“I can’t get his face out of my mind,” the girl told me. “I saw him so clearly. He murdered someone.”
I had just finished giving a ghost talk at the library, and the twelve-year-old girl was troubled, as she described the recurring scenario in her dreams. “It’s near a baseball field, and there is a body in the Dumpster,” she continued. “It is the same every time I dream it.”
In each dream, the girl saw the victim’s long hair rippling in the wind but could not see her face. She had never seen the man in real life, did not recognize the baseball field, and had no idea of the identity of the victim.
Yet she felt that she was experiencing something that had actually happened or was going to happen. If there was something she could do to help, she wanted to do it. But what could she possibly do with the information? The nightmares disturbed her.
I told her that she may very well be psychic and could be having visions, and that she had choices. She could either work to develop her gift, or she could pray that the visions would stop.
While psychic talent is not unusual, it can be a burden, especially if the medium tunes in to violence. Throughout my life, I have had psychic dreams, and when I was young, they disturbed me. Some were just strange.
For instance, I once had a dream about a funny man doing an odd dance. Suddenly his hair caught on fire. I woke up and turned on the radio, only to hear that Michael Jackson’s hair had caught fire while he was dancing as he filmed a Pepsi commercial.
Other times, the things I saw in my dreams were so horrible that they haunted me throughout the day. I could not discern what was a vision and what was just a nightmare. I prayed that the dreams would stop and that God would take away my premonitions. It worked. For a few years, the dreams stopped, and they did not return until I was able to emotionally handle it.
I wished I could do more for the troubled twelve-year-old who could not banish the visions of homicide. That night, I spent hours on the Web, trying to find a scenario that matched what the young girl had described. It was a frustrating task with no definitive results. I knew there was little I could do for the girl with the visions or the possible victims of a monster.
If it is difficult for a twelve-year-old girl to psychically connect with the horrors of homicide, imagine how hard it is for a four-year-old!
I found one such child in San Antonio, Texas, after reading a post on psychic Da Juana Byrd’s Web site.
“My four-year-old sees ghosts,” the mother wrote. She described the invisible playmate the little girl had recently acquired. The boy, said the child, was named Alex, and he had been murdered.
San Antonio paranormal investigator Martin Leal and I met with the mother and her three small children in a Texas park where the boy said he had been murdered.
While I normally use real names, I will give the family pseudonyms here, because I do not want to put them in danger. If indeed a boy was killed, a murderer roams free. Chances are, the killer will never read this book, but I choose not to take any chances.
The trouble began shortly after the Everson family moved into a new apartment in San Antonio. Their daughter, Kelsey, who had always slept well, suddenly began having nightmares.
“She would wake up, kicking and screaming,” said her mother, Theresa Everson. “By the time my husband and I could wake her up, she had no memories of her dreams.”
The description of the episodes sounded like a sleep disturbance known as “night terrors.” Many children are afflicted with this, particularly around ages three and four. While adults also suffer from the sleep disorder, it is most common in children. Though night terrors do not fall into the paranormal category, I was not ready to dismiss the child’s experiences.
Kelsey told her mother that a little boy, covered in blood, visited her nightly. She claimed that he hit her in the back with an object. His name was Alex.
Theresa phoned a psychic friend, Cathy, who agreed to visit their apartment. Unaware of the details of Kelsey’s experiences, Cathy, too, picked up on the ghost of a little boy.
Cathy described the ghost as about six years old, with short brown hair. He was covered in blood. “He told me that he was murdered by his mother’s boyfriend in a San Antonio park,” she said.
The family had picnicked in the park with the mother’s boyfriend’s coworkers. As they got ready to leave, the boyfriend told Alex to pick up his toys. When the child did not move fast enough, the man became enraged. He beat the boy to death and buried him in an old well.
The child’s pregnant mother did nothing to help him.
The ghost, Cathy said, told her that a reporter from the San Antonio Morning News had visited his mother to inquire about the missing child’s whereabouts. Apparently, nothing came of the reporter’s investigation.
Cathy also claimed that the murdered spirit told her that he had not meant to hurt Kelsey when he had hit her. “I was just trying to show her what would happen if she was bad,” the dead boy said. “Adults are bad people.”
Shortly after Cathy’s visit, the family headed out for a day at Espada Park. Kelsey curled up in the backseat and refused to get out of the car. “Alex is scared,” she said. “This is where it happened.”
Had Kelsey overheard her parents discussing Cathy’s encounter? Had the power of suggestion wreaked havoc on the little girl’s imagination?
The parents may have been unwittingly feeding their daughter’s fears.
Yet, Kelsey had drawn pictures of the park beforehand. She drew pictures of the turtles Alex had played with in the park.
“I found out that at one time there were turtles at Espada Park. But they have not been seen in years,” said Theresa, who believes that Alex was killed at the park at least a decade before.
It was a sweltering day when Martin Leal and I gathered around the old well in the woods with Theresa’s children. Kelsey seemed hesitant as she gazed into the well, which was now filled with dirt and litter.
Was a little boy really buried there?
Martin got out his electromagnetic field detector, a tool that picks up on anomalies in the environment that many believe to be indicative of ghosts. He aimed at the well and the places where Kelsey said the ghost was. Nothing out of the ordinary registered.
I gently asked Kelsey about Alex.
Her young face clouded as she told me, “His daddy got him dead.”
The weapon? A tire iron.
According to Theresa, her daughter had drawn a picture of a tire iron and claimed that the man had used it to hurt Alex. She insisted that her daughter was not aware of Cathy’s interaction with the boy’s spirit, and that the child had drawn the pictures with no prompting.
I cannot say for certain that a boy named Alex was murdered in San Antonio. But if he was, perhaps this story will ring a bell with someone who is familiar with his story, and we can help a lost child find his way to the light.
For the unprepared, a visit from a ghost can be a disturbing experience. Yet, even those who are prepared and make a practice of contacting spirits sometimes find that the encounters are more than they can stand.
The psychics in the following story will never forget the horror they felt while visiting a murder site.
Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children …
Ezekiel 9:6 (KJV)
Brenda Marble, of Harrisonville, Missouri, cannot explain the lure of a simple Iowa farmhouse. It drew her to it, again and again. Each time she visited, she swore it would be the last. Yet, it seemed there was a message that she was chosen to tell the world. The house would not let her go until she and her friends deciphered that message and passed it along.
It should have been a lovely spring day filled with the sounds of birds singing and children laughing. But June 10, 1912, in Villisca, Iowa, was the darkest day in the history of the town.
The first inkling that something was wrong at the Moore house came when Mary Peckman peered down the street and noticed that her neighbors were not up and about. She grew more alarmed when she investigated and found the house tightly closed with all the shades drawn over the windows.
Worried, she spread the word, and before long, the brother of Joe Moore showed up and used his spare key to enter the home.
He stepped into a nightmare. The usually lively home was too quiet and washed in darkness. Every window and mirror in the home was covered with blankets or clothing. As his eyes adjusted, he did not want to believe what he saw.
Everyone was dead.
Someone had crept into the house and killed all the occupants with an axe. Joe, forty-three; Sarah, thirty-eight; Herman, eleven; Catherine, ten; Boyd, seven; and Paul, five; made up the entire Moore family.
The children’s friends Lena and Ina Stillinger, ages twelve and eight, had been spending the night, and they, too, were dead.
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.
As for the children, Catherine suffered the most. “We believe that she woke up during the attack,” said Brenda. The little girl, the psychics felt, hid in a closet but was yanked out and slaughtered on her bed. The investigators got an audio tape recording of a young girl’s voice saying, “I’m dying.”
It is a devastating scenario, one that seems to have no hope. Yet, amidst the cruelty and violence, a single powerful message shines through. “It is why we were there,” said Brenda, who feels that the spirits of the tragedy called upon them so they might speak on their behalf.
“The Moores were a very spiritual family,” explained Brenda.
Sarah, in particular, took the teachings of her church to heart. The loving mother and devout Christian carried her values with her to her death. From the other side, she spoke one word so loudly and clearly that the Miller Paranormal team was able to capture it on audio tape.
“Forgiveness.”
————
THE VILLISCA AXE MURDER HOUSE AND OLSON-LINN MUSEUM
323 East Fourth Street
Villisca, IA 50864
(712) 621-4291
In the early 1990s, while I was writing regularly for Woman’s World magazine, my editors assigned me a story about psychics who work with detectives to solve crimes.
I talked extensively with Dorothy Allison, a Nutley, New Jersey, psychic, and featured her in the article. Since her death in 1999 at age 74, Dorothy has alternately been called the most famous psychic in the twentieth century and a fraud.
Critics gather data about all the times that Dorothy was wrong. I doubt there has ever been a psychic who was 100 percent correct.
Psychics are simply people, as flawed as all other human beings, who happen to have minds that tune into information to which the rest of the population may not be privy. Some of it comes through clearly, while some of it is disjointed and pointless.
Dorothy Allison’s landmark case was in 1967. She awoke from a horrible dream with a pounding headache. In her nightmare, she had seen a little boy. His shoes were on the wrong feet, and a note was pinned to his shirt. The child was stuck in a pipe.
Unable to shake the vision, she went to the police with the information. She had never met five-year-old Michael Kurcsics and had no way of knowing that the motherless boy’s shoes were indeed on the wrong feet.
Temperatures had been freezing in New Jersey, but when it warmed up, the pipe where the drowned child had been stuck thawed, and he popped out. He was just as Dorothy had described, right down to the note (for his teacher) that had been pinned to his shirt.
After Dorothy’s dream, the ordinary housewife soon became a well-known psychic.
When I spoke with her, she was exhausted. “The mothers keep calling me,” she told me, explaining how it tore at her heart to hear from so many desperate mothers with missing children.
After three decades of working with detectives, she did not want to work on murder cases any longer. Yet, she could not turn away cases that involved children. She vowed to continue helping the little ones but had no energy left to work on cases that involved adults. She had to draw the line somewhere.
I felt sorry for her. She sounded so unhappy and so tired. But, as she pointed out, if she turned her back, killers would walk free, and more children would be hurt.
I suspect that one of the reasons that Dorothy has been so criticized is that though she was extremely psychic, she was basically an ordinary woman of average intelligence who was not particularly media savvy. She was passionate about helping to solve crimes, but because she was rough around the edges, she sometimes offended people.
As directed by my Woman’s World editors, I interviewed a detective who had worked with Dorothy, and he was pleased to offer his praise. He told me of the time that the psychic had dropped by the office to chat. Though they had not publicized a homicide case they were working on, Dorothy suddenly said, “Tell me about the black woman on the railroad tracks.”
They had not mentioned the case to her, he said, and Dorothy had no way of knowing about it—except through her sixth sense.
“She told us that the killer had a metal plate in his head. She also said that he would be arrested for an unrelated crime and kill himself in jail, and that he would be wearing army boots.”
Everything Dorothy told them came to be.
For my readers who may be seeking advice from a psychic, remember that few will have the abilities that Dorothy Allison had. And remember, that she, too, was limited.
The fact that a psychic is featured regularly on television does not necessarily mean that they are particularly gifted. One famous psychic, who will remain unnamed, charges hundreds per hour and has so many fans that they have to wait over a year to give her their hard-earned cash. Yet, her predictions have rarely been validated.
Buyer Beware!
Clearly Heard
A TEARFUL MOTHER testified in a German court that a pair of psychics led her to her daughter’s killer, according to a January 4, 2005, edition of the Expatica Direct Newsletter, which translates German to English.
Sigrid Erbe, forty-five, told the court of her heartbreak when her sixteen-year-old daughter was murdered in June 2003. Frustrated when the killer eluded detectives, she contacted the mediums. The spirit of Susanne was apparently lingering on the other side, because she came through to the psychics and fingered her murderer.
The psychics “told me he was a Croatian man in his mid-twenties, and they told me where to look for him at a garage in Mannheim,” testified the grieving mother.
When she passed the information along to the investigators, they took it to heart and tracked down twenty-four-year-old Mario Glavic. Just as the dead girl had told the psychics, he was a Croat and employed at a Mannheim garage. Mario Glavic confessed to the murder, saying that he was drunk and on cocaine, and though he had attacked her, he had not meant for her to die. He had struck the girl with a rock in an effort to quiet her when she began to scream.
He may have silenced her for awhile, but in the end, Susanne’s voice was clearly heard.