Villisca Ax Murder House

The dead have names in the register: Josiah, forty-three, and Sarah, thirty-nine; Herman, eleven; Mary, ten; Arthur, seven; Paul, five; and the two guests. The investigation produced suspects but no conviction. Frank Jones — state senator, churchman, and the employer Josiah had left in 1908, taking the lucrative John Deere franchise with him — was never charged, though Villisca split along congregational lines over him, Presbyterians against Methodists.

In 1917 the Reverend George Kelly, an itinerant minister who had been in town that night and spent the following years writing peculiar letters about it, confessed. He was tried twice; the first jury hung, the second acquitted, and his confession is generally discounted in the literature. Later researchers have nominated the rail-riding Henry Lee Moore and an anonymous serial killer working the Midwestern lines. The case remains officially unsolved — which is itself the file's point: no one has ever answered for it.

The house, built in 1868, has been restored to its 1912 condition — no electricity, period furnishings, the rooms arranged as the coroner found them. Day tours run through it; overnight stays let guests sleep where eight people did not wake. Visitors report children's laughter in the upstairs bedrooms, doors that open and close on their own, and an oppressive atmosphere in the parents' room; paranormal teams, who have put the house through the full television circuit, log electronic voice phenomena and a figure described as a man carrying an axe. The archive notes only that a house preserved at the moment of the crime produces exactly the reports you would predict of it.

One incident is in the police record rather than the lore: in November 2014, a Wisconsin man staying overnight on a paranormal investigation was hospitalized with a self-inflicted stab wound. Whatever moved in the house that night, the ambulance was real.

Villisca keeps the case open and the house open — the caretaker lives next door in what was once Mary Peckham's house, the woman whose phone call started it all. The legend attached to the property is unusually restrained: it invents no demon, names no revenant. It keeps the eight victims, the covered mirrors, the bacon, and a question that has outlasted every jury empaneled to answer it.