On November 7, a visitor to the world-renowned Villisca Axe Murder House in Villisca, Iowa, was rushed to a nearby hospital after being found with a self-inflicted stab wound to his chest. The house is a familiar site to paranormal investigators, who have proclaimed it to be one of the most haunted places in America following the 1912 murders of six children and two adults whose skulls were crushed while they slept in their beds. The crime was never solved, and visitors to the house regularly report emotional, physical, and supernatural disturbances during their overnight visits.
“They play with the children, they hear voices, they get pictures of anomalies,” says Martha Linn, 77, who bought the house in 1994 and restored it to its 1912 condition, stripping the place of all electricity and plumbing and turning it into a tourist attraction. “I have notebooks from just the last two years full of what overnight experiences people have had. Very few of them go away without experiencing something.”
Due to the overwhelming number of paranormal experiences reported in the house, it has become one of the most regularly visited sites for ghost hunters, who will often bring Ouija boards, EVP recorders, or the original axe from the murders into the house in attempts to stir up whatever dark forces lie within its cursed walls.
Earlier this month, Robert Steven Laursen Jr., 37, of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, was one such visitor. He arrived with a group of friends for a “recreational paranormal investigation,” according to Montgomery County Sheriff Joe Sampson. “From my understanding he was alone in the northwest bedroom, and the rest of the party was outside, and he called for help on their mobile, two-way radios,” Sampson told me. His companions found him stabbed in the chest—an apparently self-inflicted wound—called 9-1-1, and Laursen was brought to a nearby hospital before being helicoptered to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha.
According to a Montgomery County police report, the incident happened around 12:45 AM, which is said to be the approximate time that the 1912 murders of Josiah and Sarah Moore, along with their four children and two visiting girls, took place.
On the night of June 9, 1912, Josiah Moore and his wife, three sons and daughter attended an evening church service before returning home, accompanied by two friends of his daughter’s who were invited to spend the night at the house. Around 7 AM the following morning, a neighbor noticed the house was unusually quiet, and when she found the doors locked and all of the windows covered, she called Moore’s brother, who unlocked the house and found his relatives bloodied and lifeless in their beds.
Local officials quickly lost control of the crime scene, where an estimated 100 people arrived to gawk at the mutilated bodies. Fingerprinting had yet to become a widely established tool of criminal investigation in the US, and the massive disturbance to the house from onlookers prevented detectives from collecting sufficient evidence for a conclusive investigation. Gouge marks across bedroom ceilings from the upswing of the axe revealed something about the killer’s height (exonerating one particularly short suspect), but these marks were in the center of the room, not above the victim’s beds, and were thought to be the killer whirlwinding the axe in a one-handed frenzy of excitement.
The town has again drawn a lot of attention since the Laursen episode, however, and both Sampson and Linn, the caretaker, say they have been inundated with media inquiries, which they hope will end soon.
“This particular incident has been very upsetting,” Linn says. “It’s publicity, but it’s not exactly the kind of publicity you desire to have. I don’t want people thinking that when they come to the Villisca Axe Murder House something’s going to happen that’s going to make them do something like that. I want them to have a good experience from the house, learn about the history, and if something [paranormal] comes about, then that’s one-up for them, I guess.”
Linn and Sampson say that Laursen has recovered from his injuries, but will not comment any further out of respect for the family.