Chicago’s Hull-House has a supernatural history, but its most valuable early accounts are unusually careful about the difference between a story and an event. Jane Addams recorded tenants’ belief in a haunted attic, then described the crowds who came to the settlement demanding to see a Devil Baby. She did not report finding such a creature. Her interest moved towards the people who needed the story, the experiences it helped them express and the difficulty of persuading an expectant visitor that there was nothing to exhibit.
The result is a substantial record of urban folklore. Addams was present at Hull-House and dealt with its visitors, giving her evidence particular importance. That does not make the supernatural characters real, or turn every story told to her into an independently established fact. Her books and speeches let us examine what she observed, what others claimed and how she interpreted the difference.
A settlement with an older reputation
In chapter V of Twenty Years at Hull-House, published in 1910, Addams recalled the search for a building in Chicago’s Near West Side. The house had been built in 1856 for Charles J. Hull. Before becoming the centre of the settlement, it had accommodated other uses, including a furniture business and a home for older people run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. Parts were associated with a factory when Addams and her colleagues sought rooms there.
Addams, Ellen Gates Starr and Mary Keyser moved in on 18 September 1889, according to her account. The project subsequently expanded beyond the original mansion. Its purpose was neighbourhood life, education and social reform. The present museum’s history likewise places the institution within a community shaped by immigration, industrial work and unequal access to public services. That setting matters more to the early folklore than a generic picture of an abandoned, sinister house.
The pitcher on the attic stairs
Addams’s 1910 account contains a specific household custom. Second-floor tenants kept a large pitcher of water on the attic stairs because the attic had a partly believed reputation for haunting. She thought the practice might preserve a belief that ghosts could not cross running water. Crucially, she immediately questioned her own interpretation: perhaps her enthusiasm for finding folklore had supplied the explanation.
This is evidence that tenants respected a haunting tradition and acted upon it. It is not an eyewitness description of an apparition, nor a successful test of a supernatural barrier. A stationary pitcher and running water are not identical things, and Addams did not pretend that the tenants had supplied a coherent explanation. The uncertainty is part of the source, rather than a detail to remove when retelling it.
Later identification of a particular ghost should also be separated from this passage. Addams’s description of the pitcher does not name its intended supernatural opponent. Nadia Maragha’s 2022 museum essay discusses the mansion’s Lady in White tradition and its association with Millicent Hull. That is useful evidence of the wider lore presented by the museum; it does not add a named apparition to Addams’s original paragraph.
A baby everyone expected to see
The Devil Baby brought a different kind of disturbance. In The Long Road of Woman’s Memory, published in October 1916, Addams described three Italian women arriving with an urgent demand to see a remarkable child. They already knew its supposed features: hoofs, pointed ears, a tail and an ability to speak offensively from birth. Denial failed to dislodge that certainty.
According to Addams, visitors then came from across Chicago and its suburbs for six weeks, sometimes continuing late into the evening. Telephone enquiries multiplied. Some callers believed admission cost money; others thought the child had been moved elsewhere. Residents repeatedly explained that Hull-House had never housed it. Visitors who had travelled a long way sometimes interpreted refusal as concealment or an attempt to charge more.
The distinction is straightforward but essential. Addams witnessed the enquiries, arguments and crowds. The child’s appearance and adventures reached her through the stories those people repeated. A large number of visitors establishes the reach of the rumour, without establishing the existence of its subject.
Several stories, rather than one birth account
Addams recorded variants. In a version she associated with Italian visitors, a husband rejected a religious picture and said he would as readily have a devil in his home. The child that followed was interpreted as punishment. The tale continued with a failed baptism, the infant escaping the shawl and running over church pews. In another version, which Addams associated with Jewish storytellers, a father who already had six daughters expressed a preference for a devil over another girl.
These are Addams’s descriptions of circulating narratives, not verified histories of identifiable Italian or Jewish families. Their changing details are informative. A red motorcar or a stolen cigar could enter a story whose structure otherwise resembled a much older moral tale. The differences make it unsafe to combine every reported feature into a single supposedly corroborated incident.
The story was already part of Addams’s public discussion before the 1916 book. Her speech to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs on 10 June 1914 described the visitors and the two principal variants. The speech also suggested that the tale had attached itself to a short-lived child with a disability in the neighbourhood. It supplied no identifying birth record or medical evidence. That suggestion should remain attributed to the speech; it does not establish a documented origin for every subsequent version, and it does not contradict the settlement’s denial that it possessed a Devil Baby.
Why the story mattered to its visitors
Addams’s investigation developed through conversation rather than a search for an occult specimen. In the first two chapters of her 1916 book she described older women whose interest in the rumour opened discussions of family life, bereavement, difficult work and mistreatment. Some had felt ignored by younger relatives. Possessing the details of a compelling story could briefly restore their place as people worth listening to.
Other visitors treated the legend as an argument about conduct. A supernatural penalty for a father’s cruelty or rejection of daughters gave women a powerful warning to repeat at home. Addams also recorded the story being used to frighten young women about relationships and social outings. The same narrative could challenge a husband’s authority while being used to constrain a daughter’s choices.
Her examples should not be reduced to a diagnosis of credulous immigrants. She explicitly included visitors of different educational and economic backgrounds, including medical professionals. At the same time, her language sometimes ranked people and cultures in ways readers should recognise as belonging to her period. Her interpretation is an historically situated argument about memory and social power, rather than a universal explanation proved by a controlled study.
Compassion and the refusal to invent evidence
One of the book’s most revealing episodes concerns an older woman who insisted that she would accept a denial only from Addams herself. Addams considered whether allowing belief might bring comfort and renewed attention to a lonely life. In the account, her hesitation itself conveyed disappointment. She did not transform the encounter into a claim that the creature had been seen.
That tension explains much of the case’s lasting interest. Rejecting the literal rumour did not require dismissing the distress or hopes of the people who repeated it. The supernatural narrative could have social effects even while the supposed exhibit was absent. Hull-House’s documented response was not to advertise a captive monster, but to answer demands and gradually understand the conversations behind them.
Reading the surviving record
Hull-House’s attic tradition and Devil Baby belong together as folklore attached to a real institution, while retaining different source histories. The pitcher appears in the 1910 memoir; the Devil Baby is discussed in the 1914 speech and developed at length in 1916. Those publication dates should not be mistaken for precise dates on which a ghost or creature appeared. This account does not use a modern ghost-hunting episode as confirmation of either tradition.
The original mansion survives as part of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. The photograph accompanying this case shows the building in 2010, not a supernatural event. The directory location represents Chicago broadly. The strongest established facts here concern the settlement, its recorded customs, the circulation of a rumour and Addams’s response. They support a history of belief and interpretation, while leaving the ghost and Devil Baby as the subjects of the stories she collected.
Sources and related reading
The primary sources are Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), chapter V, especially the settlement’s opening and haunted-attic passage; her speech Immigrant Woman As She Adjusts Herself to American Life (10 June 1914), preserved in the Jane Addams Digital Edition; and The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (1916), introduction and chapters I–II. The 1916 Atlantic article is a related presentation of the Devil Baby material, rather than an independent corroborating witness.
For institutional context and the distinction between early accounts and later haunting traditions, see the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum’s history and Nadia Maragha’s museum essay, “Finding Folklore”: Jane Addams and Hull-House’s Supernatural History (19 September 2022). The surviving public museum is distinct from private homes mentioned in the historical narratives.
Map reference: US Census Chicago city reference point. Broad city location; not a private residential address.