When the Ghost Screams(18)

A crowd soon gathered outside the death house, and the curious pushed their way into the home, gawking at the mutilated bodies and trampling over evidence. The crime scene was destroyed.

Over the next years, investigators focused on three suspects. There was the Reverend Lyn George Jacklin Kelly, a minister who had been visiting the town the night of the murders.

Mentally unstable, at one point he confessed to the killings, saying he was inspired by a sermon he was working on, taken from the book of Ezekiel in the Bible, which has a verse that begins, “Slay utterly old and young …”

As any seasoned detective knows, compulsive confessors crawl out of the woodwork to admit to crimes they did not commit. In addition, it appeared that the reverend may have been pressured to confess.

Then there was Frank Jones, a rich and powerful rival of Joe Moore’s. Each owned a hardware store, and the competition had grown bitter.

William Mansfield also was investigated. He was a suspect in the axe murder of his wife, daughter, and in-laws in Blue Island, Illinois. His modus operandi was similar to that of the Villisca killer.

The convoluted case and its investigation inspired books and documentaries. Perhaps if the case had been solved, there would not be such interest in it today.

Apparently residents of Villisca were not altogether repelled by the history of the house. When a documentary maker interviewed an elderly woman whose family had lived there after the murder, she smiled as she recalled her childhood sleeping in the blood-splattered room.

Though no one interviewed on the documentary mentioned ethereal encounters, it may simply be that they were not sensitive enough to sense the spirits in the home.

Or it could be that new owners woke the spirits from a daze.

When Darwin and Martha Linn purchased the old house, they restored it to resemble the grisly day in 1912. Crime buffs flock there to take the tours.

Like a dial on a radio, the ambience was set to pick up signals from beyond.

When people began to notice ghostly stirrings in the house, a small but determined investigative group from Missouri got on the case. Six members of the Miller Paranormal Research team traveled to Villisca. Brenda Marble, Dee Ann Tripses, Jerry Miller, Kathy Burhart, and psychics Joyce Morgan and Misty Maeder entered the historic murder site in August 2003, equipped with their electronic detection tools and their keen sixth sense.

The stage was set to draw visitors to the past, Brenda noted, as she inhaled the heavy odor of the kerosene lamps. Those with imagination could find themselves back in the era of the brutal night. Add intuition to that, and it may be more than you bargained for.

Joyce Morgan was so tuned into the horror, that she was overcome with emotion on her first visit, as disturbing images of the children invaded her senses. She opted to leave the house.

The rest of the team spent the night, one they will never forget.

It was two a.m., possibly the exact hour that the mass murder occurred, when the spirits came alive.

Investigators theorized that the killer went into action as the train roared through town, the scream of its whistle drowning out the screams of his victims.

When the whistle sounded the first night that the Miller team visited, it seemed to literally wake the dead. Misty, Dee Ann, and Brenda watched in astonishment as a fog moved through the upstairs rooms of the old farmhouse.

It began in the parents’ room and settled in the children’s room. “It was as if the whole room went out of focus,” Brenda told me.

Through her third eye, psychic Misty Maeder then saw a reenactment of the attacks on the children.

The train passed, and the world became still.

“It was so quiet,” Brenda told me. “There were no clocks ticking, and it was not raining. It was eerily silent.”

And then came a noise that made the hair on the backs of their necks rise. All three women heard the distinctive sound of dripping. It came from the direction of one of the girls’ beds.

It was the sound of blood droplets hitting the floor.

“That’s when it became real,” confided Brenda. “With the sound of the dripping, I realized how brutal it was. It just hit me how tragic it was.”

Though Brenda had planned just one visit to the murder site, she and the team found themselves heading back several more times. “The house kept drawing us back,” said Brenda. “We kept thinking we were finished with the investigation, and then we would find ourselves back there again.”

The psychics zeroed in on two men as the culprits. One, they believe, was a hired killer, and the other was his accomplice. The accomplice was unaware that the children would become victims and has great remorse over the fact. He is, they say, so sorry that he has returned to the Villisca home.