The News Reported Two Horrifying True Horror Stories

The Axe Murder House

In Villisca, Iowa, the Villisca Axe Murder House is a popular place for ghost hunters and horror fans to visit. Six children and two adults had their heads fully crushed with an axe by an unknown murderer in 1912. The crime scene was bought in 1994, put back to how it looked in 1912, and turned into a tourist attraction. The old haunted house costs $428 a night to stay in, and people always say they had strange paranormal experiences there, like seeing a man with an axe walking through the rooms or hearing the faint screams of children.

But in November 2014, the ghostly happenings got scarier. Robert Steven Laursen Jr., who is 37 years old and lives in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, was on a monthly paranormal visit with some friends when a terrible thing happened. The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office told VICE that Laursen hurt himself around 12:45 a.m., which is about the same time that the 1912 killings with an axe in the house started.

Laursen got better, but he has never talked about what happened that day in public. The owner of the house, Martha Linn, was very upset by what happened. "It gets you attention, but it's not the kind of attention you want. I don't want people to think that something will happen at the Villisca Axe Murder House that will make them do something like that." The house is still open for tourists to visit and stay overnight.

Dead Animals in the Walls

When the Bretzuis family in Auburn, Pennsylvania, chose to insulate their home in 2015, they found that it had already been done—with dozens of dead animals.

According to Fox:

The dead animals were wrapped in newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s and were found with half-used spices and other things.

After removing the items, they sent hundreds of objects and dead bodies to an expert in Kutztown.

The expert said that the dead animals in their walls were caused by Pow-wow or Dutch magic, which is a ritual that came from the culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch and was used to treat illnesses and get physical and mental protection. In the 1600s and 1700s, a group of German-speaking people moved to Pennsylvania. These people are often Lutherans, Mennonites, or Amish.

The magic is mentioned in the Washington Post:

Many of the spells are about taking care of animals, finding water, or treating minor illnesses, which reflects the lives and worries of the first settlers in America.

But there is also a practice in powwow of using darker spells and even calling up demons.

One important part of their custom is this hex to make a dog loyal:

To connect a dog to a person, if nothing else has been done before: Try to get some of your blood and mix it with the dog's food. He will stay with you.

Mold found on the rotting bodies in the Bretzuis' home has made family members sick, and the smell hasn't gone away, they say.

The Death of Elisa Lam

Elisa Lam was last seen in the hallway of the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on January 31, 2013. She was on vacation along the West Coast. Every day, she checked in with her parents and wrote about her trip on her blog. The calls stopped on January 31. Lam had gone away. Soon, the cops joined the search, and her parents came to help.

They were poor. In February of that year, the LAPD showed surveillance film of Lam in an elevator before she went missing. The video shows Lam acting strangely in the elevator, like he was talking to people who weren't there. He looked around the corner of the door, crouched in the corner, and opened and closed the door. But there are more questions than solutions about what is going on in this video. Theories range from psychotic episodes to evil possession to unknown attackers just out of the camera's view:

Around that time, hotel guests began to say that strange things were happening with the water supply at the Cecil Hotel. From what CNN says:

"The shower was awful," said Sabina Baugh, who stayed there for eight days while the probe was going on. "When you turned on the faucet, the water came out black for two seconds before going back to normal."

Baugh said that the water from the tap tasted "terrible." "It tasted funny, sweet, and disgusting. It tastes very strange. I can hardly say what it was like."

But for a week, they didn't say anything. "We didn't think much of it," she said. "We thought it was just the way things were here."

On February 19, a hotel worker used a ladder to get to the roof and check out the hotel's water storage tanks. The police found Lam's dead, naked body there, and some of his belongings were found nearby. After an autopsy, it was decided that her death was an accident. At the time, NBC Los Angeles talked about the strange things that had happened at the hotel:

The metal latch on the tank can be opened, but the warning and lock on the roof keep people from getting up there.

The hotel with only one room has a strange past. Richard Ramirez, the "Night Stalker" who was convicted of killing 14 people in the 1980s, lived on the 14th floor for a few months in 1985. And Jack Unterweger, an international serial killer, is thought to have killed three women while he lived there in 1991. In 1994, he killed himself in jail.

In 1962, a woman who was staying at the hotel jumped out of a window, killing herself and the person she fell on.

In February 2021, a Netflix documentary called Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel looked into Elisa's sad case and the past of the "cursed" Cecil Hotel.