The Official Site of the Villisca Axe Murders

The Villisca Axe Murders of 1912

Presented by Linda Blair, star of The Exorcist, Scariest Places on Earth was a paranormal television show produced by Triage Entertainment for the Fox Family Channel. ABC Family now owns the rights to the episodes of the show originally produced for Fox.

The format of this television show featured reported cases of paranormal activity in a reality TV style investigation. It originally took a family into a haunted location but the format was later changed. The hour long show was narrated by Zelda Rubenstein, most famous for her role as the psychic clairvoyant in the Poltergeist films.

The show began filming in 2000 and Darwin and Martha were contacted about including the Villisca House in an episode. Dave Christiansen, one of the first paranormal investigators to visit the Villisca House was invited to appear in the Fox segment.

Ed Epperly, considered to be one of the foremost authorities on the Axe Murders and Paula Beebee, a local journalist were also interviewed during the show.

Unfortunately, unknown at the time to the Linn's, the Fox show was quickly building a reputation for fabricating evidence and the resulting episode featuring Villisca was extremely disappointing to all of us involved with the history of the Axe Murders.

The show's producers choose to use fake photographs of the Murder victims and even went as far as to conduct an interview with a supposed resident of Villisca who was obviously a hired actress.

Despite the fact that Kelly and Tammy Rundle of Fourth Wall Films provided accurate historical facts and even photographs, none of their material was used in the show. Although copies of the Villisca Review from the time of the murders were also given to the producers, they again choose instead to create their own.

While we realize that the show's focus was on the paranormal aspect of the location, it was disrespectful and disturbing that the well-known facts of the actual crime were also distorted, apparently to make the story more appealing to the masses. While the interviews with Darwin, Dave, Paula and Ed were legitimate, unfortunately the inclusion of the so many other discrepancies detracted from the rest of the story.

The show still airs occasionally and usually sparks an interest in it's viewers and drives traffic to our site. We hope that those viewers will take the time to familiarize themselves with the real facts of the case and will even possibly visit themselves.

In October of 2006, the Villisca Segment of the Scariest Places on Earth was added to YouTube. We've included it here for your viewing but hope that you'll make a note of the information that is not true and watch it with a bit of skepticism.

This is exactly the type of media coverage that we don't want and don't encourage. Unfortunately, in most cases, the Linn's have little or no control over the finished product. In this case, they watched the airing for the first time with the rest of us.

The Sci-Fi channel has been advertising that “Scariest Places on Earth” is coming and it is appearing on their schedule with two episodes airing on Tuesday Feburary 12, 2008. Odds are the Villisca segment will appear here as well.