The Official Site of the Villisca Axe Murders
Is the Villisca Axe Murder House Haunted?
While there are many people in and around Villisca that will tell you that no "ghosts" exist in the former home of Josiah Moore, there are just as many that will tell you that they've actually experienced some sort of paranormal activity in the house.
Naysayers will have you believe that the "haunting" in Villisca is simply a scam dreamt up by Darwin Linn to make a few extra bucks on a bad investment. Others will swear that their visits and experiences in this house have changed their lives.
The skeptics argue that the previous owners and occupants of the house had no such run-ins with ghosts or evidence of a haunting and it wasn't until after the renovation that any such occurrences were noted. The truth of the matter, however, is quite the opposite.
In actuality, there are at least three recorded incidents of paranormal activity in the house prior to the renovation in 1994. Two of the incidents have been documented by Darwin on tape as told by the original parties involved.
The first experience of paranormal activity in the house occurred in the early 1930's. The house was a rental at the time and it's occupants were a young couple by the name of Homer and Bonnie Ritner.
According to their marriage license, Homer and Bonnie were married on November 5, 1930. It was soon after their marriage that Homer moved his young wife into the house. Bonnie was expecting a child and young Homer was somewhat strapped for cash. A laborer, Homer paid a deposit and his first month’s rent. Shortly after moving into the house, however, Bonnie began hearing noises during the night. She repeatedly told Homer someone was in the house.
Night after night, Bonnie awoke to see an image of a man with an axe at the end their bed. According to the story, Bonnie was hysterical and apparently Homer had quite a time trying to calm her. In desperation, he took her to see Doctor Cooper who informed him that if she continued to become so distraught, she was in danger of losing her child.
In an attempt to calm her, Homer took to staying awake during the night while she slept. With Homer sitting in a chair at the end of the bed, Bonnie could rest. Their financial situation was poor at best and in Homer’s mind, moving was not an option. Working all day and sitting up all night, however, began to take its toll on him as well.
One night as he sat at her bedside, Homer began hearing the noises his wife had complained of hearing. When Homer heard someone walking up and down the stairs, he too became frightened. The next day, he went to find the person who had rented him the house in hopes of getting his money back. Homer ended up in the pool hall then run by Bert McCaull.
The story goes that Homer was attempting to explain his dilemma when the bartender took a cigar box from under the counter and told him it contained the skull bones of J.B. Moore. Homer went to the bar, looked into the box and bolted from the pool hall. He returned to Lot 310 only long enough to pack his wife and their belongings. They returned to Clarinda to live with relatives until the birth of their child. Homer did not recover either his original deposit or his first month’s rent.
Most townsfolk dismissed the story, blaming the condition of Homer’s wife for her dementia and Homer’s lack of sleep for his. Homer Ritner died in 1988.
The second known incident of paranormal activity in the house on Lot 310 occurred after John and Allie Geeseman purchased the home and was told by Dale Miller of Shenandoah, Iowa. The Geesemans were his grandparents. According to Mr. Miller, his grandfather, John refused to sleep in the house and actually had a bed made up in the barn. As the elder Geeseman was known to have a terrible temper, most townsfolk were led to believe that the Geeseman marriage was a little rocky.
Miller, however, attributes his grandfather’s choice of living quarters to a story he heard often as a young boy. “My mother’s sister and her husband were staying with Grandma and Grandpa Geeseman at the time,” said Miller, “apparently throughout the evening, the door from the front porch that led into the parlor kept opening. They’d get up and close it and a few minutes later, it’d swing open again.
According to the neighbors, about 3:00 A.M. both of the guests were seen flying down the sidewalk with their nightshirts blowing out behind them. This man weighed over 300 pounds, I can imagine that was quite a sight,” Miller recounted in a recent interview. Whether or not it was the opening door that caused the Geeseman’s visitors to flee or something else was never known. Although John and Allie never discussed any paranormal occurrences, it makes us wonder what one would have had to experience to choose a bed in the barn rather than in his own home.
The third reported incident occurred between 1963 and 1971 when the house was owned and used as rental property by the Villisca State Bank. The family renting the house consisted of two young girls and their parents. The girl’s father was a truck driver and was gone from the home for long periods of time.
During his absence, the girls often awoke to the sounds of children sobbing and crying in the night. They returned to their bedroom occasionally to find dresser drawers open and their clothes strewn about the room. Although the girls shared their experiences with their parents, they were met with disbelief, until one evening their father was sitting at the kitchen table sharpening his pocketknife. When the knife flew from his hand and stabbed into his palm, he packed up his family and they left the house that night. The girl’s returned for a visit to the house on the 90th Anniversary of the Villisca Axe Murders and shared their experiences with other visitors.
Although we’ve attempted to find other tenants of Lot 310 to validate paranormal activity prior to 1994, rental records are often incomplete and families difficult to track down. The longest known residents of the house, the Sprague’s, lived there for over twenty years.
Vickie Sprague vehemently denies anything out of the ordinary during their ownership of the house and has publicly questioned whether or not the Linn’s have concocted the stories as a money-making scheme. I ran into Mrs. Sprague early one morning in 2003 when I was leaving the house after an overnight visit. She pulled up next to me on the street, leaned out the window of her van and asked if I had spent the night in the house. I admitted yes I did, and she went on to tell me that she had lived there for over twenty years and not once had they seen or felt a ghost.
As I knew that Mrs. Sprague had gone on record regarding her feelings about the possibile haunting of the house, she surprised me when she asked, “did anything happen?” Her question was sincere however, and intuitively, I felt that she really wanted to believe my answer.
I recounted some of the things that occurred during our stay and shared that I had several of the occurrences on video tape, I then invited her to spend a night in the house and give us her own opinion. She said “no thank you” and went on her way.
The first two stories regarding the Geeseman’s and the Ritner’s have obviously been passed down throughout the years, no doubt, details have been changed and potentially exaggerated. We believe, however, that given the time period, there are probably many other stories regarding paranormal activity in the house that have never been told.
One older Villisca resident now living in Florida told us “I always thought there was something about that house.” The man rode his horse past the house every day on his way home from school, “My horse always ran past it. She had good sense. I always liked that horse,” he wrote in an email we received.
It has only been within the last 10 years that psychics, mediums and paranormal investigators have begun to establish some credibility and prior to the advent of Oprah, Sally and Montel, personal business was considered just that. Our parents and their parents didn’t discuss family matters outside of the home.
Towns were small, community’s close-knit and religious. Do we assume that because nobody told the stories, they didn’t happen? Or, just for a minute, do we ask ourselves, what if? It is not our intention to convince the skeptics of the existence of ghosts and spirits. It is, however, a question we believe everyone should ask themselves.
If we’re to believe the denials by Vickie Sprague regarding any paranormal activity in the house for almost twenty years, the next logical question anyone should be asking is why now? If the ghosts/spirits frequented the house after the murders and then grew quiet, what has drawn them back? Many in the paranormal world believe the renovation of the house was a signal to the Moore’s to return. Restored to the way they knew it, the house was vacant and it once more became theirs.
Others believe they never left but not all of us have retained enough of our sixth sense to acknowledge their presence. To understand this concept we have to do a little time traveling. Step back with me to the beginning of time when there were no machines, no computers, no satellites, televisions or radar, and we lived intuitively. We felt things. We knew things that we couldn’t possibly know and we believed in our instincts. They kept us alive.
As our world has aged and technology has replaced people with machines, we’ve been taught we have five senses, not six. “Woman’s intuition”, as accurate as it often is—has become a joke. “Gut” instincts are ignored, and until recently, premonitions brushed off as ridiculous. In the year 2000, if we couldn’t hear it, feel it, see it, touch it or taste it—it didn’t exist.
Sometimes, though, we look into someone’s eyes and we know what they’re thinking. Sometimes we know what they’re going to say before they even say it. Sometimes, the phone rings and we know who’s calling before we check the caller id. We don’t know why. We just know. This is our sixth sense. We all have it. We’ve simply been conditioned to ignore it.
To prove my point, I’d like to be able to say that everyone that walks into the house on Lot 310 is open enough to allow their sixth sense to prevail, that the reason people are able to experience paranormal encounters in Villisca is because they come expecting it.
I’d like to be able to say that if your mind is closed, if you don’t believe - you can’t experience anything paranormal. That however, is not true. We do not belong to a secret society privileged to a higher level of information than everyone else. We are, however, at a point in our lives where something is missing.
We’ve lived the American dream. We got married, we bought the house, we had children, we worked hard, we landed the perfect job. We have two or three cars in the garage, we take family vacations and go to church on Sunday. Yet we’re still searching and perhaps, that’s when we finally start listening. We begin to realize that the coincidences can’t be explained away, that the dreams must have some meaning and that our interest in either proving or disproving the existence of something more is a starting point.
We discover that the journey is beginning not ending.
The best example of this concept is not the hundreds of visitors to Lot 310 that believe in ghosts and are searching for a personal experience to validate their beliefs but rather in the hundreds who come that don’t. Why are they here? Most show up proclaiming a hoax, determined to discover the hidden audio players, wires and other devices that are being used to trick others into believing they’ve had a paranormal experience. Intent on removing the possibility that their lives may not be as simple as they need them to be— they are searching instead for a reason to remain comfortable where they are. A reason to ignore the nagging incessant thought that this is not all there is.
Why then, Villisca? Is it as simple as ghosts returning home? Or has Lot 310 been chosen? What better place to learn how to overcome the obstacles we face? What better place to learn forgiveness? What better place to learn from the mistakes we’ve made in the past? What better place to point us to the future? We need a sign and the ghosts and spirits of Lot 310 are providing it.
This is the beginning of the spiritual journey upon which we will all eventually embark. Timing is critical: we will all arrive here at different times and in different lives. The song by Train, Calling all Angels, illustrates this message. How many times have we told ourselves “if we could just have a sign”– we could believe. Proof and faith, however, were never meant to go hand in hand. One will never beget the other. Signs, we’re being given. Faith in those signs has to come from within.
When and where your journey begins is up to you. We are finding, however, that for many, Lot 310 in Villisca is the beginning and the end.
In the years that I’ve been associated with the house, I’ve received many signs of my own- some personal and others obviously sent to guide my work on the website, with Villisca’s visitors and with Sarah, herself. When I first met Darwin Linn, I asked him if he believed in ghosts. Darwin was still somewhat new to the concept that his house was haunted and hadn’t yet had his own experience. His response was noncommittal. “I’ve never seen one.” he replied. Today, however, when asked that same question, Darwin responds easily. He sees the signs and knows that it was no coincidence that he and Martha became the guardians of Lot 310 and it’s secrets.
The renovation of the home was meant to be and visitors encouraged. A true small town personality with a heart of gold, Darwin Linn was supposed to be a major player in the healing of Villisca. It simply took him a few years to figure it out. It was during a brief conversation with Darwin regarding a photograph of a beautiful red flowering plant, that one of the most obscure signs became one of the most obvious.
I happened across a photograph of a beautiful flowering plant while searching the museum for pictures to include on the website. When questioned, Darwin recounted the story without a second thought - During the renovations of the Villisca Axe Murder House, Martha began planting flowers in the yard. Purchased from a local Girl Scout troop, the flower packets boasted a variety of species.
The Linn’s were pleasantly surprised when one of the plants, began to grow… and grow…and grow. A little research revealed the name of the plant was “Love Lies Bleeding.” Boasting beautiful red flowing flowers that grew down instead of up – the plant continued to bloom and grow during the years of renovation. Oddly enough, when the renovations were finished, the plant died. The name of the plant alone was enough to raise a few eyebrows and although Darwin found it a little odd, he had not yet realized the true significance.
Although I added the photo and the story to the website, it wasn’t until I dug a little deeper and the true meaning this plant was to convey became clear. Typing the name Loves Lies Bleeding into the browser on my computer, I settled back to await the long list of websites I would undoubtedly be forced to peruse. To my astonishment, however, I was immediately directed instead to a webpage that displayed an article by Richard Katz titled “Love Lies Bleeding- A study in Spiritual Surrender.” The article is reprinted below.
“This impressive species of Amaranthus shares the hardiness of its aggressive cousin, the Pigweed Amaranthus retroflexus. Its sturdy, succulent stems and prolific seeds make this plant a dynamic addition to the garden. The mature plant is characterized by long, pendulous catkins with thousands of tiny red-magenta blossoms. The flowers are tightly packed, each with just a fringe at the top and a few stamens that protrude from their enclosures. Individually the flower seems insignificant, but en masse they form a torrent of red, like waterfalls tumbling in spirals down to the Earth.
The entire gesture of Love-Lies-Bleeding is downward, each plant forming sweeping arches that embrace the Earth. The color of the plant is also effusive, with magenta red impregnating the stems, the seeds, and nearly all of the plant. The "bleeding out" of the Amaranthus caudatus relates to its quality as a flower essence. Love-Lies-Bleeding essence has proven to be a powerful balm for those undergoing great physical and psychic pain. When the soul has been stretched to the breaking point, it can enter another dimension of spiritual awareness.
The Love-Lies-Bleeding plant, in its gesture of letting go, reminds us of the healing power of spiritual surrender. Love-Lies-Bleeding addresses suffering and pain that has penetrated even more deeply into the psyche and body, often approaching the threshold of death. By allowing a process of surrender, the soul can experience the reality of a Higher Will working within it. The Love-Lies-Bleeding, with its curving and graceful form, is the picture of feminine surrender. When we surrender the self by allowing suffering to find its way to spiritual transcendence, a greater awareness and strength of the true spiritual Self is anchored in the soul.”
When you start to acknowledge the signs you’ve asked for, you’ll realize that coincidences no longer exist. Messages are sent to us from the Spirit world on a daily basis. Most we overlook. When you give up blaming things on “coincidence” and start to question why and how something happens- another world awaits. Those of you operating in a fifth sense world would say “big deal, it’s a red flower.” I challenge you to go a little deeper.
The name of the flower is the first indication that it belonged in the yard of the Villisca Axe Murder House. “Love lies Bleeding”. Eight people were brutally murdered. Innocent children were put to their deaths and a town shattered. The definition of the word “love” is: a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness. Sarah and Joe Moore loved their children. The children loved their parents. The word bleed has several definitions. “To feel anguish, pain, or sympathy”, is one. Love Lies in anguish or pain is an accurate representation of the tragedy of the Moore family.
Taking a step back, let’s look once again at the article written by Richard Katz. “The "bleeding out" of the Amaranthus caudatus relates to its quality as a flower essence. Love-Lies-Bleeding essence has proven to be a powerful balm for those undergoing great physical and psychic pain. When the soul has been stretched to the breaking point, it can enter another dimension of spiritual awareness. The Love-Lies-Bleeding plant, in its gesture of letting go, reminds us of the healing power of spiritual surrender. Love-Lies-Bleeding addresses suffering and pain that has penetrated even more deeply into the psyche and body, often approaching the threshold of death.” Yes, read it again.
The essence of this flower is a balm for those undergoing great physical and psychic pain. The family of Josiah Moore and Lena and Ina Stillinger suffered more physical pain that many of us will ever know. The psychic pain surfaced later as their souls wandered the house, searching for the answers to their deaths. On the other hand, if the tragedy in Villisca was meant to help others as we suggested earlier – what better place for such a plant to be.
As you continue to read some of the stories on this website, you’ll find the house draws people desperately seeking solace from the pain, both physical and spiritual of losing loved ones. What better lesson for those to learn than “the healing power of spiritual surrender.”
On the Ghosthunter's page of this website, we have attempted to provide links and include information provided to us by the many paranormal investigators that have taken on the Moore home. Some came away believers, others reported slight activity and still others maintained that while nothing out of the ordinary happened, they still believe something exists in the home. We have yet to have any paranormal team tell us that they do not believe the house is haunted.
To be honest, though, I can tell you from firsthand experience that paranormal activity is not something you'll truly believe until you've experienced it yourself. If you happen to be in the neighborhood... stop by and check it out. We'd love to hear your opinion.