The more colorful version of this 19th Century serial killer's life is that he had a "murder castle" created; a hotel with confusing architecture, rooms designed to kill their occupants, trapdoors to drop corpses down into the cellar, and so on. Another version I've heard is that Holmes just wasn't much of an architect, and that he contracted one builder after another, so he could cheat them out of payment, and that this also played into the weird and messy layout. I've also heard that he greatly exaggerated his killings.

Was there actually a murder castle? And did Holmes actually use it to kill people?