← The Night Owl: True Ghost Stories
The Night Owl: True Ghost Stories
The Villisca Axe Murder House - Part III (Campfire)
01:23:18
More than a century ago, in the quiet town of Villisca, Iowa… a horrifying crime shattered a sense of small-town innocence: two adults and six children were brutally murdered in their sleep with an axe. The case remains unsolved to this day. Today, the home where it happened still stands — preserved not just as a historical site, but as one of the most chilling and active paranormal locations in the country. Previously on this Campfire Series, listeners heard from the current tour guide of the Villisca Axe Murder House… a tourism rep who left the home feeling deeply unsettled… a seasoned paranormal investigator… and a researcher and author who has studied the house for years. But at the center of this series is one family: the caretaker and his wife, who unknowingly moved into the house directly across the street from the Villisca Axe Murder House — and soon after, began experiencing something they couldn’t explain. In Part I, the caretaker shared his side of the story — but it bec...
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- [00:00]
Stephen Ballew
Listener discretion is advised. This campfire series contains detailed accounts of real life violence, including the brutal murders of children, references to animal harm, and personal stories involving emotionally difficult subject matter, including inappropriate behavior. While some guests are sharing their experiences publicly, others will remain anonymous. In those cases, names and identifying details have been changed to protect their privacy. Our intent is not to accuse, speculate, or sensationalize, but to respectfully honor these voices and explore the emotional and paranormal impact these events had on those involved. The Night Owl podcast Campfire Episode 16 the Villisca Axe Murder House Part 3 welcome to the Night Owl Podcast. I'm your host, Stephen Ballew, and this is a place for all you restless spirits out there to tune in and hear true tales of the paranormal. I hunt these stories down, capture them from the mouths of those who've experienced them, and share them with you right here. We're currently looking for more personal ghost stories or haunted locations, so if you or someone you know has one, please submit it to us. For consideration, go to thenightoutpodcast.com Click on the Submit yout Story page and let us hear your ghost story. More than a century ago, in the quiet town of Aliska, Iowa, a horrifying crime shattered a sense of small town innocence. Two adults and six children were brutally murdered in their sleep with an axe. The case remains unsolved to this day. Today, the home where it happened still stands preserved not just as a historical site, but as one of the most chilling and active paranormal locations in the country. Previously on this campfire series, we spoke with the current tour guide of the Villisca X Murderhouse, a tourism rep that left the home feeling deeply unsettled, a seasoned paranormal investigator and a researcher and author who's studied the house for years. But at the center of this series is one family, the caretaker and his family, who unknowingly moved into the house directly across the street from the Villisca Axe Murder House and soon after began experiencing something they couldn't explain. In part one, the caretaker shared his side of the story, but it was clear to me that there was more he wasn't ready to say. Since then, we've heard from others who echoed the idea that a dark presence lingers in Vilisca. And now in part three, we return to the heart of the story. We'll hear what the caretaker held back from us on that first interview I had with him, and for the first time, we'll finally hear his wife's side of the story. Stay tuned for the conclusion of this Villisca campfire Just a couple of reminder announcements. Our Spirit Social event is back and this year it's happening on the most perfect night of all, Halloween. Join us on October 31, 2025 for our annual Once a year Paranormal Gathering featuring the full Night Owl team, psychic mediums from the show, guest speakers and trusted collaborators from our extended paranormal network. Expect a full night of immersive panels, live experiments, haunted storytelling, spiritual history and and behind the scenes tales from the investigations you've heard. On the podcast you'll find a massive spirit market with Tarot astrology oddities and more, flash tattoos, a photo booth, food trucks, a live taping of the Night Owl Podcast and team Q and A and an after hours mixer for all Access guests. We're thrilled to be returning to a venue close to our hearts, the Ballroom at the former Spider House, the location featured in our very first episode, now beautifully restored and reopened. Tickets are currently on sale now and VIP passes have already sold out. Our all access passes are limited and going fast, so if you've been waiting, don't grab yours now at the night owlpodcast.com or visit our link on our Instagram bio. We cannot wait to gather with you all, our fellow restless spirits out there for a night of connection, wonder and things that go bump in the night. Want to volunteer? We're looking for amazing volunteers to help bring this unforgettable night to life. Shifts are flexible, perks are awesome, and you'll be a part of something truly special. Apply now through our link on our Instagram bio or at the night owlpodcast.com Also, if you're in the Austin area, I've got something special coming up. On Friday, October 17th, I'll be hosting a free live Ghost Storytelling Night at Selous beer garden from 7 to 10pm I'll be sharing some eerie tales of my own, answering your questions and if the stars align, inviting a few brave souls to share their personal ghost stories live on stage. If you have a chilling true experience and want to be considered to share it at the the event, head to the nightoutpodcast.com and click on the Submit your story tab. We're accepting submissions now from those courageous enough to step up in front of a live audience. And lastly, I'm very excited to invite you to something I'm helping bring to life. Phantom Cinema's Blood in the Dark, a one night only outdoor horror movie screening at the Secret theater on Thursday, October 23rd. We're taking you back to the neon soaked days of 80s cult horror with a surprise vampire flick under the stars, vintage concessions, a costume contest, and eerie photo ops inside the Secret's iconic Glass House. Tickets are just $5, but seats are very limited, so head to the link in our Night Owl Instagram bio to grab your tickets now. In part one of this campfire series, you heard from the people closest to the Villisca Axe Murder House. The current tour guide shared what it's like to walk the halls of that home every day and how the feeling inside changes with each visit. A representative from Iowa's tourism office described the strange, lingering unease she felt after just a brief stop inside and we began the story of a man who unknowingly moved his family into the house directly across the street, only to find himself drawn into something he couldn't explain and eventually fleeing Villiska with his wife and children. In Part two, we took a step back to widen the lens. Hearing from author Richard Esteppel, who wrote A Nightmare in Villisca, and seasoned paranormal investigator Colin Browen of the Paranormal Files, Richard offered both historical insight and first hand accounts of what it's like to research and investigate this haunted home. Colin, who's returned to Villisca multiple times, including an overnight stay alone in the house, helped us understand what it feels like to be immersed in his energy for more than just a quick visit. Both men spoke to the same truth that something dark seems to remain inside that house. And now, as this special campfire series comes to an end, we return to where this series began with the caretaker of the Axe House who lived across the street and who ultimately informed me at the end of our first call that he and his family had fled to Florida without any intentions of returning. We all heard only a part of his story, but what comes next are the pieces he held back, and for the first time, his wife steps forward to share her side. Now, the moment you hear a family fled Villisca so suddenly, abandoning their home, their vehicle, and even their jobs with no notice, your mind can't help but leap to the sensational it sounds like something straight out of a horror movie. But what happened here wasn't loud or dramatic. There were no levitating objects, no demonic voices echoing through the walls. What you're about to hear is something far more insidious and in many ways far more unsettling. As you listen to the caretaker and his wife recount their time living across the street from the Villisca X murder House, I invite you to do two things. First, ground yourself in the real world. Set aside the over the top tropes we've all absorbed from decades of horror movies and paranormal TV shows. Because in my experience, the paranormal is rarely that overt. It's subtle, it deceives, it builds slowly and often only the people living through it can begin to piece together the full picture, as this story will soon show to you. Second, don't focus only on the moments of strangeness or supposed coincidence. Instead, pay close attention to the journey. These small, seemingly disconnected events. A sound, a feeling, a memory, a dream. They may appear mundane in isolation, but when you step back and view them as a whole, the pattern becomes hard to ignore. In the end, it's not about one dramatic moment. It's about the accumulation of moments that make the ordinary feel profoundly unordinary. This is what happened to one family in Villisca, and this is the part of their story they've rarely shared until now. So settle on up next to the Fire with me and let's listen to the conclusion of this Villisca ghost story.
- [08:50]
Caretaker's Wife
To start off with where and why we were in Villisca, Iowa, which is obviously the big conversation, is it had a lot to do, starting with the fact that we had never bought when we should have. Back in Colorado, we've been renting for a really long time. We just never had the option to buy to stay in Colorado, otherwise we would have never left. We were kind of in a position where we had to go. But my mother was sick. She was diagnosed with sepsis from a back surgery that didn't go well and ended up infecting her and didn't let my family know that that was what she was choosing to do, which was to pass. I didn't know that still living in Colorado, working as a beer merchandiser, ended up coming home and finding out that my mother's basically taken the week to die. That was pretty wicked and horrible. She's raised Catholic, raised me Catholic, so we have those types of beliefs pretty strong. And I always was a believer of God and had my own scares and all that. But when my mom passed and how she passed, that was probably the taker of faith for me. I've never watched anybody pass before and I watched my mom die, which was a big decision to make, so that affected a lot and therefore I didn't get the results. I guess I felt I deserved or wanted or expected. So that kind of messed with me. So continue on from my mom passing. I lived out in Colorado for another two years. My mom had money that was to be dispersed between me and my brother and I ended up getting that and My husband and I, all we really wanted to do was just own a home. We ended up trying to look in Colorado, which was absolutely not going to happen. And Iowa kept popping up. Different homes in Iowa that actually did meet the criteria of what we could afford.
- [10:34]
Caretaker
And.
- [10:35]
Caretaker's Wife
But there was a particular home that I ended up noticing, which I didn't know anything about Villisca. I didn't know anything about the Axe Murder house, because, again, I'm not from Iowa. I realize now, being from Iowa, everybody knows about that house. After we started to look at the house in the middle of all that, my husband, because he's just a researcher, it's just what he does. He looks into everything. So he delves into that, starts checking in that and finds out all about it. Starts watching YouTube videos about it. I wouldn't say got obsessed about it, but pretty much got pretty dang in tune with it and was like, oh, my God, you know, this is. This is what's going on, and this is where this house is. And when we looked at the house, like I said, and walked through it, that's kind of when we were like, oh, man. That's, like, right across from it, which for me at the time was maybe a little too close for comfort. And I didn't have that kind of thrill that he was having, probably because, one, I was still grieving. Two, just wasn't really that thrilled about Iowa anyway. Three would be that after researching and listening to what had happened to that home across the street, if anything, to me, that made me feel sick and sad. Really, really sad. Like, more or less don't even really want to, like, ghost hunt on something like that. It just really hurt my. Hurt my heart. So moving forward, the house ends up working out. We get the inspector, do all this stuff. It works out great. They say, you know, this and this and this is wrong. Those are all things that my husband and I were like, okay, we can do this. So we end up buying the house. Everything works out. Everything feels great, kind of. I think it felt better for my husband more or less than me. I can't quite pinpoint how I felt. Something was just off, and I kept chopping it up to. I'm still grieving. I'm sad. We're going from one extreme to another. I have children that are in school. I mean, there's a lot more in my mind as a female and as a mother not knocking my husband, that I have to play in my brain to where it makes me feel uneasy. I have no family, really. After my mom Passed. I really don't have anything, so I'm kind of just a flounderer at this point. And that's kind of how I've always felt since she passed. So I have a lot more to make me feel uneasy. So I kept chopping it up to. It's just a new thing, and I didn't want to move to Iowa, so I guess that's probably what I'm feeling. Well, my husband gets the plumbing done, and we don't have jobs. And we told ourselves, okay, you know, we're going to put a little pot aside to survive till we find something. And if I could go into that, it really seemed like everything was kind of coming along really perfect. But not for me, let's put it that way. My husband. It just seemed so perfect. Like, he's working on the house, and all of a sudden we meet the neighbor across the street. There's a. There's, you know, you have the Axe Murder house, and there. There's a position that becomes available as far as being a manager. And we go like, oh, man. And so you see on indeed that there's this job, you know, My husband's like, well, why don't I take a look and see if there's any jobs, you know, while he's working on the house with my mom's money and finds it perfectly. And indeed, there's a position as a house manager for the Axe Murder House, which I thought was so weird. I thought, oh, my gosh. And he's like, should I apply? I'm like, absolutely, you should apply. It's your walk across the street. You don't even need a vehicle. So if I get a vehicle and I have to find a job, then we're good. He does the whole calling and gets a hold of somebody, speaks to him, lets them know where we live. They tell him, oh, absolutely. That'd be great. We're gonna pass this on. They did, and they gave him a call back. And it worked out, like, within. Literally. I'm not kidding. Like, three days. Like, it was weird. Just got the job. I mean, it was so easy for him. So now I'm thinking, wow, that's. That, you know, that's great. Everything was working out for him. Like, everything. The job and this. I mean, it just seemed like everything was happy for him, and he really liked his position and ended up getting the pay that he wanted to get the pay of, and everything just seemed to work out for him. And then I started getting kind of, like, upset, like, well, what's going on. I'm not. You know, the town likes him. They all know his name. Right away, I thought that was weird. He just started working there for a week. And we would go into the local gas station and they would know his name and they would love to talk to him. And then there's me just sitting there, like, what? I tried to work at the school with my daughter, and I'm just, like, shunned. So I felt that was kind of odd.
- [14:43]
Caretaker
So as we talked in the first part, I just, I guess, want to reiterate. You know, when we came to Villisca, we had no idea we were going to be involved with the Axe house in Villisca or anything that we had gone through, which has all been negative. I would say just the amount of signs that I saw in that town and just us moving out there, all the positive signs. For example, you know, I'm a history buff. I love antiques, I love old homes. And I come to a town that's filled with old homes, filled with antiques, filled with history. Certain signs, like my wife's first military patch, the 34th infantry, which is 34th Infantry highway, which is Highway 34, as well as the town square in Villisca, had a plaque of her. Her military patch. That was a sign for me that, wow, we belong here. You know, this is working out so great. The house we had purchased for ourselves was built in 1874. And in 1912, when the murders happened, our home was owned by a woman named Margaret Ann Landers. She played kind of a piece during the murders. She testified at the grand jury claiming she heard a female that night scream from across the street at the ex house. Nobody believed Margaret. She was kind of like the old codger of town. And that was kind of all thrown out. The thing that was another sign with Margaret Landers. Margaret Ann Landers is when my wife's mother had passed. She passed kind of in a rough way. My wife's mother's name, her name was Margaret Ann. And my wife's mother was always called Mother Margaret. And when we visited the grave site for Margaret Landers, it also had on their Margaret Ann or and Mother Margaret. So to me, that was another big sign like, wow, we were meant to be here. And I used to joke with my wife saying, you know, both Margaret's are in heaven right now. And Margaret Landers got with your mother and said, hey, I got a house for your daughter and son. Lawn. All these different signs, positively for me, though, kept coming about. And when we first got there, my Wife had switched so suddenly and became negative, kind of shut down. Had no interest in our house. And I remember thinking, I'm not sure why she's feeling this way. This is. We were really excited about it. She started having just odd feelings of the town, of the people in town. And the people were nice, but she just had, like a feeling, a sense of something negative. And I was not seeing any of that. And I wasn't listening to her or really paying attention. I was getting more angry than anything with her. The other one, I. The thing that's. I think one of the odd, oddest things that happened in the beginning for us was when we went to get our home inspected. This is November of last year. There's a cat on YouTube. She's been in and around the Axe house for, I think, nine years. She's a. A gray cat. And they've named her Church because she looks like Church from the pet cemetery movies. And she had hung around the Axe house for, like I said, about nine years. She visit people. She, you know, people would video her. She was a pretty famous cat, very well known. So famous to where the company that owns the house now actually has a stuffed animal of Church. So when we were getting our home inspected in November, I'm outside with the inspector. My wife goes in the house and she's looking around, and Church shows up right away. And we both knew, oh, this is. This is the famous church. And she goes in the house with my wife. And my wife explained that this Church, the cat would not leave her alone. She kept meowing and trying to jump on her and trying to, you know, just like, almost getting in her way, like, trying to get her attention with something. I thought, okay, she's just, you know, a friendly cat. She's used to being around people.
- [18:42]
Caretaker's Wife
I remember coming in and her meowing. And she talks to you. She really does. She's a cat that really talks. And I'm kind of talking to her about, is this okay to live here? That kind of thing, to the cat. And this is in the beginning. The cat just meows. And we ended up walking. I followed her out of the house, but she didn't stay ahead of me. She walked with me, which I thought was kind of strange. And we walked out. And I remember saying, we're gonna choose this house.
- [19:04]
Caretaker
So fast forward, we close on the home. We moved down there. We weren't staying in our home at first because it was unlivable. We were staying at the bank in town. A lady had purchased it and fixed it up and turned it into, like a Airbnb. So we were staying there for the first couple of weeks as I would go to the house and, you know, try to work on the bathroom, get some plumbing done. At this point, again, my wife is just beside herself. She's recluse. She's laying in bed just in a really odd state, having just these weird feelings. And I'm not pinpointing what these are. One day in particular, this is after I had applied for the property manager for the ex house, and I was waiting for a call and received a call. Yet one day I'm in the bathroom working on it, and, you know, Church just comes in my house, the cat. And I'm thinking, how the heck did she get in here? She came in and she is literally just all over me, meowing and getting, you know, trying to get my attention, getting in my way. So I actually stop working and sit down and start petting her and kind of talking with her, saying, oh, you know, you're a pretty nosy little cat. What are you doing here? And then my phone rings right then and there, and it's the company that owns the Axe house calls me and pretty much offers me the job on the phone.
- [20:22]
Caretaker's Wife
And when my husband got the call that he got the job, the cat was in our house meowing and hugging all over him. And I thought, oh, you know, that's gotta be a sign that that cat just is saying, hey, you're gonna get this job.
- [20:33]
Caretaker
I took that whole church cat thing as like she was excited to have me come aboard or basically welcoming me. But now that I look at it today and think about it, it was this cat was telling us, leave. Don't buy this house. Leave, Leave. Don't take this job. Go, go, go.
- [20:57]
Stephen Ballew
You've just heard the caretaker's wife begin to share her side of the story. One that began with the sudden loss of her mother and an unexpected move to a quiet Iowa town. But not long after settling in, they realized their new home sat directly across from one of the most infamous haunted locations in the country. Then the unusual things started to happen. A gray cat began appearing at their doorstep. But this wasn't just any cat. This was Church, a female feline long associated with the Axe murder house. A quiet, watchful presence that had become something of an iconic among locals and investigators. Now, it seemed church had taken a peculiar interest in the caretaker and his wife. After this short break, they'll share more about this mysterious cat and the unsettling series of events that began to unfold once church made her presence known. Stay tuned. I've been really focusing on my health and physical well being as of late. 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- [25:57]
Caretaker's Wife
Cat starts coming to her house all the time. We end up finding out that that poor cat has nobody taking care of her. She's literally living in that axe murder house and then probably going to certain people, I don't know who, hoping to get food, I guess. And we moved around January, February, where it was really cold. And I was really worried about her because, I mean, where is she gonna go? That house has no electricity. I mean, max murder, no electricity, no heat, no nothing. She ended up coming to us all the time and ended up staying with us, like days on end and nights on end. And we never kept her against her will. I always made sure to let her go out when she wanted to go out. We didn't have a cat box for a litter box for, I don't know, a few Days, maybe even a week, wondering, like, wait a minute here. Cat's gotta go to the bathroom. And I don't. And I started freaking out, going, I don't want her going to the bathroom in our clothes. Looked all the time. Ever found anything which I thought was odd? It's almost like she was a fake animal. She'd come over and stay with us for two nights and end. There's no bathroom marks. There's no pee. You'd smell a cat's pee. You don't smell anything. And I used to think that was so strange. Eventually she ended up. We ended up getting a litter box, and I ended up getting food for her because I just loved her and felt so bad for her. And she still wasn't using our litter box, which I thought was so weird. I thought I would check it, like, as a weirdo, going, okay, we've had this cat staying with us, you know, this many days now. I bought a litter box because I'm thinking, she's staying with us longer. We didn't register and we should have. And I regret this to the end. I always regret this didn't register yet. But anyways, I'm checking the litter box. Nothing. I'm like, where is she going? To the bathroom. There's no way this cat is staying with us this long and isn't going to the bathroom. And I've checked every crevice. I'm not joking. I smell it by now. I would have smelt it by then. Nothing. Well, we have cats of our own in Colorado, and we ended up talking about. About our cats in front of her. And this is going to sound really kooky because this adds to the story in front of her. And she's just a sweet cat. She loved my kids. I was like, you know, we're going to have to get rid of her. And this was right before, I think we had to go visit Colorado again to get a few more things because we just had so much stuff. We still have stuff there. And I remember saying, we're going to have to get rid of her because if she can't go, and because I was kind of upset and frustrated if she can't go to the bathroom in the cat litter box, and I can't keep her because cats smell their cats pee. I didn't know how that works. They're gonna end up peeing all over the place, and I can't have that. So I remember saying that out loud. And she's sitting there rubbing on his leg, my husband's leg. And I'm like, we can't keep her. She's gotta go for real. Like, I'll leave this litter box for another day or two if she stays with us. And then I gotta get rid of her. And I swear on my life, this is no joke. I almost sometimes wish it was, because it's just so dang weird. It starts this whole thing off weird. The cat starts going to the bathroom in the litter box. It's almost as if the cat's human and heard me say, you're going to leave my home, kitty cat, if you don't start doing this. I'm not thinking I'm talking to a cat that understands that. But there's no way in heck that cat didn't understand me. So I'm thinking, okay, that's a sign. Obviously, she's going to, you know, convert. She doesn't want to leave. But I still don't believe for one minute that it's got to be that she understood what I was saying. But she ends up going to the bathroom. So now we're like, okay, so we could. We could probably, you know, domesticate the cat. She's obviously, you know, feral, but she knows how to go to the bathroom in the litter box. So now she's going to the bathroom. She's happy. I have food. I'm feeding her. She's pretty much our cat, but we're still letting her go because she'd go with him to work. It was almost like a dog. Be with him and then come back and love my kids.
- [29:25]
Caretaker
Church moves in with us, pretty much adopts us as a family and starts to hang around my kids all day. When I went to go to work and my wife had tried to go out and find work, Church would stay with us. She might go visit the Axe house when other people were there. It just depends on what kind of people would show up. If it was younger teenagers or something like that. Church would leave our house, go to work for the night, and then come back the next morning.
- [29:52]
Caretaker's Wife
And what I started noticing with her, at least the feeling I started getting with her is she would only go. She started getting less and less active at that house. She. You could almost tell she had no interest in the house and would stay with us. And the times that she would actually want to go to the Axe Murder House would be with certain people. And I noticed it was with females, and it was usually younger kids. And then I started noticing that I think she's trying to be a protector. She's not a conduit. Of something bad because we were a little nervous about her being in her home. But she was really, I think a protector for sure, Especially for children. She loved my kids and that was the way I thought. I started noticing was weird. She'd get up with me at. In the morning. I started waking up at 2, between 2 and 3 all the time at that house, all the time. So living in the house was causing issues for me. Sleeping wise, I was having really weird dreams and I could. I was always waking up. But we had the cat staying with us all the time. And she'd get up with me like clockwork, which I always felt kind of like protected in a really weird way because she'd get up with me, walk with me, I'd go to the bathroom, she'd go drink her water and she'd wait all the time for me. And I thought that was so odd a cat would do that. So I started noticing. I think if anything, we were almost like her energizer. She would go protect and then come back and stay with us and get the love and be away from probably what was evil, I think stewing in there. I don't think all evil was initially in that home, the ax murder home. But I think definitely people who did the wrong things and like to conjure bad things were doing stuff and that cat could feel it. And so she'd come to our house and she would look at Eve in a certain way. It was really weird. And there was a few other instances where we would say things and she would just do it afterwards like a little human. And I remember joking with my husband about like, she's probably got one of those spirits in her, living in her. And I don't know which one it is because she just seemed so human. But we ended up losing her.
- [31:49]
Caretaker
So Church was eventually stolen. Ever since then, I would say it got worse. So for me, I think Church was a protector as well as almost like a service animal. For me. If I were gonna do something that I shouldn't have done in the Axe house, maybe I was gonna take an ax we have and put it in the room and take a picture. She'd literally get in my way and meow and meow. And I started picking up on her signals like, ah, maybe I shouldn't, you know. But eventually she was stolen. The day she was stolen. Well, actually, let's say the very next day. I'm upset. My wife and kids are really upset. And I'm driving down the main road in the town of Villisca and I see this cat laying in the middle of the road. Someone had hit it, but it was moving around. And I thought, oh, no. And I knew right away it wasn't Church. Thank God. It was a spotted brown cat. I pull over and I get out, just, you know, look at this poor thing. Is it still moving around? And it was the. The oddest negative feeling looking at this cat, you know, gasping for air in the road. This cat is literally looking at me and trying to reach its paw out to me, like, take me, you know, take me. And it's meowing and it's bleeding everywhere, the poor thing. And urinated all over the place. It was. It was dying. And I just remember staring at this cat and having just a feeling of it's time to go, like. And I don't know why I had that feeling that night. I had a dream, like, of this cat, like, all night that night, the one that was dying in the road. So that, you know, that I think that was a sign, another sign to leave at this point, you know, because I'm not an animal lover. I really am. I'm not. I'm just, you know. But this. This cat, Church, and then the one dying was. That hit me hard. And still to this day, I tear up over it. But when Church was taken, that things I would say started to progress negatively down the road for us.
- [33:53]
Caretaker's Wife
So we lost the cat. So we don't have the cat anymore. She wasn't a part of the Axe murder house anymore. She pretty much got taken two months into the time we lived there. So when we got there to January, February, I think she was taken in mid March. To move forward to that, from that to my husband, he really liked that job a lot. And as I repeat, when we were looking at this home that we moved into, he was watching a lot, a lot, a lot of YouTube videos. He probably got a little more obsessed than he needed to be about it. But definitely, you know, again, his passion is that. But it was getting to a point where I remember even noticing going, okay.
- [34:25]
Caretaker
This is just, what the heck?
- [34:27]
Caretaker's Wife
Then we get here, he's doing the job. And I noticed the agitation and just kind of weird things with him very focused on that house in particular, to the point where it was causing marital issues a little bit, because he just wanted to do a certain thing or they would have overnight stays. He'd be, you know, almost obsessed with, here's our family time off. And he's obsessed with getting over there to go, you know, let them in and talk with them and it was just crossing over into our family life. But I could see the obsession creeping more and more into his brain, getting more and more to where all he's really focusing on now is the job, job, job. And it's this house, which is. Has horrible things. And I wasn't 100% against it. Like, I get, you know, wanting to tell people the story because he was passionate about it. He gave them true warnings of his own feelings. He was never lying about things. I respected that. But I could also tell what it was doing elsewise, like, out, you know, to us. And so he continues on, like in the job. And meanwhile, you know, things are. He's focused on this, and this is going good for him, and I'm all alone. And that's kind of how I felt as far as the Axe murder goes. If I'm going to explain that I've gone through that house with my husband and nothing ever felt weird, I'll be honest with you. And if you want to talk about being a skeptic, I know there's things out there because I've been raised to believe that. And I might have had a few things happen to me as a child, but a lot of that goes away when you have a traumatic experience where it kind of takes away from everything. And that's where I stood when I moved to Villisca, as I was kind of faithless, and I shouldn't even say kinda, I was very faithless. Feeling very guilty about that as well. Never preached that to my children. I always told my kids, believe in God and pray to God and pray to grandma and never, ever let them know how I feel. But deep down inside of me, I just have it set in my head that went the way my mom passed and the way things should have done. And maybe it's like a theatrical thing like in the movies, but I just believe something would have happened. And nothing happened. Like, nothing for me. Nothing. So that, like, took over every little piece of faith and every little piece of maybe experience or proof I might have had as a child, gone. So I'm moving into Villisca now, not realizing that this town is not a good town. But I have no faith. It's pretty much gone. And so they go into this house that every single buddy, and from the town to the YouTube videos I've been forced to watch say, this happens and this happens and it's terrible and blah, blah, yeah, that what happened is terrible. I agree with that. 100. I never took that away. Sad as heck, but I just didn't believe in the ghost stuff. So when we would go in there, a lot of people say they feel heavy or they feel funny or they feel this or they feel that. And I never felt that pretty much ever, except for one time when we reenacted what had happened. And that would be the one time I could say I felt dizzy, kind of funny, like sick to my stomach. I couldn't explain that, but it was the way I felt after going from the upstairs to the downstairs doing the axe move, which I didn't want to do, but my husband just wanted to prove that it was somebody shorter. And I'm five foot. So I accepted that challenge and did that and didn't feel good about it at all. And after we went downstairs to the Stillinger's room is when I called it quits on that one. So I was like, okay, I don't feel good about this. It feels icky. Even pretending that someone's around the corner was horrible. But to say if I felt anything, that would have been the only time physically I felt sick. So going into the axemur all the time, you know, I don't feel anything. My husband definitely had experiences that he shared with me. And there's other people that when I'd go over there to help him in the barn where they sell stuff, people would talk about it. People who have been there before would come again and talk about their experiences. And I would listen to it and I would never knock them. But I certainly didn't indulge in what they were saying because I just don't feel good about that. If I don't think it's true, I'm not going to say that's true. So saying that now, I didn't feel anything when my husband not only was taking over the axe Murder house, but he was taking over the house next to it, which was Mary Peckham house, which is the person who first came over to the home realizing that no one was awake and had saw the tragedy or knew something was wrong. That's Mary Peckham. So that home, I always thought the house was a cute house. Cute looking house. Had no real interest in giving a crap about it. But when my husband took it over, ended up going in there and he had to change the locks, he was, you know, requesting to do a lot of different things there. When he was changing the locks is when he was asking me to come over there and take a look at the house.
- [39:01]
Caretaker
The biggest reason we left and I'm not quite sure if I touched on like the real reason we I think we had to leave was it had everything to do with the neighboring home.
- [39:19]
Stephen Ballew
By now you've heard how Church the gray cat tied to the Villisca Axe house unexpectedly became part of the caretaker's family's life, only to vanish, stolen just before a chilling encounter with a dying cat. That felt like an omen to the caretaker. But still, he didn't heed this warning. And as the days went on, his wife began noticing a change. His connection to the Axe House was deepening and obsession was taking root. But soon the roles would actually reverse and that same pool would begin to take a hold of her Stay Tuned. All my Night Owl listeners have definitely heard me spout out the praises for our longest sponsor, AG1. They've been a part of my morning routine for some time now. But you know what? The folks at AG1 are not content to rest with those laurels. They've introduced a new product that I've now incorporated into my nighttime routine as well as AGZ is the nightly drink that helps you wind down and rest up. Head to drinkag1.com nightowl to get a free frother with your first purchase of AGZ. AG1's been a loyal sponsor of the Night owl podcast since 2023 and a primary source of my daily nutritional needs for that same amount of time. My daily routine starts with AG1 and now my nighttime routine ends with AGZ. AGZ is a nighttime drink designed to support restful, restorative sleep with clinically studied key ingredients including adaptogens, herbs and minerals. AGZ is a melatonin free formula that supports the body's natural sleep cycle. My AGZ was delivered to my doorstep and I put it to the test that very same night. Each packet of AGZ contains a unique blend of easy to absorb ingredients that works through each phase of the rest cycle to help you relax in the evening, get quality sleep and wake up rested and refreshed. Simply mix one packet of AGZ with 4 ounces of water or milk and blend it with the free frother included with your first order. You can drink AGZ cold, at room temperature or even warmed, and AGZ comes in three flavors mixed berry, chocolate and chocolate mint. I've tried the chocolate and the chocolate mint so far and I prefer it with water at room temperature the first night and subsequent nights thereafter have sold me on AGZ and as I said earlier, it's now a part of my nighttime routine. There are no artificial flavors, sweeteners or added sugars in AGZ and the hint of herbal flavor immediately puts me in a wind down mode once asleep. The blend of calming herbs, magnesium and Adaptogen supports my body's natural sleep rhythm and I wake up feeling ready to take on the new day. Now I can address two of my biggest foundational health building nutrition and quality sleep with confidence and ease, AG1 in the morning and AGZ at night. Thanks to AG1 for sponsoring this episode. If you're ready to turn down the stress and focus on the rest, head to drink ag1.com Night Owl to get a free frother with your first purchase of AGZ. That's drink ag1.com night owl there are a lot of edible gummies out there on the market right now, so how do you know which ones are right for you? Most gummies either get me way too high or don't seem to have any effect at all. And the taste is not always the best either. So let me introduce you to Lumi Gummies. Consistent, mellow and super delicious, Lumi Gummies are specifically designed to make you feel good, not stoned. Whether you're looking for an end of day de stressor, a midday mood boost or help getting the best sleep ever, Lumi Gummies has a strain for you. Lumi Gummies come in three primary strains Sativa for energy boost and focus, Indica for relaxation and Hybrid, which is the best of both worlds, providing energy, soothe, tension and creativity. Each strain comes in a variety of flavors, making it easy to find the right gummy for you. I recently tackled an outdoor project I've been wanting to do for some time now and that was putting in pavers for an outdoor barbecue space in the backyard. If you've never attempted a project like this in August in South Texas, I let me tell you it is work. I'm talking backbreaking, sweaty and extremely energy draining work. At one point in the process my energy dropped down to a zero and I decided to try one of the Orange Cream Cookies gummies. This particular Sativa strain, Gummy, tastes like an orange Creamsicle and is designed to melt away stress and tension and give you a little energy boost with the gummy. A little hydration, a brief rest. Soon I was back at it with shovel in hand, creating my dream barbecue space. Everyone needs a little boost now and then and if you're looking for a quality, good tasting edible, look no further than Lume Gummies. Lume Gummies are available nationwide. Go to lumigummies.com that's L U M I gummies.com and use Code Night Owl for 30% off your order. Again, that's L U M I gums.com Code Night Owl lumigummies.com Code Night Owl.
- [44:16]
Caretaker
The biggest reason we left, and I'm not quite sure if I touched on, like, the real reason we. I think we had to leave, was it had everything to do with the neighboring home. Not so much the Axe house, the neighboring home, Just to reiterate where that falls into play, it's. It's right next door to the Axe house. It was built in 1905. It was owned by a woman named Mary Peckham. She was the neighbor to the Moore family in 1912. She loved the Moore children. The Moore children would go over, and she'd let them play around, and she was almost like their grandmother. Mary Peckham was also the one to go to the house the next morning because, you know, the Moore family hadn't been awake, and she was the first one to make notice of something was wrong. So that's basically the history of the neighboring home.
- [45:13]
Caretaker's Wife
I really had no interest initially to look at the home, but eventually I was like, okay. So I came over because, again, I'm still waiting for a job. And I went over there and came in the house, and he's working on the front door lock. And when I walk in there, I recognize the smell, which is a weird smell now that I look at it now. It was a gross smell, but when I first went in there, to be honest with you, the smell reminded me of when I was, like, 15, staying over at a friend's house, and she lived in an old house. So I thought, oh, I recognize this smell. And I told my husband, and he was just appalled by it. Like, why? Are you kidding me? This smells nasty. But I felt comforted by it. And I'm looking at the house. I'm only on the first level. It has, like, a cellar, and then it has an upstairs. But the house itself, I'm like, I like this house. You know, it's not as big as our house, but I like it. And he's like, really? He's like. Because I really like our house. I'm like, I just like the porch, and I just like this. And I kind of just described the things I liked about it. The house has an entrance to the upstairs, which looks like there should have been a door there. So you can see the stairs going right up and to the left. And as I passed the stairs, I would say about three different times, walking all over the house as he's working on the locks. I will Be honest with you. The stairs were almost ominous. Just kind of funny. Like, it just felt weird. There was something weird there, Stairs. And I thought, that's kind of funny. And every time I'd pass, I'd look up. So I asked my husband, I said, hey, I know you're working on the locks, and I know that you said you, you know, you're managing this home, but can I actually go up the stairs? Go ahead. I'm like, okay. So I go up the stairs, and the minute I get to the top of the stairs is when things feel funny, like, kind of heavy. I would say the way they described the Axe Murder House was the way I was feeling that home. As soon as I turned the corner, I thought, okay, now I know why I was feeling weird looking at the stairs. And I went into the first bedroom to the right and walked in it. Old, old room. So I walked in the first room, opened up the closet door, walked in and could just feel funny, like, oh, okay. And walked out, came out of the bedroom, went into the next room, which I believe is Mary Peckham's room, went into that room that had another deep closet. That one felt just, I will say again, just odd. And then I went into the final room, which is on the other side, and kind of went into there and didn't necessarily feel anything. But that's the room that faces the house, the Axe Murder house. And I thought, okay, well, that doesn't feel as weird as the first two rooms. That feels weird. So then I kind of stay up there, and I'm looking at everything in awe because there's still so many cool structures to the home, and it's old and original that I'm staring at it all, feeling funny, but still drawn to the way it's built, to the way everything looks like, oh, man. So then I finally get myself to leave, go downstairs, and I say to my husband, hey, do you feel funny when you go up there? He's like, no. Why? I go, because I feel real funny up there. He's like, no, I don't feel anything. So I remember thinking, okay, so I left. And when I left, to confirm feeling weird about it, a person who lived in it prior had came over there to grab some more stuff and had mentioned to him, hey, you know, don't go upstairs. It was a female, don't go upstairs, because the upstairs, I swear to you, is haunted. It's weird. My husband had had to say to that person, are you kidding me? Because my wife mentioned the same thing, and she goes, yeah, don't go up there. We didn't spend time up there. So it kind of confirms right off the bat, a second person who was living there said, don't go up there.
- [48:33]
Caretaker
At this point, my wife and I, we had taken over the neighboring home with the company because they owned both homes. My wife started to feel less weird or odd in town, and almost like all of a sudden, she started loving the town, loving the people. And as she's starting to feel better, I'm starting to feel weirded out or worse. It started to switch. My wife was all about, oh, I love this place. It's great that people are, you know, I don't know why I thought they were weird. It was. She was changing, and I was changing negatively, like she was in the beginning. So the neighboring home, we had access to it, it was cleared out. It was empty. My wife said to me one evening, I want to go ghost hunt with the one of those spirit talker apps in the neighboring home. And I thought, oh, okay. And so she starts doing that on a daily, nightly basis. That's all she wanted to do, was keep going into this old, dirty home and spend time in there. And it became to a point where she became absolutely obsessed with this neighboring home. And I started to get angry, like, you know, I don't think it's a good idea for you to be in there, due to the fact that it has a certain way of manipulating, you know, women's minds in a weird way. You know, we've already brought a lot of women in there, and they said. All said the same thing.
- [50:00]
Caretaker's Wife
But the weird part is, on top of that, it intrigued me to go, okay, because remember, I have no faith, and I'm wanting to look for something. I'm like, oh, okay, well, I felt something. So I started picking at my husband, like, the day, day after day, like, hey, we should go back over there. I really want to go in there, and I want to, like, you know, check and see if we feel anything or see anything, and maybe we can go there at night. It got more and more, like, obsessive for me, and I ended up downloading this thing on my phone called Ghost Tube. Whether that's real or not, I laugh at it, but. Because, again, I'm skeptic about it, but, you know, we don't have a bunch of money to buy all these cool things that can tell you the truth or not. So I get that. And I'm doing the ghost Tube, and we're going over there almost consistently and making them more than The Axe Murder House. Because we have. We had done some ghost hunting over there, too. Didn't hear anything until maybe toward the end of our time leading that. There was a few things I could speak about that I can't deny at all. A skeptic or not, but, you know, staying with this house across the street, which isn't the Axe Murder House, it's the neighbor's house, Mary Peckham. We're in there, and I'm getting obsessed, like, wanting to check things. Now, in the middle of us checking that home out is when I'm getting ready to do an interview for the correctional facility. And I'm extremely nervous because to me, that's a very serious job. So I was already kind of uptight when we. When I started getting obsessed with the house, my husband and I got him to come over there with me and went upstairs because when we would turn the Ghost Tube on, it never said anything in the lower level of the house. But because I felt the way I felt upstairs, I was like, you know, honey, let's go upstairs. Right off the bat, that sucker starts talking. It says really random things. Like, I think at one point it said murder, and it brought up a name like Ashley, and just really random, weird things. It talks, and I can't for the life of me remember all the things it would say, but it would speak a lot. And that was just the first day of doing Ghost Tube. My back was feeling kind of tense, like, up. Up high. Just kind of like, I'm uptight. Oh, man, I might have slept wrong. So going there the second day, the day before my interview, obsessed with it. Hey, let's go up there and use the Ghost Tube. We have nothing going on. You know, the kids are getting ready to go to bed, and you're done with work. Let's go upstairs. It kind of became a thing for us to do together, like, spend time with each other alone, because it's across the street, and our kids can call us or walk over here if they need to, and we never have time to be alone because, again, we don't really have a bedroom at the time. So I was kind of utilizing that as well. And so when we went upstairs the day before my interview and did the Ghost Tube, that's when things started to say. Things that were a little too close for comfort for me. My mom's favorite color is yellow. The Ghost Tube, when I walked into one room, said, yellow, yellow. And I stopped and was like, why would it say yellow? And then it said, he'll be okay. Like weird things that would pertain to how I felt inside, not outward, just inward things I might have not even expressed or almost being, like, answered in a very weird way. To me, that caught my attention immediately to where I'm like, okay, it's talking to me. And that started to get my obsession, probably even more so, because now this thing's real. Like, maybe this is real. It just had a lot to do with my mom. Things that were personal to my mother. And then we had to go, you know, and my back's hurting and I'm uptight. And I gotta go to sleep now because now I got this interview. So I hear these things, which is yellow. You'll be okay. I love you. Oh, I love you. I'm here. Stuff like that. And I'm like, what? And then it would jump to leave and murder and Ashley and weird stuff. And then it kept saying the town, which I didn't know at the time, it's a town. Brand lavender. Weird stuff. Then it would jump to weird stuff. So we went down. We. I went home, went to bed, did my interview the next day. My back's hurting worse now. This is like day three of my back, get through the interview, get home. My back's still up tight, but I'm ignoring it. And I want to go in the house again. So we go back in the house again and we do more ghost tube. And this time we bring the. The ghost box in that or the spirit box that will make noises when something touches it. Now I'm getting obsessed to that level. I'm like, hey, husband, go grab this. You know, go grab the ghost box. Let's bring their spirit box. Let's bring it in and put it here. And then let's see if it does anything. Let's bring it upstairs. And we do that. And it goes off upstairs, not downstairs. And it does it in one of the rooms that I didn't expect. And it only does it for a little bit. And then we realize, oh, it's because, again, I'm trying to debunk it. It's battery. Maybe it's battery. Maybe it's this. Maybe it's that. Because it's not doing it where I would think it would, or it's a REM pod. So we put it in there, we mess with it, you know, we get a few things out of it, and that's about it. So we start our ghost tube again, and it starts, you know, splurging out things like evil and just random bad things, I guess. So we're doing that, and, you know, we're done, we leave. And my back's now getting to day four, where I'm like, oh, my gosh, this, like, really hurts now. At the time that this is going on, my husband was feeling really icky in the house at the axement or next door. And they always needed him to get on the computer and do different things on the computer and make calls, but his calls would never go through really well. And they asked murder. So he would be in the barn, but even the barn felt weird to him. So then he thought going over to the neighbor's house because it was better Internet, that that just felt better, and it works better. So he was spending more time in the house next door, the Mary Peckham house. While I'm becoming obsessed with this house. And he had his whole almost like an office set up in the kitchen. And I didn't think anything of it. You know, I'm obsessed coming over there anyway. And he's always over there now taking phone calls. I think he did, you know, a FaceTime with one of his managers over there, because, again, the Internet was better, and he just felt better over there. And so he's over there. I'm at day four, my back hurting really bad. But to try to paint the picture I'm painting is my husband's there all the time. So now I'm going over there during the day, not just at night. I'm going over there to bring him something to eat. I'm going over there to talk to him. I'm over there just, you know, we're chatting. And we ended up getting into a little weird fight because not only am I going over there to bring food and to talk with him, I'm also wanting to do the ghost tube thing, which he was irritated because he was trying to take care of something and end up snapping at me, saying, I don't want to ghost hunt. And I really wasn't there for that necessarily, but it was just the tiff that created us to argue. So now we're not doing so well. This is like day four. I think of my back and I'm, you know, uptight. And he we're not getting along. And we would fight about weird things off and on. It started getting more and more weirder. And we had to use their oven across the street, which I didn't say, because our appliances in our house weren't working properly. So we would use the neighbors across the street because the stove worked. So I had our food over there, and we were Using the stove. I had never been in at home till this moment by myself, like, ever. It always had been me and my husband. So I go over there and this particular day that we had had fought, I can't remember where he was. So I'm over there making a pizza, and I'm angry, probably really, really, really, really angry. And. And I put my pizza in the stuff, you know, I got the heat. Well, I got it preheating. And I'm sitting there and I don't know what possesses me, but I want to do the ghost tube now by myself. And the ghost tube was on my phone. So I put it on and sit there and I'm irritated and I'm swearing and I'm mad. And right off the bat, the. The lady on the ghost tube starts talking. It's never talked to me downstairs. And I'm rambling on out loud like I'm mad. I'm effing this and blah, blah, blah. And then it says, what are you going to do about it? He's right here. Right after I say after, it says, what are you going to do about it? Then it says, make a decision. And I'm thinking, I will make it, you know, And I'm not necessarily as weird as this sounds. I'm not even registering that I'm answering the thing out loud. Like, I'm just so mad, Like, I know and I will. And then it says evil, and I'm like, you know, and I start to kind of stop. And then it says behind you. And I'm like, that's when I got really uncomfortable. And then I stop and I'm looking around, I'm like, oh my gosh, she really is talking to me. Then I start getting sick to my stomach. And then I do what I do best, which is mind f myself and believe that I'm. It's just talking. It's, it's, it's, it's registering something somehow. It's not real. Can't be real. Now, keep in mind, my back hurts so bad as I'm sitting in a chair. My lower back to my upper back. I'm not even kidding when I say that. Just tense and it hurts, you know, as I'm getting angrier. And then I'm realizing, oh my gosh, this thing is talking to me. And then it brings up the town, Brandt. And then it says some other weird mumble jumbo crap, which I turn off the ghost to I'm done. Like, okay, now I'm sitting here and I have to wait for this Pizza to be done. And I'm not going to do this anymore. So turn it off, because I'm smart enough to do that. And I get through the pizza, I get it home. And I ended up telling, you know, my husband about it, saying that was kind of weird. Didn't tell him 100 what it said, but just said, you know, it was pertaining to kind of what was going on with us. Because I didn't want to be mean or I don't know what I was feeling, but my back just got worse. So that's like day four or five, I think, is when my back got the worst. The worst it's ever been. Now it hurts so bad that I really can't move a certain way. I can't bend over because my back is so tight and it's just aching to the point where I want to throw up. And I tell him I started to think in my head, which I was so weird seeing this because, again, I had a hard time believing it myself. But I think we all have these moments where things happen sometimes, and subconsciously, you kind of know the answer, but you don't really acknowledge it. You keep it there, but you don't really, like, believe it or. Yeah, I think eventually you act on it naturally, but it's there. And mine was. There's something with the house. I probably shouldn't go in the house anymore, because if there's anything that I've done that's weird, I haven't done any exercising. I haven't been running, and I'm a runner. I didn't do anything to create back issues. My bed's the same bed that I've slept in before in Colorado. Nothing changed. I chopped it up in the very beginning, like I said, because I was tense. But at this point of day five of a backache like this, there's no reason for it. And so in my head, as you're going through things like, what did I do? Why is this hurting worse? What the heck? Why is it getting worse and not getting better? Because most of the time, it gets better. I'm taking Advil. I'm doing the things I'm supposed to. I'm stretching. When I get out of the bed, I have that in the back of my mind going, I wonder if it's the house. No, can't be the house. What if it is the house? So at day five, I tell you, my husband, that, like, hey, I think I'm gonna stop going in the house. Like, I'm gonna stop ghost hunting. He's like, yeah, you know, I think. I think you should. He's like, because I'm even feeling funnier and we're fighting more. And the neighbor had told us within that week that the person had felt the same things and said, don't. Don't be in that house for longer than you have to. Which, at that point, I got a little uptight going, okay, maybe it is the house, because me and him are fighting. Like, it's getting more and more intense. So day five, I decided not go in there. Between day five and day six of, my back hurting was the worst it's ever been. And then it just gets worse throughout the night to the point where I'm crying. Now I'm 41 years old and I'm crying. My back hurts so bad that I can't even describe it to this very moment. Like, I can't even describe to you. It's like a spasm of I can't. I've just never felt that before. My little boy wakes up and continues crying, and I'm trying to pretend like I'm fine and I'm not fine deep inside. And so we end up. I end up waking my husband up saying, I think I need to go to urgent care, because this isn't getting better. This is not getting better. But this is the first full day I stayed away from the home. I pushed through it. I ended up not going to urgent care, which I probably should have. I fell asleep by taking a sleeping pill and was able to wake up and could still feel it. But I just decided that I'm going to get up and start walking. And I walked. And eventually it started to lose. Loosen up just a little bit to where it wasn't so wickedly bad. But I was also taking tons of ibuprofen, but I stayed out of the house. I didn't ghost hunt. I didn't go. Something for the next three days, to be honest, from the time it hurt really bad to next three days, I stayed away from the ghost tube thing. And I didn't go upstairs. I had popped in and out of the porch of the house because I was helping my husband clean things out of the porch. But I didn't go in the home. And I swear to you on my life, and that's what I think is one of the things that sticks with me with this whole thing is my back is it got better. It just got better, and it got better. And within those three days of not ghost tubing and within not going in the upstairs and not going in the house, my husband staying away from it as well, because we both kind of decided at the same time. Then my back started feeling better. Oh, thank you, God. I mean, I was so grateful, so grateful. I thought for sure I was going to go to the error because it was bad.
- [62:33]
Caretaker
We had met an individual, or I did as a friend, and it's a male. We had met and literally became, I would say, very close, good friends. It was an odd situation because him and I had so much in common that it was, it was weird. I had never had this much in common with another guy or another friend my entire life. We had grown up the same. We had served in the army, the same. We were both into German, you know, World War II history. We were big into researching. We were very interested in all the same things. He had collected antique dolls, the creepy looking dolls. I did the same thing. We had become, I would say fairly close. Once I got into town, it turned out to where my wife and this man and myself all became friends. We would text each other throughout the day, he would text my wife throughout the day. But it was merely just a friendship. And this individual was struggling financially, kind of at a low point in his life and we were helping him. We were tithing and we didn't have much to give. So we all became very close friends. So fast forward a little bit more. She started having, wanting to have a fire, like a fire pit. There was a fire pit behind the neighboring home and she always wanted to be there as much as she could. And we had a fire. And our friend comes over and, you know, joins us at the fire. My wife and I had had kind of a fallout last previous couple of days. It was basically fighting about. I was uncomfortable with her consistently going in this house looking for something to communicate with her, looking to. She would tell me, I'm trying to find my faith in this. I gotta see proof, you know. After her mother died, she says, I felt nothing. And I, I want my, my answers here. And I said, you know, I, it's dangerous because, you know, a possible demonic entity will give you some false evidence and, you know, control you well. So anyway, we're, we're having a fire and our friend comes over and I went back to my house to grab some more chairs. And when I come back, I shockingly see our friend just literally groping her, like almost attacking.
- [65:08]
Caretaker's Wife
I end up getting sexually touched, which was probably the demise. Everything on top of everything that was happening in the home already. We were hanging out and our friend ended up touching me in A way that he shouldn't have touched me. And my husband came across it right when it happened. And I would say it was more like a grope to a degree, but it was so uncomfortable and yet so unbelievable, because this particular family friend was kind of like our hope in being accepted in the neighborhood and kind of our hope in making things what we thought be normal. We thought that this particular family friend between us, which was a male, was like a good friend, and we had, you know, helped that person out, and we felt like he had helped us out. And to have that happen while my children are right there and then have my husband come across, it created a whole mess right then and there. And I. Instead of smacking the person like I feel like I should have done, I just kind of stood there in disbelief.
- [66:07]
Caretaker
And my wife is just literally standing there with a expressionless face, and it gets confronted.
- [66:16]
Caretaker's Wife
It becomes a huge fight, which I'm still, like, in disbelief that this even happened. I don't know why I sat there in such disbelief. Maybe because so many different things went through my mind, like, what do I do? And. And it just ripped the friendship apart immediately. And then it created more problems between my husband and I with trust and other things, which created anger and frustration and resentment in my feelings. So now it's created a boiling heap of anger.
- [66:43]
Caretaker
I'm thinking, you know, complete shock, complete. Oh, my God. Is this. Is there an affair going on? Is this. You know, is this. I mean, this is absolutely insane.
- [66:54]
Caretaker's Wife
The friend is no longer a friend of our family. That was immediately put away. But now him and I are dealing with our own issues, our marital issues, fighting extremely bad and being both extremely sad, and now thinking, now what do we do?
- [67:08]
Caretaker
It ended badly. The next morning, my wife woke up and was just in tears, Just felt totally disgusted. It's almost like she didn't even realize what was happening the night before until the morning. And I had to explain it to her. Yes, this is what was going on. She. She was like. I just felt like I was possessed. I couldn't. I couldn't even comprehend what was going on. And. And again, you know, so as time went on from that, we disassociated ourselves with this individual. But I had these thoughts and dreams and visions of wanting to kill this person. These are things that I've never felt before. And someone could tell me, well, yeah, you know, if someone touches your wife that way, or, you know, that would make sense, but this was. This was different to where it almost was. It was a good feeling. And I'm thinking, what the hell is wrong with me? My wife, at this point, and, you know, she's. She's okay with me talking about this, but as her possession or obsession with this neighboring home continued, she. Like I said, all she wanted to do was stay there or go there all the time. Sometimes she would get out of bed and walk across the street in the middle of the night and be sitting in the back of the house in the dark neighboring home. You know, stuff like that. It also started to, I would say, affect myself. Son who's. He's 13. And my son, he is. I would call him a scaredy cat. He is not into horror. He does not like scary stories. He hated. He hated that house across the street. He didn't want to go over there. He wanted nothing to do with it. I would say the last week and a half we were there, I wake up and I noticed we had all slept in the same room in our house at this point. I wake up and I see my son, you know, leaving our room. And he goes right out the front door. And this is like three in the morning. He goes right at our front door. And I'm thinking, what the heck is he doing? And he's not. He doesn't sleepwalk. He doesn't have any history of that. And I'm. Before I said anything, I'm just trying to figure out what's he doing. So I'm being quiet, just kind of watching him. He walks right out the front door in the pitch dark. He goes right across the street. And so I sneak. You know, I'm sneaking around, I'm following him. And it's just like he's just in a daze, walking across the street to the home that he hates. He did not like the Axe house either. And he goes around back and sits kind of where that the fire pit is. And he's just sitting there and it's so dark. I gotta turn on my cell phone light. And I told him, what are you doing? And he just looks at me and he has this odd little, like a smirk, kind of like a laughable type smirk. And he says, what? Kind of rude what? And I go, what are you doing? He goes, I just wanted to come over here. It's pitch dark and it's three in the morning. No, let's go. And he almost got irritated with me. Like, I don't want to leave. Like, no, let's go. That is not my son. Neither is this my wife.
- [70:19]
Caretaker's Wife
Then it's like almost as if our. Our feelings and the rage and the anger and the sadness and the doubt and the we're going to leave each other. And all these things are just nasty as heck. While the summer just started, pretty much almost just about. My house starts doing weird things. My house, since I've lived there, moving in in January, I've never felt anything weird. There was one time that I could say. And I still chop this up to skeptics, I don't. I feel like it was just me. There might have been one time sitting in my bedroom while my son is sleeping. And all this would be in January, like, or February, because we moved into the house officially February, getting the plumbing done. I saw somebody go past my bedroom door. And the. Where my bedroom is positioned in the home. It's toward the front of the house. When you come out of my bedroom, there's a little tiny window that I absolutely love. But it's a perfect picture of the axe murder house. Like, the perfect picture. So we ended up putting like stained glass stuff over it so you can't see it anymore because weird stuff was happening just with that, with dreams. So I remember thinking, oh, something went past me. And I got my. I had. I have a concealed to carry. So I ended up grabbing my weapon while my son's sleeping. This is like at 11, my husband's working across the street and I get up to check my house because I'm thinking, who in the heck would be in here? It's not my husband. He would have told me, did the whole check, because I know how to do that. And I'm like, okay, nothing's here. That was the only thing I've had. And I chopped it up. So I'm just being paranoid now. You flash forward to being touched and having all this stuff going on. Now we're starting to hear things in the house. My husband can hear somebody walking. It's residual. But with our house, he was already telling me a few days before I got touched by this person. He was hearing stuff from upstairs to downstairs to where he thought somebody was walking from our bedroom to the bathroom to the point where he's come into our room asking, you know, am I up? And I'm just now waking up going, no, that was not me. This is like early morning to, like, morning. So that starts happening. But my. My son had complained, and he's not one to do that at all. Right after this incident, like a day after we were having a bonfire, we were at the neighbor house because we always are over there. They have a fire pit. This is shortly after getting over what had just happened, we're still hurt and angry. But it's my daughter's birthday, so we're trying to make the best of it. She likes bonfires, so we're having a little fire over there, and my son decides to stay with our dog at our house. And at some point, when my son was gonna go to the front door, he said he was standing there at the front door looking out, and he could feel the steps of someone coming up behind him, like walking up, like a heavy step and standing behind him and then turning around and walking away. So he turns around, he goes to look and sees. Doesn't notices there's nothing there. He's bothered by. It tells us about it. I end up hearing things now that are steps in the middle of the room. My husband's now hearing day three of like, somebody walking residually from our bedroom to the bathroom. But I'm not hearing that part, just that one time. So now we're thinking, okay, this is weird. It could just be us being worked up about this. But our house is almost awakening from, I guess maybe the tension or the stress or the. Whatever the heck's going on. And that's when it gets to a point where we're like, we have to go. We can't do this anymore. It's getting worse. We're hearing things now upstairs in the bedroom, like walking. But when you have your husband, who's 200 and what, 20 pounds, sitting next to you, and you're hearing the same thing, you're going, all right, what the heck? And I can see my son looking at me. And now I'm like, okay, something's wrong. And the only thing I can think of at this point is maybe the house did have history. Maybe I have to believe that there's something. My back. I don't know what to do.
- [73:55]
Caretaker
And meanwhile, I'm thinking, we have to get out of here. And my wife and my son and even my daughter were totally against leaving. Even though our last few nights as a family, it was the worst, nastiest fights. And I could clock when the fights would start. And it would be after 7pm Everything would be going good. And then all of a sudden, either I would become just filled, almost like possessed with anger. And that's really the reason we left so suddenly and only took one car. I still have my other car at our home in Villisca because I felt if I don't force my family out of this situation and we don't all drive in the same car, with me being in charge of the driver, I don't think we're going to leave. I really think whatever it was, it wanted me, but I think it. But I think it really wanted my wife more than me. It needed to entice me to keep her there long enough to, I think, get to her. Now I can tell people, which I haven't told a soul down here in Florida that I work with or anything, but if they did know and wanted to ask me, I'd say, well, yeah, it destroyed my life, at least for a while. And it, it made things pretty hard. And we were only there five months. That's all it took.
- [75:21]
Caretaker's Wife
I had a dream of my own mother which could make me cry. And it happened more toward the end of us getting ready to leave. And it was like my mom talking to me, telling me, like almost an advice of, you need to go. And it was so real. It was like my mother coming to me going, this is really real. And her telling me that in my dream it is really real and you need to go. And I didn't mention that because I feel stupid saying it, but it is true. I think it's between the dream, my mom telling me what I need to do, which I wasn't dreaming of her for a while, which was weird for her to pop up like that to tell me that it's real and you need to go, and the instance of my back and what was going on across the street and what was happening in my house, those three things are the three contributors to me going, this isn't normal. This isn't one of those things where we're just having a bad marriage or we're just having bad luck because God knows me and my husband have had some really horrible luck. But this isn't a luck thing. This is a instance of something's happening and I don't know why. What is it trying to take and who is it trying to take? And my husband used to joke and think that the house was calling him there, but I am 150% convinced it was calling me there because I'm faithless. And maybe not so much now, but definitely before. And I think that's kind of where I had to like, admit myself it was me and those types of things. I just can't like, debunk, pretend like it was just coincidence or bad luck. I think maybe it was supposed to be positive for me in the end to see that there is something there, you know, that evil can really happen or that there is, there's Another thing out there that if you really don't believe and you're really that angry, shit can happen. I just think it was those three things, though, that probably did it as far as making me believe it's something real. And I just am real good at, like, putting things away after they happen. I ignore them, and I didn't want to talk about it. So, yeah, I think that's it. Those are it.
- [77:58]
Caretaker
I appreciate you being so vulnerable and open about that, and that's. That's part of this journey that I go on with the show, too, and I really hope that it didn't upset you to talk about it. The last thing I want to do is provoke or agitate, but I think I do see a message there. I've heard over a hundred stories now, and. And a lot of people go through this type of journey, too. If it's like there's always something there in the journey, whether the experience was scary, horrifying, but there are moments that you take from it that seem to have a purpose amidst the awfulness, you know?
- [78:41]
Stephen Ballew
As we close this final chapter in the campfire series on Vilisca, there's a deeper truth to confront, one that extends beyond the walls of the Axe Murder House. At the center of this story is a family who didn't just witness something, they lived it. They weren't simply observers of a haunting. They became entangled in something far more insidious. Their sudden flight from Villisca, abandoning their job, their home, even their belongings might sound like the climax of a horror film. But what actually unfolded wasn't sensational. It was slow, subtle, creeping. And that's what makes this even more chilling. In paranormal theory, many believe that true spirit attachment, and eventually possession follows a progression. First comes invitation, often unknowingly, through curiosity and prolonged exposure. Then oppression, when energy, mood, and sleep begin to degrade. Then obsession, where the haunted individual becomes consumed by the presence, and finally, in rare cases, possession, when something begins to influence or inhabit a person in deeply harmful ways. The caretaker and his wife's story mirrors this arc in disturbing ways. He began drawn to the house, documenting his experiences. Over time, he grew drained and reactive. His wife, initially skeptical, became obsessed with the home neighboring the Axe house, convinced it, too was part of the pool. Their health, sleep, and peace unraveled. They fled, but not without a cost. And yet, it wasn't over. I actually had one other final call with the caretaker, and in it, I learned that they had returned to Villisca to recover the belongings they left behind and prepare the house for its next renter. And on this return trip, new and unnerving experiences unfolded. Despite now being safely back in Florida, they both admit they left Villisca. But Villisca hasn't quite left them. If you'd like to hear that final call, I'll be sharing it soon on our Patreon page. But at the close of this series, I'd like to reference what Richard Estep referenced in Part two, a quote by when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. In this story, we've seen what happens when that gaze lingers, when you open the door and when you stay. Because sometimes the most dangerous kind of haunting is the one that follows you home. Thanks for listening to this campfire series of the Night Owl Podcast. Be sure to join us at the end of October when we start a new paranormal adventure. Don't Forget to visit theknightowlpodcast.com for info and tickets to our big annual event, the Spirit social, happening on Halloween 2025. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter on our website thenight owlpodcast.com follow us on Instagram or Facebook Henight Owl Podcast and consider becoming a patron and supporting our show on patreon.com thenight owl podcast to stay up to date with our show's news and events. Stay restless out there. I'd like to thank my investigative team, Alexis, Franklin and Jeffrey for going on these crazy adventures with me Nicholas Fair for his talented musical contributions to this show my dad Sam for his incredible historical research Mikey for his assistance editing Beau Tristan and Devin for their help with our Night Owl events and tours Sandra for keeping us all on schedule and on budget. And last but not least, David Dalton of driftworks Sound for mastering every single episode on the tight turnarounds I give him. Please support their works by visiting our website thenight owlpodcast.com and clicking on the about tab. There you can find links to all their individual works and websites. This podcast was mastered by David Dalton of Driftworks Sound. Do you have a song that could use a professional touch to get it across the finish line? Do you wish you could remove the sound of a loud air conditioner or distracting mouth noises from your podcast recording? Whatever your issue, David can repair and enhance your audio and help you achieve rich, full professional sound at industry standard loudness levels? Quit struggling with audio engineering and get back to creating. To discuss your options, reach out to davidriftworksound.com that's D R I F T worksound.com and set your creative self free.