The Devil Baby of Hull-House

A rumour of a hoofed, tailed, talking Devil Baby that brought crowds of women to Hull-House in Chicago, recorded by Jane Addams in her 1916 book The Long Road of Woman's Memory.

Jane Addams described the episode in The Long Road of Woman's Memory (Macmillan, 1916). She says the residents learned of the Devil Baby when three Italian women hurried in and asked to see him. Denials did nothing. The women already knew his cloven hoofs, pointed ears and small tail, and they said he had talked from birth and swore terribly.

Addams called the baby mythical, but the visitors kept coming. For six weeks, she wrote, old women arriving to see him took up so much of Hull-House that she could attend to little else. She wrote that the visit pushed her to follow a line of thought she might otherwise have dropped, and the book's first chapter uses the story to look at women's memories.

Atlas Obscura dates the rumours to 1912. It says women came in droves looking for proof, and that Addams thought they were projecting the worries of life in the neighbourhood onto the tale. Atlas Obscura adds that many people think the tale inspired Rosemary's Baby, both the 1967 novel and the film of 1968 that shares its title.

The building is now the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois Chicago. In October the museum runs Halloween folklore tours that cover the Fountain Girls, the Devil Baby, a neighbourhood mortician and a Lady in White, and it invites visitors to share their own ghost stories.