To close out the Halloween festivities, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum will host our annual Open House. Visitors can hear stories of Hull-House folklore and watch silent films from the 1920s. Poems While You Wait will also be on-site tapping out spooky prose. Costumes are encouraged!  

From its inception, the Hull-House settlement was a center of urban legends and supernatural stories, as Chicago’s neighborhoods kept alive whispers about its supposed unearthly inhabitants. For many, Chicago was a place of great hardship, plagued by a history of tragic events that left countless ghost stories in their wake, including those of Hull-House’s infamous Devil Baby and resident Lady in White. While they are spooky and fun, these stories stem from important conversations about religious beliefs and social norms, as well as the collective consciousness of the Hull-House neighborhood. They often highlight the struggles of new immigrants in the city and the gruesome conditions they faced due to capitalist exploitation in factories and tenements.