Villisca Axe Murder House

Villisca was a busy railroad town in southwest Iowa in 1912. On the evening of Sunday, 9 June, Josiah Moore, a 43-year-old local businessman, and his wife Sarah, 39, walked home from a Children’s Day program at their church with their four children – Herman, 11; Katherine, 10; Boyd, 7; and Paul, 5 – and two of Katherine’s friends, Lena Stillinger, 11, and her sister Ina, 8, who had been invited to stay the night. The next morning a neighbour noticed that the house was silent and the chores undone. Josiah’s brother Ross let himself in with a key and found the two girls dead in the downstairs bedroom. All eight people in the house had been killed as they slept, with Josiah’s own axe.

The investigation was compromised from the start. Hundreds of townspeople walked through the house before it was secured, and the case drew a procession of suspects: Frank F. Jones, a prominent businessman and state senator for whom Josiah had once worked; William Mansfield, alleged by a private detective to be a hired killer, whom a grand jury declined to indict; and the Reverend George Kelly, an itinerant preacher who had been in town that night. Kelly signed a confession in 1917, then recanted; his first trial ended in a hung jury and the second in acquittal. No one was ever convicted. In 2017 Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James argued in The Man from the Train that the killings belonged to a series of family murders along American rail lines.

The two-storey white frame house, built in 1868, passed through many hands. In 1994 Darwin and Martha Linn bought it and spent years restoring it to its 1912 appearance – no plumbing, no electricity – intending it as a historical attraction. They opened it for tours, and visitors soon began asking to stay the night. By the 2000s the house was one of the best-known “haunted houses” in the Midwest, featured on Ghost Adventures, Ghost Lab, The Dead Files and Kindred Spirits. It is now operated for tours and overnight stays by US Ghost Adventures.

Not everyone in Villisca welcomes the attention. Residents have said they would rather their town be known for its railroad history and its veterans than for its worst night. The house’s story is, first, a real and unsolved crime against two families: the Moores, who lost an entire household, and the Stillingers, whose daughters never came home from a sleepover.

Overnight guests report children’s voices and laughter, footsteps on the stairs, doors opening and closing, lamps or objects falling, a sense of being watched, and dark figures. Paranormal investigators have recorded what they describe as EVP responses, and some guests have left in the night.

Reports focus on the upstairs bedrooms where the Moore family slept, the downstairs bedroom where Lena and Ina Stillinger were found, and the attic, where investigators believed the killer may have hidden. Most activity is reported during overnight stays after dark.

The murders inspired the documentary Villisca: Living with a Mystery (2004), the horror film The Axe Murders of Villisca (2016) and many books and podcasts, and the house has appeared on Ghost Adventures, Ghost Lab, The Dead Files and Kindred Spirits. It is among the most famous ghost-tourism stops in the Midwest.