Jane Addams Hull House: Closing in Spring

 

This week, the Jane Addams Hull House Association announced it could no longer balance its books and planned to shut down this spring.

Addams noted upon moving in that the building had a “half skeptical reputation for a haunted attic.”[29] Over the years, numerous stories of ghosts and hauntings have surrounded Hull House, making it a stop on many of the “ghosts in Chicago” tours. Charles Hull’s wife had died in the house in 1860, and is sometimes thought to haunt it.[30] Other candidates for resident ghosts include the many people who died there of natural causes in the 1870s when it was used as a home for the aged by the Little Sisters of the Poor.[30]

In 1913, another Hull House ghost story began circulating. According to this legend, after a man claimed that he would rather have the Devil in his house than a picture of The Virgin Mary, his child was born with pointed ears, horns, scale-covered skin, and a tail. The mother was said to have taken the baby to Hull House, where Addams was said to have attempted to have it baptized and wound up locking it in the attic.[31] While initially annoyed about the story, which had no basis in fact, Addams became fascinated by the effect the episode had on old women in the neighborhood and used the episode as a basis for her book, The Long Road of Woman’s Memory.[32]

While a great many erroneous stories have circulated about the building, Addams is known to have spoken to several friends about one of the front bedrooms on the second floor being haunted - she and a friend once thought they saw a “woman in white” ghost there, and the same ghost was later seen by a group of girls when the room was used as a dressing room for the adjacent theatre. Though Addams called it “haunted,” she seems to have been more amused than frightened by it