Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

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.