There are a lot of superstitions surrounding the number 13.  It is an unlucky (and many say) bewitched number, known in some circles as the devil’s dozen.  Many serial killers have 13 letters in their names (Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Albert De Salvo, Jeffrey Dahmer).  There are 13 witches in a coven.  The 13^th card in a Tarot deck is the Death card.  As a result, many people fear the number—the clinical phobia is called trskaidekaphobia, and society has accommodated their fear.  Skyscrapers do not have a thirteenth floor and hotels do not have a room 13—most hotels, that is.  There once existed a hotel that accommodated both a thirteenth floor and a room 13. It was the Warwick Hotel in Huntington, Indiana. 

Indiana’s most enduring tale of horror, shrouded in both the macabre and the supernatural, begins with one Reginald Warwick. Reginald Warwick began his career working in a major insurance firm owned by Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, a wealthy icon of Chicago in the late nineteenth century. After two years he was asked to step down from a rather high position in the firm for reasons not yet known to historians; the facts at this point conflict with available testimonies. What is known is that in early October, 1871, merely two weeks after the dismissal, Chicago was devastated by a terrible fire that cut a path of destruction 3 and 1/3 square miles long, costing 192 million dollars in property damage, killing nearly 300 people and leaving 100,000 homeless.  Though no conclusive evidence linking him to the fire existed, Reginald Warwick remained under suspicion by both investigators and fellow employees of Gurdon and Wells…in part due to his known propensity for resentment and a tendency towards violence. Regardless, he, his wife and two year old son Damian managed to leave Chicago on October 13^th, 1871 and moved to Indiana with a large sum of money…the source of which is still in question.  Hubbard, on the other hand, suffered tremendous losses from which he never recovered.

 The Warwicks moved around Indiana for the next twenty years following a string of failed business ventures, never spending more than five years in one place.  To make ends meet, his wife Ileana worked as a spirit medium, earning quite a reputation in Northern Indiana, especially.  She eventually founded a clandestine group called the Circle of Mizraim, which gradually built a following as they moved around.  Damian Warwick preferred to spend his time reading Edgar Allen Poe rather than follow in his father's footsteps in business.  His father was not pleased and consequently Damian lived in fear of him, becoming peculiar and withdrawn.  On the other hand, Damian was a capable student, and showed a variety of interests when it came time to go to university.  He was sent to Britain, where he studied architecture to appease his father, yet took a singular, additional interest in herpetology, abnormal psychology, and western folklore. It was also in Britain that Warwick met Boer War veteran Charles Vanderpelt and psychiatrist Kenneth Wasserman. Both would eventually move to the States and take up residency with Damian.   

 Things turned sour for the Warwicks when accusations of sexual misconduct and the use animal parts in secret rites caused them to summarily disband in May of 1892.  Later that year, both Reginald and Ileana died in a freak accident, leaving Damian with everything.  Damian Warwick left college and used his family’s savings and insurance money to build a hotel of his own design in Huntington, Indiana, where he lived out the rest of his life.  

 Construction of the Warwick Hotel was an unorthodox endeavor and many of the designs were shrouded in secrecy.  Perhaps the single most bizarre feature of the Hotel was the top floor—the thirteenth floor, a marvel of engineering not yet entirely explicated. Only fragments of the blueprints remain (the others were stolen from the county courthouse), but they reveal numerous secret passages and unusual building materials unique to the structure.  Just what the purpose of this strange project was no one can say definitively, but a clue is found in a letter from Damian Warwick to his then fiancée, Miss Anastasia Vereor.  One passage reads:

 “…I am at the brink of discovery and on the cusp of completing that which has eluded me for so long; a gate of deliverance for me and all who are likewise gripped in Fear’s dread vise.  My work will change the world; of that, my darling, I am certain.  At last the world will have a tangible evidence of the Great Mysteries, and a doorway through which to ascend and cast down that Great and Terrible Light…”

Damian and Anastasia were married over the objection of her parents, who felt that their daughter was under some sort of mind control, but thirteen months later Anastasia gave birth to their only child, a daughter they named Lilith.  That same week the hotel was completed and became immediately successful. 

The most compelling clue to the enigma of the 13^th floor comes from the personal testimony of the patrons of the Warwick. Almost half of the hotel had permanent residents, who complained of strange deliveries in the middle of the night.  Patrons allowed to visit the thirteenth floor describe a wide array of horrors including strange creations, grotesque faces lining the walls and entire rooms devoted to the examination of particular fears.  Predictably, few wished to occupy the 13^th floor, but there were always those less superstitious who chanced the bad luck.  Kenneth Wasserman (M.D.) was one such individual and became a permanent resident not long after the hotel’s completion.

 It seems the function of the entire floor was specifically intended to evoke all types of terror, especially those which haunted Damian himself. Damian was fearful of snakes, having nearly died from a water moccasin bite while vacationing in the south as a young boy.  He was also terrified of bees and wasps, being once stung over twenty times by yellow jackets in the woods near one home.  These and other common objects of fear were given expression in many of the rooms of the top floor of the Warwick, but that was only the beginning.  The building had a darker secret, and rumors of something otherworldly haunted the community.     

 Guests regularly disappeared from the hotel, arousing suspicion from local police, but a lack of evidence kept charges from being brought against its owner. Additionally, it’s been suggested that the local magistrate, Judge Michael Streng, was an active member of an esoteric coterie spearheaded by Warwick. Whisperings of dreadful occult ceremonies practiced in the remote wooded areas a few miles away at what is now known as the Huntington Reservoir became widespread among Huntington’s population.  Had Damian and his wife resurrected the Circle of Mizraim?  Most of the missing people had been residents or guests at the Warwick, but no other link was firmly established.  Though strange fires were often reported in the Reservoir area coinciding with disappearances, Damian was never formally implicated.  Investigation showed evidence of various bonfires, but little else.  

 It was in this location a few years later that tragedy struck for the Warwick family. Lilith, only four years old, was apparently torn apart by a pack of wild dogs, though no remains were found by investigators. The circumstances of her death remain vague at best, and local psychics continue to argue she’d simply been “taken.” Whatever the cause, how she had managed to get to the woods by herself was never determined. She’d last been seen in the hotel under the watchful eye of Anastasia’s sister. Her disappearance was apparently too much for her mother.  After six months of living on the edge of sanity and feeling neglected by Damian, she hung herself in a 13^th floor bathroom. 

 Damian Warwick, on the other hand, became a recluse for several months after Lilith’s death.  Those few who did see him describe his mood as obsessive and brooding.  Finally, on October 13^th, 1904, when it was full to capacity, the Warwick Hotel burned to the ground, killing 302 people, including Damian’s jealous sister-in-law and her 3 children.  None survived. Twenty members of the Masonic Three Ring Circus were among the dead as well as a contingent of family friends. It is assumed that Damian Warwick died in the fire, but his body was never recovered.  Coincidentally, a wild fire in the Huntington Reservoir burned some fifty acres of woods before going out.  Were these two incidents related?  These tragedies left more questions than answers, and the authorities were baffled.  Arson was never proven, but neither was any satisfactory explanation given.

 Years later, in a twist of irony, a local hospitality group built a hotel on the ruins of the Warwick.  Today, businesses that occupy this area have been successful, but every now and then there are rumors of people disappearing for a week or more, then somehow turning up delirious several miles away in a place near the Huntington Reservoir the locals call ‘The Devil’s Backbone’.  Most of these poor souls have had to be institutionalized, but their testimony is eerily similar to that of Warwick patrons of old, who told fantastic tales of bizarre creatures and terrifying rooms.  Had Damian Warwick created some sort of spiritual doorway by burning down his hotel? Had he collaborated with an unethical psychiatrist to create a state of human terror so primal that it tore the ethereal fabric of space-time?  Or were these merely psychic echoes of terrors past?  We may never know the answers to these questions, but the thirteenth floor of the Warwick Hotel will be forever etched in history as one of the most fascinating stories of the Chronicles of the Strange.