The Mystery:
Is Hull House haunted?
Jane Addams’s groundbreaking settlement house was rumored to have ghosts and a so-called “devil baby.” Geoffrey Baer visits Hull House to hear those stories.
In 1889, pioneering social reformer Jane Addams opened the doors of Hull House, the first settlement house in the United States. With a kindergarten, day care, English classes, art classes, social clubs, as well as legal and employment aid, Hull House served the surrounding immigrant neighborhoods. In addition to housing such famous residents as Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, and others, Hull House was rumored to be the dwelling of various spirits. And a concrete slab, which used to be the site of a fountain, in the courtyard of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum was said to be a “portal to hell.” Nadia Maragha, Hull House education manager, told Geoffrey Baer, “People have said that they’ve seen little girls dancing or playing around that space. They’re known as the fountain girls.” There’s also Addams’s bedroom, where some people feel as though they’re being “watched,” according to Maragha. But the most famous spooky tale is that of the “devil baby,” a child with cloven hooves, a tail, and horns who is said to live in the attic. Though the legend varied depending on the ethnicity or religion of the person telling the story, the Catholic version goes like this: A devout Catholic woman married an atheist, and he removed a religious image from the wall, threw it on the floor, and said he’d rather have the devil in his house than the religious image. When the woman gave birth, the child was a devil baby. “My favorite part is that Jane Addams said [in] some versions of the story, the baby takes the cigar out of the dad’s mouth and starts smoking it,” Maragha said. The baby was then supposedly brought to Hull House, and when they tried to baptize it, it attempted to run away, so they locked it in the building’s attic. People from the neighborhood even lined up to get a glimpse of the devil baby. Jane Addams, who wrote about the saga for The Atlantic, was reportedly fascinated by the events, which lasted about six weeks. Maragha said the story may have particularly captured immigrant women because, for older women, it was the kind of fable that imparted wisdom and passed lessons down to the next generation. Younger women may have found validation in the story, because “a lot of blame was put socially on women for what might be the ‘failings’ of their families,” Maragha said. The story could also have ableist implications – that a child was perhaps born with some kind of disability and people used lore as a way to explain it. As for Maragha’s own experience with Hull House ghosts, “I have heard little things here and there,” she said. But fortunately, “I’ve never been scared…they’ve never made any real trouble for us.”
