The lamps were still burning when neighbors found the Moore house locked from the inside on the morning of June 10, 1912. Josiah and Sarah Moore were dead in their bed. Down the hall, all four of their children were dead too, and in the guest room, two young sisters who were only sleeping over that night, Ina and Lena Stillinger, had been killed as well. Eight people in one house, all struck with the same weapon, an axe that belonged to Josiah Moore himself, left behind at the scene rather than carried away.
Whoever did it stayed in the house for hours afterward. The mirrors were covered with cloth. A bowl of bloody water sat on the kitchen table. Every window shade was drawn. Nothing valuable was taken.
Investigators chased the case for years. A traveling minister named George Kelly was tried twice and acquitted the second time. A serial killer theory pointed at a man named Henry Lee Moore, no relation, who was already committing similar axe murders across the Midwest. Neither theory ever produced a conviction, and the house still stands in Villisca today, restored to its 1912 layout, open to anyone willing to spend the night inside.
Is it possible whoever covered those mirrors knew exactly what they were doing and wanted the house itself to forget what happened in it.
Cold case, or does that house still remember?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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