Real Life Houses of Horrors

Every year, Halloween brings people to so-called haunted houses and houses of horror. These relatively harmless attractions are filled with Halloween revelers wearing scary costumes and gore to frighten guests. Real houses of horror are something else altogether. They are places where truly sinister men and women lure people in and do their best to ensure that their victims never leave. There have been a number of these houses of horror throughout history. The following houses of horror got their reputations with the help of some of the most sadistic serial killers in written history.

10 Rillington Place Notting Hill, North Kensington

10 Rillington Place was once home to a man who was a rapist, murderer and skilled liar. This man's name was John Reginald Holiday Christie. He was known simply as Reg. He and his wife Ethel moved into the first floor of 10 Rillington Place in 1938. By that time, John Christie was well on his way to becoming a serial killer/rapist.

John Christie's childhood was not particularly bad, but it left him significantly less manly than he thought himself to be. He loathed dirt, but enjoyed gardening. He may have also had Munchausen syndrome, a mental malady that causes sufferers to fake illness or exacerbate illnesses for attention. A military stint during World War I left him even more emasculated. After an incident where Christie was only mildly wounded in a mustard gas attack, he refused to speak for several years and had periods of silence even after he began speaking again. He swore it was a physical malady, but today it is believed that he was simply shell-shocked or had P.T.S.D.

Before Ethel and John Christie moved into 10 Rillington Place, John had done a good job ruining their marriage by sleeping with prostitutes and getting charged with violent crimes. However, you would never have known this by looking at the couple. Some say Ethel seemed to fear her husband, yet she came back to him even after he lived with a prostitute for a time and did a few stints in jail.

When Timothy and Beryl Evans moved into the top floor of 10 Rillington Place, they had no way of knowing they were living above a monster. The couple had a volatile marriage of their own and Timothy had the intellect of a boy. They also had a baby on the way. It is likely that they simply missed the warning signs of the psychopath beneath them or that John Christie simply never showed them his true self until it was too late.

Timothy and Beryl Evans had a rough time at 10 Rillington Place, even without the help of the murderer/rapist downstairs. (Christie had killed at least two women by then.) Their first child, a girl named Geraldine, was quickly followed by another pregnancy, despite Timothy having an affair with a 17-year-old girl. Beryl wanted an abortion badly, but Timothy said no, especially when John Christie offered to give it to her.

What happened next is muddled by the lies and deceit of two men who were attempting to cover up whatever hand they played in the tragedies that followed. One thing is nearly certain; John Christie went upstairs to the third floor of the 10 Rillington Place horror house and told Beryl that he would give her an abortion, though he had no skill in this area. Once safely inside, he proceeded to rape and strangle her to death. When Timothy learned of this, he covered it up with John for a little while, possibly thinking that it was a botched abortion attempt, but he eventually went to the police. By that time, young Geraldine was also dead. It is unclear which of the men killed her, though many believe it was John Christie. Timothy was executed for the crime. John Christie remained free to kill some more.

After John Christie moved out (by then Ethel was dead), the new tenants of the first floor apartment at 10 Rillington place found three decomposing corpses in the kitchen cupboard. Further investigation revealed one more female corpse under one of the apartment floors and two buried in the backyard. One of them belonged to Mrs. Christie. John was eventually hanged in July of 1953.

Oxford Apartments Apt. #13 924 N. 25th St. Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Oxford Apartments Apt. #13 was a house of horrors that belonged to one of the most notorious American serial killers of all time - Jeffrey Dahmer. He was a rapist, pedophile, necrophiliac, murderer and cannibal who lured boys and men into his apartment and murdered them in all kinds of unmentionable ways. The worst of his desecration of these poor victims usually came after they were dead. Dahmer would eat their flesh, save a number of "souvenirs" from their bodies and even dump some of their flesh, mixed with chemicals, down the drains of his Oxford Place apartments. Jeffrey Dahmer was the epitome of what we view as "evil."

Only one of Dahmer's victims almost escaped his house of horrors. He was an Asian teenage boy who had been drugged by Jeffrey. The boy struggled through the drugs to leave the apartment - in the nude. Concerned neighbors called the police. When they arrived, Dahmer was already on the boy's trail. He explained to police that they were having a lover's quarrel. Unbelievably, the police returned the boy to the Oxford Apartments house of horrors, where Dahmer promptly killed him and raped his corpse. At the time, Dahmer was on probation for child molestation.

Just a few months later, in July of 1991, police found a man wandering around with a pair of handcuffs attached to one of his wrists. The man led police to Dahmer's apartment. This time, the police looked around. One of them found pictures of dismembered bodies in Dahmer's bedroom. After a struggle, Dahmer was the one wearing handcuffs and the apartment began to reveal the horrors that it held behind its meticulously neat facade.

In the freezer and refrigerator, there were four human heads. Elsewhere in the house, such horrors as genitalia and other body parts were found. Numerous pictures of all the acts Dahmer had committed on his victims horrified those forced to look upon them. There are too many atrocities to list. Suffice it to say that Dahmer was never allowed to live in his house of horrors again. He was sentenced to 957 years in prison. He served a very small fraction of them. Another inmate murdered him along with yet another inmate in 1994.

(Please note that Dahmer was killing long before he moved to the Oxford Apartments. His list of victims and crimes is appallingly extensive.)

8213 West Summerdale Avenue Norwood Park Township, Illinois

This house of horrors was home to notorious serial killer and pedophile, John Wayne Gacy. Gacy was a somewhat respected member of the community where this house was located. He involved himself in politics, volunteering and dressing like a clown for local children. Yes, you read that last correctly. No one man has done more to make clowns terrifying than John Wayne Gacy.

In December of 1978, police arrived at Gacy's home in search of a missing child. Once police gained entrance, they noticed a stench that his neighbors and friends had been complaining about for years. The source of the stench was the corpses of 29 men and boys that were rotting below the house. He later confessed to killing four others, who he heartlessly dumped in a nearby river.

Gacy was able to lure his victims with the nice, seemingly helpful, side of his personality. He would arrange to have consensual homosexual sex with his victims in his home, luring them in and then ultimately killing them. Alternatively, he would offer them work and money. Whatever the trap, the result was nearly always the same. He did commit some rapes without murders, one that landed a man in the hospital for six days. He was a convicted of sodomy, yet he was married twice and had two children. Like so many other serial killers, the duality of his personality is impossible to comprehend. This man literally wore the face of a clown while the bodies of boys were rotting away in his house of horrors.

John Wayne Gacy was found guilty of the murders he committed and sentenced to death. While in prison, he produced paintings, including some of his clown personality. Collectors of morbid curiosities buy his paintings even today, years after his execution.

Gein Farmhouse Plainfield, Wisconsin

Edward Gein is one of the most emulated real life serial killers in cinema. Movies like Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs are famously connected to him. Many of the houses of horrors in film resemble his farmhouse in Wisconsin as well. Something about the decrepitude, isolation, true madness and even sadness of Ed Gein's life and home makes him and it stand apart from other, equally depraved, men and women.

Edward Gein was raised by an overbearing, frighteningly religious mother. This woman used the Bible to instill fear in her sons and she used it often. She produced a childhood for Ed Gein that anyone would have been hard pressed to come out of with some semblance of normalcy. Unfortunately, Ed Gein did not have it in him. In many cases, investigators cannot find a direct reason for a serial killer's depravity, but in Gein's case, it was all too easy. His mother was the root of his disturbance. When she died and left him alone in the Gein house of horrors, his insanity was able to escape. This too is capitalized upon by moviemakers.

In the conventional sense, Ed Gein was not a serial killer. He only (only is used for lack of a better word, not to diminish the severity of Gein's crimes) killed two women. Both of the women were in their fifties. It is thought that they reminded him of his mother. However, Gein was not only a killer; he was a grave robber, a necrophiliac and a cannibal. He dug up bodies and made skin clothing and masks, among other truly horrendous crafts. He wore these masks and clothing while pretending to be his mother.

When police finally entered the Gein farmhouse in 1957, they found all of this, a woman hanging disemboweled like hunting game and more. Gein was found to be guilty, but insane. He spent the remainder of his life in a mental institution.

The above houses are not all of the horrible domiciles this world had known, not by a long shot. There was the castle of Elizabeth Bathory, the castle of Vlad the Impaler, the castle of Gilles de Rais, the home of Fred and Rosemary West and many more. These are not the type of houses of horror in which you want to find yourself. Always be careful to keep your guard up around people with whom you are not completely familiar, travel in packs and keep your children close to you, no matter their age. It seems there is no way to prevent serial killers, but people can protect themselves against being victimized.

Sources

Ed Gein American Psycho, retrieved 2/4/11, houseofhorrors.com/gein.htm

John Wayne Gacy, retrieved 2/4/11, clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/USgacy237.htm

Bardsley, Marilyn, Jeffrey Dahmer, retrieved 2/5/11, trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/dahmer/index.html

Ramsland, Katherine, John Christie, retrieved 2/5/11, trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/history/christie/index_2.html