Van stays all night at Ax murder House

November 1, 2018

A year ago around Halloween, Leila Rush, who was the producer of our Van & Bonnie radio show at the time, asked if I would consider doing the morning show from the Villisca, Iowa Ax murder house, with which she had a fascination. I laughed and said, "Sure if you think you can pull it off," never dreaming that she actually would. On June 9, 1912 eight people, including 6 children, were killed by an ax murderer and the case has never been solved.  Plus there have been stories of all sorts of unexplained things going on in the house ever since.

When Leila asked, the owner of the home knew of the credibility and huge audience of our morning show, so she actually gave us the house for 24 hours. Seven of us from the station stayed all night and broadcast the show from there the next morning. I'm not a big believer in these things, but yes, unexplained things did happen.  I'll mention those in a bit, but first some pictures I took.  Be warned, some of this is rather graphic.

Either during or after the murders, the murder put sheets over all the mirrors in the house. No one knows why for sure but the theory is that no one could do anything so heinous and look at themselves. 

And in this picture, notice the mark on the wall above the mirror and sheet. This was in the bedroom where the parents were in bed sleeping and bludgeoned with the blunt side of the ax head. On the murderer's back-swing, the sharp end of the ax hit the wall and made the mark, which has never been touched since.   Here's a close up of the mark.

Of the 7 of us from the station, I was the only one that slept. I attribute this to my strong Christian faith and belief that, "Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world." I slept on an air mattress on the floor right below those ax marks next to the parents bed.  We were not allowed to sleep in the beds. Here is a picture that had been put on the wall of some of the children. The more you were there, the more you realized what a terrible tragedy this was. 

 

And here is a picture I took the next morning of the sun eerily streaming in the children's attic playroom. 

 

There is no electricity, so we sat in the living room the night before the broadcast with a lantern and a few flashlights. We were told that we might want to bring some toy balls because legend had it that the ghosts of the children might play with them.  We set several in the middle of the floor. Nothing happened for several minutes, then one started rolling toward John, our engineer. I didn't think too much of it, but then another ball that had been sitting in the same place as the first, started rolling the other direction toward me. But I thought the most bazaar thing of the evening was when I was doing some e-mailing on my phone and all of a sudden a screen picture popped up that looked like the room in which we were sitting but there were 2 human arms coming down out of the ceiling.  I called Leila over to look at it.  She did and screamed.

We had to run power in from outside the house the next morning to power our radio equipment and the show went fine. We interviewed the caretaker and I was stuck by his reverence for the family and what had happened there.  He didn't see it as a place of amusement, but a place of history...horrible history. 

To me, there are 2 powers in the world...one good...one bad. Stick with the good folks!  Don't dink with the bad.