Logan Corelli - The Haunted Heart of America: In-Depth Investigations of the Villisca Ax Murder House, Myrtles Plantation & Other Frightful Sites

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Haunted Heart of America: In-Depth Investigations of the Villisca Ax Murder House, Myrtles Plantation & Other Frightful Sites 2018 by Logan Corelli.

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First e-book edition 2018

E-book ISBN: 9780738756356

Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

Interior photos courtesy of the author

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Pending)

ISBN: 978-0-7387-5591-5

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

: The St. James Hotel

: Waverly Hills Sanatorium

: The Villisca Ax Murder House

: The Myrtles Plantation

: The Crescent Hotel

: Jefferson, Texas

: Guthrie, Oklahoma

: The Abandoned Church

: The Kitchen Lake Bridge

: The County Line Restaurant

: Arapaho Cemetery

: Residential Investigations

For Danae and Ashley

INTRODUCTION

You come home late one night exhausted from a long day at work. You throw your keys down on the kitchen table and start down the long hallway to the bedroom. Suddenly, you hear a noise behind you and stop. It is the sound of someone dragging their feet across the carpet. You look, but no one can be seen. An arctic air blows past you just as you look over and see a massive shadowy figure standing next to you. Then you feel the cold brush of a hand grab your arm. You spin around to confront your attacker, only to find no one is there. You hear the distant sound of a door in the house slamming shut just as the room returns to normal.

This is one of the many different types of paranormal encounters that literally thousands of people across the United States experience in their lifetime. Explanations for these encounters are what bring me to locations and the people that experience them. For almost two decades I have been seeking out paranormal activity for research and documentation purposes as well as helping people understand and live with whatever may be residing in their home with them. Its never easy for someone to hear that their home or place of business is inhabited by spirits. Most would flee just from the idea that there are invisible invaders watching them at every turn. Some, however, flock to those locations and wait for a supernatural encounter.

With the popularity of ghosts and the paranormal today, there has been a huge demand for genuine haunted locations. Throughout the country, haunted hotels, businesses, and abandoned buildings are open to the public for tours and overnight stays to anyone interested in having a paranormal experience. However, many people dont have to even leave the house to have experiences, as theyre living in their very own haunted house. But what exactly is a haunted house? Some can drive through a neighborhood, look at a house, and say, That house is haunted. But it takes more than a dark and creepy-looking old house to make it haunted. Most houses have paranormal activity that is not the run out of the house screaming for your life type. In fact, the activity is sometimes so subtle that without proper investigation, you would never know it was haunted. There are those few-and-far-between cases, however, that have more extreme activity, and a few of them are documented in this book.

Throughout the course of this book, I will be walking you through some of the most memorable and fascinating cases I have been on and the evidence I have collected from them. A few of them are some of the most haunted locations throughout the United States and have had activity recorded and experienced by visitors for many years. The entire content of this book will be written through my perspective as the events are taking place. This is not an official report or case log, but simply my own personal diary of each location visited.

Before we begin, I feel it is necessary to tell you a little bit about myself, my history with the paranormal, and how I became involved with parapsychology. At a very young age I was exposed to paranormal activity and what I now believe to be spiritual encounters. Being as educated as I am today, I can better understand some of those experiences with the supernatural, but still to this day many of them remain unexplained.

The first extreme encounter I had with the paranormal was when I was just eight years old. My mother and I had vacationed at a resort in eastern Oklahoma. On the long trip home, we stopped at the Fountainhead Lodge, a lodge unlike anything I had ever seen before. The building was huge and rounded. We pulled up to the building, gathered our things, and headed inside.

The first thing that was to frighten me was when my mother asked me to go down the hallway to the ice machine and fill the ice bucket. Our room was at one end of the floor, and the ice machine was all the way at the other end. I made my approach to the ice machine and gathered the ice. As I started back, I paused and looked back toward the machine. There was a shadow of a figure on the wall directly across from it. The shadow appeared to be a silhouette of a slim man just under six feet tall. I started walking back to the room, kept looking back, and noticed when I started to walk, the shadow started taking small steps in my direction to follow me, only at a slower pace. I kept turning back around occasionally to see if it was still moving. I looked back only to see the shadow had stopped. I took a few more steps then stopped as well. Then it broke into a run right toward me.