Over a hundred years ago a maniac axed to death Josiah Moore, his wife Sarah, and their six children aged 5 to 12 in their home in southwestern Iowa. The murders were so horrifying that it supposedly took the Titanic sinking, which occurred two months earlier, off the front page of the newspapers. The crime remains unsolved. After many years as a rental and threatened with demolition in the 1990s, a local man named Darwin Linn stepped up and saved this curious attraction, which is now known as the Villisca Ax Murder House and Museum. Visitors can tour it, or if they’re feeling brave, spend the night for $428. Linn brought the house back to 1912 by taking out the electricity, the plumbing, and the garage; and instead reconstructed an outhouse, a chicken coop, and a barn. The house is filled with time period-appropriate furnishings, which are placed in the exact same spots on the night of the murders. If you’re not at all creeped out yet, well, it gets worse. An old calendar turned to June 1912 hangs in the kitchen, while photos of the murdered family decorate the parlor. There have been claims of a figure of a shadowy man with an axe standing at the foot of a bed. Shoes filled with blood have been found, while a closet door opened and closed during the night. And ghost hunters take note, the ground floor “blue room” is where two of the children were murdered; while everyone else was murdered in the upstairs bedrooms. After Linn’s death in 2011, his wife kept the house open as an attraction. But a year ago the house made headlines again for another mystery; one of its overnight ghost-hunter guests stabbed himself for no apparent reason. Okay…
Villisca Ax Murder House and Museum, Iowa
