Already thought to be haunted by the wife of the man who first owned it and the many ill people who had died there during its days as a home for the aged run by those bitches The Little Sisters of the Poor, Chicago’s Hull House became even more notorious in 1913 when an especially bizarre story started to make the rounds.
At that time the house was a refuge run by social workers for the benefit of the poor and homeless of the city, and rumor spread that one of those who had taken refuge there was, yep, a devil baby! The story goes that a man once swore that he would rather have the devil in his home than a picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall (other stories claim that he said he would rather have the devil in his house than yet another daughter who was always on the phone, though the first seems to me more likely to provoke heavenly wrath.) Either way, soon after this blasphemous incident a baby was born into the household, a baby with horns, a tail, hooves, pointed ears and red scaly skin! The satanic bub’s mother, not wanting Rosemary’s Baby gluing itself to her tit, supposedly took her offspring to Hull House, where it was locked in the attic and proceeded to become fluent in not only English but also Latin. How it learned Latin i don’t know, maybe they had a satanic tutor come round a couple of times a week. No evidence was ever found of such a child, but that didn’t stop hordes of rather stupid women turning up demanding to see the devil baby.
When told by the educated gals who ran the place that there was no Beelze-bub in residence, the superstitious women went away disappointed but still believing that the Devil Baby was real. Why they were so credulous and why most of them were women is a puzzle, one for sociologists and psychologists, but after years of being told that the infernal infant did not exist, the rumors finally started to fade till they became mere shadows in the neighborhood’s memory. Still, despite a total lack of evidence, these things never fully go away and even today there are those convinced that a certain attic is still inhabited by what is by now an extremely old Devil Man or, more popularly, the Ghost of the Devil Baby of Hull House!