Chicago's Settlement House and Its Enduring Devil Baby
800 S Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60607
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Museum admission is free. Seasonal 'Haunting of Hull-House' evening tours are ticketed separately; check hullhousemuseum.org for current pricing.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved, urban campus
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1856 · National Register of Historic Places · Chicago Landmark · Settlement House Movement · Progressive Era Reform · Nobel Peace Prize
The building at 800 South Halsted Street began as a single-family home. Charles Jerald Hull, a wealthy Chicago real estate developer, built the Italianate mansion in 1856 on what was then the city's western edge. By the 1880s, the neighborhood had transformed into one of Chicago's densest immigrant corridors — Italians, Greeks, Russians, Poles, and Bohemians living in overcrowded tenements within blocks of the house.
Jane Addams, 29 years old and recently returned from studying settlement work in London, saw the empty mansion as a starting point. She and Ellen Gates Starr moved in on September 18, 1889, under a 25-year rent-free lease from Hull's cousin Helen Culver. Within a year the house was running English classes, a kindergarten, a day nursery, and a gymnasium. Addams spent the next two decades expanding: by 1907 Hull House comprised 13 buildings, including a coffeehouse, a theater, a music school, and one of the first public playgrounds in the city.
The work produced legislation. Hull House researchers documented industrial hazards that led to Illinois factory inspection laws. Florence Kelley, a Hull House resident, pushed through the Illinois Factory Act of 1893 limiting child labor. Addams herself helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
In the late 1950s, the University of Illinois selected the Hull House site for its Chicago campus. Addams had died in 1935; the remaining residents and preservation advocates managed to save two structures from the 1963 demolition — the original 1856 mansion and a dining hall constructed in 1905 and designed by the architectural firm Pond and Pond. The dining hall was physically relocated 200 yards from its original position. The University of Illinois Chicago now operates the two buildings as the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
Sources
The most documented haunting at Hull House is not a ghost in the traditional sense. In the spring of 1913, a rumor spread through the Italian and Jewish neighborhoods surrounding the settlement: a monstrous infant — horned, scaled, possibly cloven-hoofed — had been born at Hull House and was being kept hidden there. The story had multiple versions. In the Italian telling, an atheist husband had ripped down a religious picture and told his wife she might as well live with the devil; the resulting child was sent to Hull House. In the Jewish version, the transgression was a father who had said he would rather have the devil in his house than a girl, and when the seventh daughter was born, she arrived with horns.
Addams described what followed with characteristic precision. For six weeks, a steady stream of elderly neighborhood women arrived at the door, demanding to see the baby. They were not frightened visitors seeking reassurance — many were insistent, some traveled significant distances, and a few pressed money on residents believing the infant required a baptism fee. Addams counted hundreds of callers and spent several afternoons attempting to dissuade them. In her essay on the episode, she concluded that the legend functioned as a vessel for anxieties the women had no other language to express — about unwanted pregnancies, about daughters who could not inherit or protect family honor, about the powerlessness of aging in a world that no longer had use for them.
The legend is widely credited as a partial inspiration for Ira Levin's 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby.
Separate from the Devil Baby, Hull House accumulates a more conventional paranormal reputation. Jane Addams herself recorded in her writings that she was awakened one night to see a woman standing over her bed; other guests in the room reported the same experience across different visits. The 'Lady in White' — a female apparition in period dress — has been reported in the front parlor. Staff and visitors have described the sound of children running through the upstairs hallway when the building is unoccupied. One persistent detail: residents once placed bowls of water at the tops of stairs, operating on the folk belief that spirits cannot cross water. The bowls are no longer there. The courtyard fountain, now reduced to a concrete slab, is described in some accounts as having once served as a gateway point.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Free self-guided and staff-led tours of the two surviving original Hull House buildings — the 1856 Italianate mansion and the 1905 dining hall. Over 1,100 artifacts document the settlement movement Jane Addams built here starting in 1889. The attic where the Devil Baby was allegedly hidden is part of the building fabric.
Seasonal evening tours led by museum educators explore the settlement house's folklore layer: the 1913 Devil Baby panic, the 'Lady in White' apparition in the front parlor, and Jane Addams' own documented accounts of a figure standing over her bed at night. Ages 16 and up.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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