We booked an overnight stay at the Villisca Axe Murder House with a group of coworker friends,…read morewhich was super odd to begin with. But with all its ups and downs, we had a ton of fun overall.
We were to meet our guide at the museum in town, but arrived a little early and had a bit of time to look around at the exhibits. The museum had a lot of items from the period when the murders took place - things like old Coke and Pepsi bottles, but none of which were used in any of the murders so we just took a passing glance.
We came upon a bucket of old shingle scraps from the original murder house (free for the taking) so that was an interesting piece of the history. We did not take any of these shingle chips, lest we bring something more than memories home with us.
Once we met our guide, she was to take us around the area and to the cemetery where the victims are buried, and then to the Axe Murder House where we would spend the night.
Since we had a big group and she drove a small Sedan, she just said to follow her in our car and she would point out her window at a few things along the way and then tell us what the pointed-at things meant when we arrived at the cemetery. However, she also had a cigarette she ashed out the window so we weren't sure what was pointing and what was ashing. Just to be clear, I'm not complaining about this - it was hilarious.
Our guide imparted to us that she had heard weed-whacking sounds at the cemetery earlier that week, but when she looked around, there was no weed-whacking landscaper to be seen. Needless to say, we were on the lookout for this phantom weed whacker the rest of the experience.
We arrived at the main event, and got a quick tour of the barn, cellar, and the house. Inside the house there were a few historical pieces from the Moore family (the victims) such as some clothing laid out on the beds and photos on the walls.
Once we were on our own, we ventured into the cellar first. After looking around a bit, a mouse or maybe a stick touched my friend's foot and she screamed, which caused us all to scream. When we found out it was just a mouse/stick, we told her to save her screams for actual ghosts or supernatural sightings.
We next went to check out the barn a little closer, and saw that there were some semi-unflattering paintings of the victim's on the wall, along with a previous visitor's warning: "Sh*t went down!"
We strolled around the rest of the grounds, which included an outhouse, a little gazebo style pair of benches, and a few other outbuildings.
One thing to note here is that this house is not in the middle of nowhere out in a cornfield where you feel isolated and instantly eery - it's in the middle of a neighborhood with neighbors' yards all around, including playsets and bicycles, etc. If you can ignore those, the grounds do feel a little creepy as you walk through them.
After our little stroll of the surrounding area, we headed into the house. We sort of just waited around for nightfall and chatted a bit about what we thought we might see once it got dark. We had Casey's Pizza and wine coolers, so we were having a good time while we waited, don't worry.
Once night fell, we did walk around the house a little more (with flashlights) to see if any spooky things happened now that it was dark. We did hear a slight tapping/humming noise, but when we went to investigate, it ended up being the old window air conditioner.
At this point, we thought we may need to delve deeper to get these spirits to haunt us. Luckily, one of my coworkers brought a crystal which we used to ask the spirits questions (yes or no questions). We decided the crystal swinging one way meant yes and the other way being no. I feel that was kind of arbitrary since we made up the rules of the answering format, but we did get it swinging a little bit to get some possible answers out of those dang ghosts.
My other coworker brought an EVP reader and we asked the spirits a few questions (but we didn't get to hear the recordings until the next week, and there were a few little spooky things there, if you increased the volume a ton and could hear a muffled voice kind of saying a few of our names).
A handful in our group were getting tired and did not want to sleep in the house, so they headed to their van at this point to hit the hay. The true ghost hunters (me and a few others) stayed up the rest of the night so we didn't miss anything spooky that may pop up. We didn't see anything creepy beyond a wasp's nest in the attic and a suspicious doll we found in one of the bedrooms.
The morning came, and even though we didn't have any specific haunting experiences, we did have a ton of fun and did freak each other out a few times, so it was all in all a pretty good time.
I would recommend this experience if you have a good group to go with, and a light spirit to not take it too seriously and expect to see Ghostbusters-like apparitions (who knows, maybe YOU will!)
