Villisca Axe Murder House

The story

Villisca is a town in Iowa. On the evening of 9 June 1912 the Moore family attended the Children’s Day program at the Presbyterian church, together with two young guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger, and returned home around 9:45 to 10 p.m. During that night eight people were killed with an axe: Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children (Herman, Katherine, Boyd and Paul) and the two guests. Mike Dash, Legends of America and Wikipedia agree on the victims. Doctors placed the time of the killings between midnight and 2 a.m.

The bodies were found on the morning of 10 June. A neighbor grew worried at about 7 a.m., and Josiah’s brother Ross Moore opened the house with a key. By the time the National Guard set up a perimeter at about 10:30, crowds had already been through the scene (the perimeter from Wikipedia; the crowds from Wikipedia and Dash). A coroner’s inquest was held on 11 June.

The case was never resolved. In 1914 George Kelly, an English-born minister who had been in Villisca on 9 June, was arrested on an unrelated charge of sending obscene material. In 1916 William Mansfield was arrested, but a grand jury declined to indict him because payroll records gave him an alibi. In 1917 Kelly signed a confession on 31 August and then retracted it. His first trial ended without a verdict, and he was acquitted in November 1917. A state senator was also investigated without being charged (Dash). More recently, Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James (2017) proposed that a man named Paul Mueller was a serial killer responsible; we know this only through Wikipedia, not from the book itself. Nobody has been convicted.

The legend

We could not read a 1912 report of the crime: our local corpus, a small sample of old newspapers, holds no article on Villisca from that year, and the Library of Congress newspaper site refused our requests. We also found no trace of a haunting from 1912, though that sample cannot prove there was none. The only early use of the word “ghost” that we found is political. The Evening Times-Republican of Marshalltown, on 19 January 1917, page 1, reads (in a scanned text with OCR errors): “The ghost of the Villisca ak murders appeared in the legislature today”. The context shows this is a figure of speech about bills on state prosecutions and their funding, not an apparition.

The earliest report of anything supernatural that we located is a local story from the 1960s, when the house was a rental. A tenant is said to have seen a flash of light in the kitchen and to have had a knife stuck in a hand. Wikipedia is the only source we could read (it cites the house’s own website, which refused our request), the account is undated beyond the decade, and it names no witness. Mike Dash’s 2012 article, which we read, does not say when the house’s haunted reputation began. What we can say is that the reputation seems to come from tenants’ stories, only one of them dated, and then from tourism after the house was restored in the 1990s and opened to visitors (Wikipedia).

Legends of America (updated in October 2026) says former tenants described a shadowy man with an axe at the foot of their bed, that visitors on tours have heard children’s voices, and that objects move and doors open on their own. It adds that some people who lived there experienced nothing. It also says the Ghost Adventures crew reportedly recorded a man’s voice, without giving a date. The house has appeared on the Travel Channel’s Most Terrifying Places in America (5 October 2008), on Ghost Adventures (10 December 2010), and on the Biography Channel’s My Ghost Story: Caught on Camera (28 April 2012), among other programs. In November 2014 a visitor stabbed himself during a paranormal investigation, as reported by KCCI through Wikipedia. That is an incident that happened, not evidence of anything paranormal.

The victims were people who died violently. We would not tie these reports to any one of them.

What remains today

The house survives. It passed through thirteen owners in ninety years and was rented in the 1960s and 1970s. It was bought on 31 December 1994 and resold to another couple, who restored it to its 1912 condition (Wikipedia). Wikipedia gives 1 December 1997 for its listing on the National Register of Historic Places; Legends of America says 1998, and we have not resolved the difference. It is open today for tours and overnight stays (Legends of America, October 2026); Dash wrote in 2012 that stays are paid for. We do not name the present operators.

For the record itself, see the Annals of Iowa essay by Larsen and Atkinson (volume 62, no. 4, 2003), which we could only see as metadata, and the books by Rundle, Marshall and others listed in our notes; we have not read them.

Visiting

According to Legends of America, in an entry updated in October 2026, the house is open for tours and overnight stays. Hours, rules and booking can change, so check with the house itself before planning a trip; we give no address. Whatever you believe about ghosts, the house is the scene of the killing of six children and two adults, and visitors should keep that in mind.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Villisca axe murders — Wikimedia Commons
2. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Villisca, IA 1980 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1980 · Public domain (USGS)
3. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Nebraska City, MO 1955 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1955 · Public domain (USGS)
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Nebraska City, NE 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
5. Josiah B. and Sara Moore House — Wikipedia
6. The Villisca Ax Murders, 100 Years On — Mike Dash, 2012-06-08
7. Villisca axe murders — Wikipedia
8. Villisca Axe Murders — Iowa Cold Cases
9. Villisca, Iowa — Legends of America, 2026-10
10. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.