Paranormal Unsettled

My Reckoning With Villisca

I've researched a lot of haunted houses for this podcast. None of them have stayed with me the way the house in Villisca, Iowa has.

If you don't know the story, in the early hours of June 10, 1912, someone walked into the Moore family home with Josiah Moore's own axe and killed eight people. Josiah and his wife Sarah. Their four children, Herman, Katherine, Boyd, and Paul. And two house guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger, who simply stayed the night after a church event. The killer covered the mirrors. Left a slab of bacon leaning against the wall. Locked the door behind him on the way out and took the key. This wasn't a robbery. Nothing was stolen except the lives of eight innocent people.

Over a hundred years later, nobody has ever been convicted. But I have a suspect, and it's the same one a lot of serious researchers have landed on. While many seem to think it was "The Man From The Train" Paul Mueller, and he also fits the bill, I happen to keep coming back to Reverend George Kelly.

Why I think it was him

Kelly was a traveling minister who rolled into Villisca on June 8, two days before the murders, to teach at the Children's Day service. Coincidentally this was the same event the Moore family and the Stillinger girls attended the night they died. He left town between 5 and 6 the next morning, hours before anyone discovered the bodies.

And on that train out of town, he told other passengers that eight people were dead back in Villisca, killed in their beds. Before the bodies were found. Before anyone knew. That alone should have ended the conversation in 1912.

His track record after that only makes the case heavier. He had a documented history of peeping in windows and propositioning young girls to pose for him. He'd had a breakdown as a teenager. He became obsessed with the case in the years that followed, writing letters to police and to the victims' families, fishing for details, inserting himself into the investigation, even posing as a detective to get himself onto a tour of the murder house. In 1917 he confessed outright, in detail, describing a "vision" telling him to "suffer the children to come unto me." He recanted at trial and the first jury hung. A second jury acquitted him in November of that year. No one else has ever been tried.

People will tell you the case against him had no solid evidence and a coerced confession. No physical evidence tied him to these murders. He was a small man the original coroner didn't think was strong enough to swing an axe that hard. I get the skepticism. But intent doesn't require size, and a man who tells strangers about eight dead bodies before anyone else on earth knows they're dead is not an innocent bystander with bad timing.

As a dad of two, this one doesn't let go.  Especially with a newborn at home.

The details describing this night in Villisca make my stomach twitch. The children's room, the lamp turned down low, the care taken to not let them see what was coming for them. Sickening. Whoever did this didn't just take lives, they took the one thing a parent is supposed to be able to guarantee for one night under their own roof, safety. If it was Kelly, a man who'd just stood in front of those same children teaching Sunday school days before, that's not a murderer to me. That's a coward who used a collar and a Bible to do the unthinkable.

The questions nobody answered

A cigarette butt was found in the attic of that house. The same attic some believe the killer hid in, waiting for the family to fall asleep. To my knowledge, it has never been forensically tested in any meaningful modern way. In an era of DNA and genetic genealogy that has cracked cases decades older than this one, that's not a small oversight. That's a hole you could drive a truck through.

This brings me back to another suspect in the case, Frank Jones. A state senator. He was the wealthiest man in town. Josiah Moore used to work for him before going into business for himself and taking customers with him including, by some accounts, a very profitable John Deere account. Jones had motive, money, and influence in a town small enough that everyone owed somebody a favor. The original private investigator on the case, J.N. Wilkerson, said outright that he believed Jones's influence got an earlier suspect released and pushed investigators toward Kelly instead. Maybe that's coincidence. Maybe it's a small town protecting its most powerful resident. I don't think the people of 1912 Villisca were in a position to push back on a state senator even if they wanted to. 

It's a strange thing, knowing Kelly ended up living out his final years and dying at a psychiatric hospital roughly twenty minutes from where I live now, and that he's buried in a cemetery about an hour from my front door. A man I believe walked away with eight lives on his conscience, never held accountable, just a few exits down the highway from me the whole time. Not to mention his later years in New Jersey where he lead bible reads for the K.K.K. before cross burning rituals. I hope he is rotting.

Why the house itself matters to paranormal investigators

Whatever you believe about what walks those halls now, the Villisca house is unlike almost anywhere else I've ever researched. There's no electricity. No running water. No modern lighting, no HVAC hum, no plumbing creaks to explain away a sound or a weird feeling. When something happens in that house, you're not filtering it through a furnace kicking on cables running through the walls to the light switch. What you experience is raw in a way almost no other haunted location in the country can claim.

With that said, I think it's also worth noting that the house was open to the public as a historical attraction well before it became a paranormal hotspot. People were touring it as a true crime location first. The ghost stories built up around an already famous murder house, not the other way around. I think that speaks volumes to the authenticity of the home whether you sit on the skeptical side or believe something truly evil still lives in those walls.

If you want to find out more about Villisca and the heinous murders that happened between these walls, my podcast "Paranormal Unsettled" is available Monday at 3:17AM on all podcast platforms and YouTube.  Listen with the lights on.

- Johnny Clash