of “something” childlike
peering at them from the darkness.
Devil
Baby just the facts:
A link between ghosts and cemeteries has a
certain logic, but a connection between specters
and a monument to good works is less explicable.
Nevertheless, a demonic spirit supposedly
haunts Hull House, site of the most famous
settlement house in America.
In 1889, Jane Addams and another social worker
took over the Hull mansion at 800 South Halsted
and turned it into a community center. The
house, now part of the Chicago campus of the
University of Illinois, is currently a museum
dedicated to Addams and her work.
Addams was
a hardheaded, progressive reformer, a proud
and determined do-gooder in an age sorely
in need of one. She and her colleagues turned
Hull House into a community center, supplying
shelter, food and practical advice to the
huge number of bewildered young immigrant
women in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In the winter
of 1913, Addams could have used some advice
herself to deal with what must have seemed
to her no-nonsense mind a case of mass hysteria.
Women were streaming into Hull House with
a very particular request: They wanted to
see the Devil Baby. Stories were circulating
throughout the city about a child born with
scaly skin, horns, hooves and a tail. Some
of the rumors included accounts of the young
demon flying about the rooms of Hull House
while social workers tried desperately to
catch him. "He looks just like Satan
himself," a witness told newspaper reporters.
Depending on
who told the story, the infant's origins varied.
Jewish women claimed he was the offspring
of an unfeeling father with a large family
of daughters who declared that he'd rather
his wife give birth to a demon than to another
baby girl. Italians said the Devil Baby's
mother was a God-fearing woman who had had
the misfortune to marry an atheist. When the
woman put a picture of Jesus on her wall,
the husband angrily tore it down, saying that
he'd rather have the devil himself in the
house. And, according to this version, he
got his wish. These and other variations ended
with a desperate family taking the baby to
Hull House and pleading for help.
In the beginning,
Addams was furious at the rumors, which she
tried to combat with appeals to common sense.
Eventually, however, she worked out a sociological
explanation that, to her way of thinking,
explained the phenomenon. She noted that many
purveyors of the Devil Baby story were older
immigrant women, isolated in their new country,
deprived of whatever domestic power and authority
their age might have afforded them in their
native villages. "The old women who came
to visit the Devil Baby believed the story
would secure them a hearing back home,"
Addams reported, "and as they prepared
themselves with every detail of it, their
faces shone with timid satisfaction."
But despite
Addams' sensible, secular debunking of the
Devil Baby as the outcome of a pitiable bid
for attention, many Chicagoans still believe
that a strange creature of some sort really
existed. Some suggest that the Devil Baby
may simply have been a horribly deformed child,
kept by the Hull House workers to shelter
it from an unforgiving world. Other believers
still claim to see a devilish little face
peering out of one of the House's second-floor
windows.
Addams would
doubtless have scoffed at such superstitious
claptrap — or maybe not. In her diaries,
she reported hearing strange noises coming
from the upper rooms of the Hull House. She
didn't know what made the racket, but she
habitually put large buckets of water at the
top of the stairs to keep it — whatever
it was — at bay.
Haunted
Chicago
Excerpted from Discovery
Travel Adventures Haunted Holidays book.
The Jane Addams
Hull-House Museum, part of the College of
Architecture and the Arts at the University
of Illinois at Chicago, is a historic site
and memorial to Jane Addams, her innovative
settlement house programs and associates,
and the neighborhood they served. Housed in
two original Hull-House buildings, the museum
is an internationally recognized symbol of
multicultural understanding, reflecting the
long Hull-House tradition of social service
and reform, educational innovation, and urban
research.
A National
Historic Landmark, the Charles J. Hull house,
pictured above, was built in 1856 and occupied
by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889.
Furnishings, paintings, photographs, and exhibits
recreate the history of this world-famous
settlement and the work of its residents.
Directly south of the Museum is the Residents'
Dining Hall, an Arts and Crafts style building
designed by Allen and Irving K. Pond in 1907
and later designated a Chicago Historic Landmark.
Restored by the University of Illinois at
Chicago in the mid-1960s, the Mansion and
Residents' Dining Hall are all that remain
of the original thirteen-building Hull-House
complex.
About
Jane Addams
Born in Cedarville,
Illinois, on September 6, 1860, and graduated
from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881, Jane
Addams founded, with Ellen Gates Starr, the
world famous social settlement Hull-House
on Chicago's Near West Side in 1889. From
Hull-House, where she lived and worked until
her death in 1935, Jane Addams built her reputation
as the country's most prominent woman through
her writing, settlement work, and international
efforts for peace.
Social settlements
began in the 1880s in London in response to
problems created by urbanization, industrialization,
and immigration. The idea spread to other
industrialized countries. Settlement houses
typically attracted educated, native born,
middle-class and upper-middle class women
and men, known as “residents,”
to live (settle) in poor urban neighborhoods.
Some social settlements were linked to religious
institutions. Others, like Hull-House, were
secular. By 1900, the U.S. had over 100 settlement
houses. By 1911, Chicago had 35.
In the 1890s,
Hull-House was located in the midst of a densely
populated urban neighborhood peopled by Italian,
Irish, German, Greek, Bohemian, and Russian
and Polish Jewish immigrants. During the 1920s,
African Americans and Mexicans began to put
down roots in the neighborhood and joined
the clubs and activities at Hull-House. Jane
Addams and the Hull-House residents provided
kindergarten and day care facilities for the
children of working mothers; an employment
bureau; an art gallery; libraries; English
and citizenship classes; and theater, music
and art classes. As the complex expanded to
include thirteen buildings, Hull-House supported
more clubs and activities such as a Labor
Museum, the Jane Club for single working girls,
meeting places for trade union groups, and
a wide array of cultural events.
The residents
of Hull-House formed an impressive group,
including Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr,
Florence Kelley, Dr. Alice Hamilton, Julia
Lathrop, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and Grace
and Edith Abbott. From their experiences in
the Hull-House neighborhood, the Hull-House
residents and their supporters forged a powerful
reform movement. Among the projects that they
helped launch were the Immigrants' Protective
League, the Juvenile Protective Association,
the first juvenile court in the nation, and
a Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic (later called
the Institute for Juvenile Research). Through
their efforts, the Illinois Legislature enacted
protective legislation for women and children
in 1893. With the creation of the Federal
Children's Bureau in 1912 and the passage
of a federal child labor law in 1916, the
Hull-House reformers saw their efforts expanded
to the national level.
Jane Addams
wrote prolifically on topics related to Hull-House
activities, producing eleven books and numerous
articles as well as maintaining an active
speaking schedule nationwide and throughout
the world. She played an important role in
many local and national organizations. A founder
of the Chicago Federation of Settlements in
1894, she also helped to establish the National
Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood
Centers in 1911. She was a leader in the Consumers
League and served as the first woman president
of the National Conference of Charities and
Corrections (later the National Conference
of Social Work). She was chair of the Labor
Committee of the General Federation of Women's
Clubs, vice-president of the Campfire Girls,
and a member of the executive boards of the
National Playground Association and the National
Child Labor Committee. In addition, she actively
supported the campaign for woman suffrage
and the founding of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (1909)
and the American Civil Liberties Union (1920).
In the early
years of the twentieth century Jane Addams
became involved in the peace movement. During
the First World War, she and other women from
belligerent and neutral nations met at the
International Congress of Women at the Hague
in 1915, attempting to stop the war. She maintained
her pacifist stance after the United States
entered the war in 1917, working to found
the Women's Peace Party (WILPF), which became
the Women's International League for Peace
and Freedom in 1919. She was the WILPF's first
president. As a result of her work, she was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
Jane Addams
died in Chicago on May 21, 1935. She was buried
in Cedarville, her childhood home town.
More than
one hundred years after Jane Addams mapped
Chicago areas of race and class distress,
the Human Relations Foundation/Jane Addams
Policy Initiative, releases “Minding
the Gap: An Assessment of Racial Disparity
in Metropolitan Chicago”. Minding the
Gap looks at seven different quality of life
indicators: Income, Employment & Wealth;
Education; Housing; Transportation; Health;
Crime, Law Enforcement & the Justice System
and the State of Children. Visit the web site
Hull-House
Link Highlights
www.hullhouse.org
Hull House Association of Chicago is the direct
descendent of the settlement house founded
by Jane Addams in 1889. History books have
documented the lifetime achievements of this
remarkable woman whose name represents not
only a famous place in American history, but
a philosophy of community service and social
reform.
Jane
Addams was a member of the first generation
of privileged, American women who obtained
college educations and then dedicated their
lives to community service and social justice.
Born in 1860, Ms. Addams was influenced by
the abolitionist movement, the westward expansion
of the US government, the industrial revolution,
the progressive era of political reform, and
most importantly, the Protestant ethic of
hard work, intellectual achievement, and duty
to serve others.
http://wall.aa.uic.edu:62730/artifact/Highlights.asp
