Date: September 4, 2022

Location: Villisca Ax Murder House, Villisca, Iowa

After several delays due to the pandemic and busy schedules, we were finally able to head north to Iowa to investigate the small-town farmhouse made notorious by a grisly, unsolved murder in 1912. The tragic and brutal murder of six young children and two adults has brought countless ghost hunters and thrill seekers to the quiet town of Villisca, nestled in southern Iowa farm country. 

We arrived in the late afternoon, just as the day’s final tour was wrapping up, to collect the keys and learn more about the house. Although I didn’t know it at the time, our most intriguing finding occurred in those first few moments of wandering around photographing the outside of the house. Upon zooming in to look more closely at the house, I noticed a small (but fairly obvious) face peeping out of the upper half of one of the kitchen windows. As you can see in the images below, the face appears to be that of a young child, but it is hard to discern enough detail to tell whether the child is a boy or girl.

Full-size image - window with face circled in red

Zoomed-in image showing what appears to be a child's face peeking out the window.

Upon entering the house to start setting up for the night, Don was very quickly hit with a heavy feeling in the upstairs of the home. This isn’t surprising given that the entire Moore family was murdered in their sleep in this part of the house. 

Despite the immediate impressions, the house was relatively quiet while we were inside. We captured one possible EVP of a quiet voice responding “uh-huh” to a question, but it wasn’t distinguishable enough to publish. Our infrared cameras recorded multiple orbs of varying brightness and size, particularly in the upstairs rooms, but we caught none in our still photos. 

Our personal experiences were the most noteworthy occurrences besides the initial photo. Early in the evening, my dad and I were sitting in the children’s room upstairs. I was sitting on the very edge of one of the beds (pictured) while my dad sat on the floor asking questions. We both heard the bed frame rattle, and the bed shook briefly as though someone had sat down or jumped onto the head of it. Oddly, when I played the audio track back, I did not hear the rattling on the digital voice recorder we were using.

My mom and I were in the same room an hour or so later, and she was reading a children’s story aloud to anyone who cared to listen.  The voice recorder that we had been recording with for several minutes completely shut off midway through the story, and strangely, the file that had been recording was no longer on the device when we turned it back on... Perhaps the children were politely letting us know they didn’t want to be heard that night.

We left the house with a definite feeling that the spirits of those who so tragically died there are still lingering. We are pleased with the unique photo we captured, and we all had some interesting personal experiences, but, like many other popular haunted locales, it seems that the spirits at this one may be growing wary of all their still-living visitors poking around day and night for evidence of a haunting.  

Hayley.