Hull House — The Devil Baby of Halsted Street
The settlement house Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded in 1889, the birthplace of American social work — where in the autumn of 1913, for six weeks, thousands of Chicagoans besieged the doors demanding to see the Devil Baby: a cloven-hoofed, pointed-eared child the neighbourhood's women knew was locked in the attic; Addams turned the siege into sociology and wrote it into the American canon; and the house's own ghost — a woman in white at the foot of the bed — was met, by the account of her biographer, by Addams herself.
Case File No. 435
FILE 01 The Legend
Hull House opened in 1889 in an old mansion on Halsted Street, and under Jane Addams — future Nobel laureate — became the laboratory of American social work: kindergarten, theatre, employment aid, the institutions a machine city would not give its immigrants. In 1913 the other Chicago arrived at its door. Three Italian women burst in demanding to see the Devil Baby — the child with cloven hoofs, pointed ears and a diminutive tail, born speaking and blasphemously profane; the father in their telling had torn the Virgin's picture from the wall declaring he would rather have a devil in the house, and the household, overwhelmed, had carried the result to the settlement. No such child existed — but the story outran every denial. For six weeks thousands came, from every quarter and beyond, offering money to see it; the versions multiplied by parish and nation — a Jewish telling (a devil rather than another daughter), an Irish one (an unconfessed sin); the Chicago Examiner broke it at Halloween 1913 and the Tribune sneered at the medievalism while the queue formed. Addams did what no ghost-hunter has improved on: she listened. Her Atlantic essay of 1916 and The Long Road of Woman's Memory read the legend as the rebellion of the old immigrant women — disbelieved by their children, fluent in nothing the new city valued — finding in the baby a thing their families could not tell them they were wrong about. The house kept its own quieter ghost: by her biographer's account, Addams and her partner Mary Rozet Smith spent a night in the haunted room of the old mansion and woke to a woman in a white dress standing at the foot of the bed, who turned and glided out through the locked door. The museum at UIC keeps the file: the Devil Baby's window, and a courtyard patch where visitors still ask if the baby is buried.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The six-week siege of 1913 — documented in contemporaneous newspapers and in Addams' own published writing, with visitor counts and quotations; the white woman at the bedfoot via Bowen's biography; and the museum-era file: attic-window figures, a child's crying heard at the turn-of-millennium renovation.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
No baby ever existed — Addams said so in print at the time, patiently, hundreds of times; the furor is mass belief in its purest documented form, ended not by debunking but by exhaustion. The white-woman story is second-hand, posthumous and perfectly shaped, the classic ghost story. But that is the point of the grade: the Devil Baby is among the best-documented mass supernatural events in American urban history — the ghost here is the crowd, and the crowd is entirely real.
BEYOND THE CASE FILE / PLAN A VISIT