Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

It is a small white house on a corner lot in a small Iowa town, two stories, a porch, a gable, the kind of house that appears in the background of a hundred thousand American photographs and is never the subject of any of them. There is no reason on earth to look at it twice. Today you can rent it for the night. People do — regularly, months in advance, at a price — and a good number of them do not last until morning. They come out onto that porch at two or three o'clock and sit in their cars with the engine running until the sun comes up over the cornfields. What happened inside that house on the night of June 9, 1912, has never been solved, and it is one of the ugliest unsolved things in the American record. Eight people were killed with an axe while they slept: a husband, a wife, their four children, and two little girls who were only there because they had been invited home after a church program. The oldest victim was forty-three. The youngest was five. And more than a centu...

In the small farming town of Villisca, Iowa, on a warm night in June of 1912, a family went to sleep in their white frame house and did not wake up. When the morning came and the house stayed silent, a neighbor grew uneasy, and what was found inside that quiet home became one of the most infamous and thoroughly unsolved crimes in American history. Eight people — a husband and wife, their four children, and two little girls who had come home to stay the night as guests — had all been killed in their beds by someone wielding an axe. The killer had come in the darkness, done the whole terrible work while the town slept, and vanished so completely that despite years of investigation, multiple arrests, and two trials, no one was ever convicted. More than a century later, the case remains open, and the little house still stands, drawing visitors to the scene of a horror that was never explained. A Sunday in June The family were the Moores — Josiah, a well-liked local businessman; his wife...