Villisca Axe Murder House:
Eight Dead, No Answers,
110 Years Later
Villisca, Iowa is a town of about twelve hundred people, two hours south of Des Moines, in the middle of farmland that goes on in all directions until the sky takes over. There is nothing remarkable about it. There never was, except for one night in June 1912, and the house on East 2nd Street where eight people were sleeping when someone came in through the unlocked door and killed them all.
The killer was never identified. The case was never solved. The house is still there. You can stay the night in it.
The Night
June 9, 1912. The Moore family — Josiah, his wife Sarah, and their four children — had attended a Children's Day program at the Presbyterian church. The event ran late. Josiah and Sarah brought home two young guests, sisters named Ina and Lena Stillinger, who had been invited to sleep over. Everyone went to bed around 10pm. The house was unlocked, as most houses in Villisca were. Nobody expected anything.
A neighbor named Mary Peckham noticed, the following morning, that the Moores' house was unusually quiet. The chickens weren't being fed. The cows weren't being milked. She knocked on the door. No answer. She contacted Josiah's brother, Ross, who found the front door unlocked and went inside.
He found Josiah and Sarah in their bedroom. He found the four Moore children — Herman, Mary Katherine, Arthur, and Paul, ranging in age from five to eleven — in their beds. He found Ina and Lena Stillinger in the guest room downstairs. All eight had been killed in their sleep, in their beds, with an axe. None had apparently woken up during the attack. None had tried to get up. The killer had moved through the house room by room in the dark and completed the entire thing without waking anyone.
The Investigation
The investigation that followed was a catastrophe by any measure. The crime scene was compromised within hours — townspeople walked through freely before police arrived, a local undertaker moved bodies before they were fully examined, evidence was handled without documentation. The case attracted national attention, and with it came a parade of detectives, journalists, and self-appointed investigators who generated noise without generating answers.
Over the following decade, at least three men were charged with the murders at various points. All were acquitted. The most likely suspect, based on the physical evidence, was a traveling preacher named Reverend George Kelly, who had been in Villisca that night and whose behavior in the months following the murders was erratic enough to attract sustained suspicion. He was tried twice. Both trials ended without conviction — the first in a hung jury, the second in acquittal.
No one has ever been convicted of the Villisca murders. The case is still officially open.
"There were things about that crime scene that didn't fit any theory we had. The killer covered every mirror in the house with cloth. The killer took the time, after killing eight people, to carefully cover every reflective surface. Why? We never understood why. We still don't."
— Account attributed to the original county sheriff, recorded in 1930sThe House Now
The house was purchased in 1994 by Darwin and Martha Linn, who restored it to its 1912 appearance and opened it as a tourist attraction. You can tour it during the day. You can also pay to spend the night inside.
People do. Regularly. Paranormal investigation groups book it months in advance. Individuals and couples come from across the country to sleep in a house where eight people were murdered in their beds. The Linns report that the overnight bookings are consistently full.
What the overnight visitors report has been remarkably consistent over three decades of such stays.
The most frequently reported experience: children's voices. Not crying, exactly — something between crying and talking, coming from the upstairs bedrooms, most often in the hours between 2am and 4am. Groups who have stayed have recorded audio that captures sounds in those rooms that cannot be attributed to the building, to wind, or to the other people present. The sounds stop when people enter the rooms to investigate.
The second most common report: a feeling of being watched from the doorways. Multiple independent accounts describe turning toward a doorway in the house and having the strong conviction that someone is standing just out of sight in the adjacent room. When they look, the room is empty. This has been reported in the master bedroom doorway, in the children's room doorway, and most frequently in the doorway of the guest room where Ina and Lena Stillinger were killed.
In 2014, a man staying overnight stabbed himself in the chest with a pen knife. He survived. He said afterward that he had no memory of doing it — that he had been standing in the guest room and then he was on the floor and bleeding. He was charged with criminal mischief. He has refused to discuss what happened in any further detail.
The axe that killed eight people in this house is now in a museum in Villisca. The house itself has been maintained exactly as it appeared in 1912. The beds are the same beds. The rooms are laid out the same way. At night, when the last tour group has left and the last daytime visitor has gone, the house on East 2nd Street sits quiet and dark on its residential street in a town of twelve hundred people in Iowa, and whatever is in there has the dark to itself until morning.
Nobody has ever identified who walked through the unlocked door on the night of June 9, 1912. Nobody knows why the mirrors were covered. Nobody knows how eight people were killed in their sleep without a single one waking to stop it. The case is 112 years old. It remains open. It will almost certainly remain open forever.