A small American town sells you a promise.
Safety.
Quiet.
A place where bad things don’t happen because everybody knows everybody.
Grain elevator, church, school three blocks away.
A place where you leave the doors unlocked and sleep with the windows open.
That promise is sometimes a lie.
Often enough for these nine houses on this list to exist.
Nine houses in nine small towns where ordinary hides what nobody wants to see.
Some were burned, some still stand.
The scariest part is how normal they look.
Just like any other house, we start where least expected.
Number nine, the Lizzy Bordon house, Fall River, Massachusetts.
Lizzy Bordon took an axe, gave her mother 40 wax.
When she saw what she had done, gave her father 41.
You learned that nursery rhyme as a kid.
But the rhyme leaves out this part.
Lizzy Bordon was acquitted.
She walked out of the courtroom in 1893, a free woman, and lived in Fall River, Massachusetts, until she died in 1927.
She never confessed.
The case was never officially solved.
The house at 232nd Street in Fall River is where Andrew and Abby Bordon were murdered on the morning of August 4th, 1892.
Andrew was struck 11 times with something like [music] an axe.
Abby, Lizz’s stepmother, was found in the upstairs guest room, struck about 19 times.
The weapon was never confirmed with certainty.
Lizzy was the only serious suspect.
Her father, Andrew Jackson Bordon, was a wealthy Fall River businessman, but famously tight-fisted to an uncomfortable degree.
At the time of the murders, his estate was valued at roughly $300,000, equivalent to more than $10 million today.
He lived in a house far below his financial station in a neighborhood that was not the richest part of Fall River.
And this caused resentment in both Lizzy and her sister Emma.
Abby Bordon, the stepmother, was never accepted by the two sisters.
Days before the murders, Abby had gone to a doctor, fearing she was being poisoned.
She said Andrew was not a popular man in town.
She was right.
That morning, Lizz’s uncle, John Morse, left the house around 8:48 in the morning to buy cattle and visit a niece.
The maid, Bridget Sullivan, was outside washing windows.
Abby was killed first upstairs while making up the guest room.
Andrew was killed about 90 minutes later while napping on the downstairs sofa.
Lizzy said she was in the barn when her father was attacked.
No one fully believed her, but a jury acquitted her in June 1893 after a trial that shocked the nation.
Although the judge acknowledged she was probably guilty, the 12 jurors said no.
After the aqu quiddle, Lizzy did not leave Fall River.
She moved into a three-story Queen Anne Victorian mansion called Mapleroft, also in Fall River, and lived there until she died of pneumonia on June 1st, 1927 at age 66.
Her sister Emma eventually cut ties with her and left the city.
Fall River residents boycotted Lizzie for the rest of her life, but she stayed.
She remained in the very place people believed she had killed her father.
Today, the house on Second Street is the Lizzy Bordon Bed and Breakfast and Museum.
You can sleep in the room where Abby Bordon’s body was found.
You can eat breakfast in the house where two people were hacked to death with an axe.
They run daily tours.
The gift shop is rated pretty well.
This is America.
We have accepted a lot of things.
What is remarkable about the Lizzie Bordon House is not the paranormal tourism, though that is certainly something.
It is that the building has survived nearly intact since 1892.
The interior, the layout, the rooms are almost exactly as they were on the morning of the murders.
When you stand in that sitting room, you are standing in the same space.
It is not a reconstruction.
It is the real space.
And every morning, someone eats eggs there before the tours begin.
Number eight, the Clutter family home, Hulcom, Kansas.
A house at the end of Oak Avenue on 7 acres of farmland in Hulcom, Kansas, southwest Kansas.
The kind of town where you can stand in the middle of Main Street and see the horizon in all four directions.
Population at the time, a few hundred.
Herb Clutter built this two-story house in 1948.
He was a prosperous farmer, a community leader, a man everyone knew and respected.
His wife Bonnie suffered from chronic depression.
Their daughter Nancy, 16, was the perfect small town girl.
Their son Kenyan, 15, liked building things in the garage.
In the early morning hours of November 15th, 1959, two ex-convicts named Richard Hickok and Perry Smith broke into the house.
They had heard from a fellow inmate that Herb Clutter kept a safe full of cash in the house.
There was no safe.
They bound all four people, searched the house, found $50, a pair of binoculars, and a [music] radio.
Then they killed the entire family.
All four were shot in the head with a shotgun.
Herb Clutter was also stabbed and had his throat cut.
They drove away with less than $50.
Hickok and Smith were arrested in Las Vegas 6 weeks later.
They were tried, sentenced to death, and hanged at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lancing on April 14th, 1965.
Writer Truman Capot read about the murders in the New York Times and traveled to western Kansas with his childhood friend Harper Lee, author of Tequila Mockingbird.
He spent 6 years researching and writing.
The result was In Cold Blood, published in 1966, which became the second best-selling true crime book in publishing history.
It invented the non-fiction novel, and it turned the Clutter House into one of the most famous addresses in America.
The 1967 film adaptation was even shot on location at The Real House in Hulcom.
The house is now owned by Donna and Leonard Mater, who bought it in 1990 from Bob Bird, the first owner after the Clutter family.
The Maids have lived there longer than the Clutters ever did.
They sit on the same blue Ngahide furniture the Clutters installed.
Three of the four upstairs bedrooms Herb Clutter designed for his family are still bedrooms.
Donna Mater says there are marks on the floor that people believe are blood stains.
People from all over the world still show up after reading Capot’s book to the point that the maiders at one time had to charge admission to anyone wanting to see the house.
There are also rumors that the house is haunted by the ghost of Nancy Clutter, the teenage daughter, but the owners say no paranormal activity has ever occurred.
Hulkcom today is a quiet rural town with a Clutter family memorial in the community park.
Carved in stone is a list of the family’s achievements in community groups, school, and church.
The house looks ordinary from the outside.
Most of them do.
Number seven, the Isisa Axe Murder House.
Isa, Iowa.
We start in Iowa, where most people would not expect a list like this to go.
Isa is a small town in the southwest corner of the state.
The kind of place where the grain elevator is the tallest structure for 20 m.
And everybody knows what the neighbors had for dinner last night.
Population today around 1,200.
Quiet, flat, Midwestern [music] in every direction.
On the night of June 9th, 1912, someone entered the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and killed every person inside.
Josiah, Sarah, their four children, and two Stillinger girls who had stayed overnight after a church service.
Eight people, [music] all killed with an ax while they slept.
No one heard a thing.
The killer was never identified, never charged, never found.
Each victim had their head covered with a bed sheet and was struck 20 to 30 times with the blunt side of the axe.
Every mirror in the house, and the glass in the doors was covered with clothing taken from dresser drawers.
A 4-PB slab of bacon was found leaning against the wall next to the axe [music] in the parlor.
No one has ever explained why.
The plaster on the ceiling of the master bedroom is still chipped today.
Marks left where the axe struck the ceiling on the upswing.
The house at 508 East 2nd Street [music] still stands.
It is a two-story white frame house that looks completely ordinary from the street.
The kind of house you drive past 10,000 times without glancing twice.
And that is exactly [music] the point.
For decades, the house existed in various states of ownership and decay.
In 1994, Darwin and Martha Lynn bought the property and eventually opened it as a historic site and paranormal overnight destination.
That’s right, you can sleep there.
People book months in advance.
Guests report hearing children’s voices, waking to unexplained sounds, finding doors open that they had closed.
Whether you believe or not is up to you.
What is beyond dispute is this.
In the summer of 1912, someone stood in that house with an axe and made a decision that has never been explained.
[music] And on any given weekend night, someone is sleeping in that same building voluntarily.
To each their own, I suppose.
[clears throat] Number six, the Bloody Bender Inn, Leette County, Kansas.
If you were traveling the Oage Trail through Leette County, Kansas in the early 1870s, and needed a place to stop, the Bender Inn was right there on the prairie.
A small frame building, grocery store on one side, living quarters on the other, separated by a wagon canvas, a welcoming family, hot food, a place to sit after days on the road.
The family consisted of John Bender Senior, his wife whom history remembers simply as Ma Bender, their son John Jr., and daughter Kate.
Kate is the one everyone remembered.
She preached publicly about spiritualism all over the county.
She was magnetic, intelligent, the kind of person who made you feel the most interesting conversation of your life was happening right then.
People traveled far just to hear her speak.
They were also murdering their guests with a system so methodical it is still hard to read.
Travelers were invited to sit at the table with their backs to the canvas.
Someone waiting on the other side would strike them in the head with a hammer.
Their throats were cut.
Bodies dropped through a trap door into the cellar below.
Later, the corpses were carried out and buried in the apple orchard behind the inn.
In May 1873, after a series of disappearances along the trail finally drew serious attention, investigators searched the property.
They found 11 bodies in the apple orchard.
Some had been there long enough for the apple trees to keep growing right over them.
The Bender family was gone.
They had fled sometime in the weeks before the search, and despite large-scale manhunts and multiple sightings in the years that followed, not one member of the family was ever captured or brought to trial.
Kate Bender was never found.
What truly happened to her, no one knows.
The inn is gone.
The orchard is gone.
Farmland stretches across Leette County now.
Seeds are planted every spring.
There is a historical marker near Cherry Veil for those who know to look.
Most people driving Route 166 do not look.
Number five, Doroththa Poentes Boarding House, Sacramento, California.
The house at 1426F Street in downtown Sacramento is a pretty Queen Anne Victorian with a wide porch and wooden fence, the kind of house you see in tourism brochures.
Dorothia Helen Poente ran it as a boarding house for the elderly and mentally disabled throughout the 1980s.
She took the hard cases other social workers refused.
She cooked for them.
She managed their medications.
She also murdered them, buried seven people in the yard, and cashed their social security checks after they were dead.
Police estimated Poente’s illicit income at more than $5,000 a month.
Social worker Peggy Nickerson had referred 19 clients to Poente’s boarding house since 1986.
When Poente could not account for the whereabouts of some of them, Nickerson grew concerned.
When neighbors began complaining about the smell of rotting meat coming from the property, Nickerson called the police.
On November 11th, 1988, police found the first body buried in the front lawn, then the second, then the third.
In total, seven bodies were dug up from the yard.
And here is the detail no one forgets.
While the police were digging, Poente, who was not yet a suspect, asked permission to walk down the street for coffee.
The police let her go.
She fled to Los Angeles.
She was arrested a few days later in a bar when someone recognized her face from the news.
Poente was charged with nine murders, convicted of three, and received [music] two life sentences.
She died of natural causes in prison in 2011 at age 82.
The house still stands.
The current owners, Barbara Holmes and Tom Williams, bought the property at auction in 2010 for $227,000.
They do not shy away from the history.
Holmes says the stream of people coming to take selfies and request interviews never slows.
In 2026, the house was selected as one of six stops on Preservation Sacramento’s 50th annual historic homes tour.
They even placed a mannequin resembling Poente holding a shovel in the yard.
A house where seven people were buried in the yard is now a stop on a heritage tour.
Number four, the Lawson family home, German, North Carolina.
Christmas Day 1929.
A small tobacco farm in rural Stokes County, North Carolina.
Snow on the ground.
The Lawson family had lived here since 1918 when Charles Davis Lawson followed his two younger brothers, Marian and Elijah, to the German area.
Charlie Lawson, 42, was a tobacco farmer.
Not rich, not famous, just a farmer with a wife, Fanny, 38, and seven children.
The kind of family everyone in a small town knows, but no one especially notices.
Until everyone started noticing.
A few days before Christmas, Charlie Lawson did something completely out of character.
He took the whole family into Winston Salem, bought expensive new clothes for his wife and seven children, then had a formal family portrait taken.
For a poor farmer at the start of the Great Depression, spending money that way was irrational.
But he insisted that photograph still exists.
The whole family in new clothes looking straight into the camera.
It looks like an ordinary family photo until you know what happened next.
Christmas morning was especially busy in the Lawson house.
Oldest daughter Marie, 17, got up early to bake a cake.
Oldest son Arthur, 16, nicknamed Buck, was sent by his father into German to buy more shotgun shells for hunting.
Arthur invited a cousin to go with him.
They trudged through the snow into town.
Meanwhile, Carrie, 12, and Maybel, 7, were getting ready to visit an uncle and aunt who lived on a nearby farm.
As Carrie and Maybel stepped out of the house, their father was waiting behind the barn with a loaded shotgun.
Charlie shot Carrie and Maybel, beat them, then dragged the bodies into the tobacco barn.
He arranged their heads on rocks, crossed their arms over their chests as if they were sleeping.
Fanny, sitting on the porch, heard the shots, and ran inside.
Charlie followed and shot her dead.
Marie in the kitchen, heard the shots and screamed.
The two youngest, James, four, and Raymond, two, ran through the house looking for a place to hide.
There was nowhere to hide.
Charlie shot Marie, then found James and Raymond and killed them both.
Afterward, he returned to the barn and arranged the bodies of Fanny and Marie the same way as Carrie and Maybel, heads on rocks, arms crossed on their chests.
Then Charlie Lawson walked into the woods.
He circled a tree for hours wearing a path in the snow that people could clearly see.
Then he shot himself.
The suicide shot was heard by the crowd that had already gathered after learning the news.
The only survivor was Arthur, the 16-year-old son Charlie had sent to buy shells that morning.
Many historians believe Charlie deliberately sent the boy away to spare his life.
Why Charlie Lawson did this has never been confirmed with certainty.
He had been behaving very strangely for months beforehand, complaining to the family doctor of terrible headaches and insomnia.
But there was another secret.
Decades later, Stella Lawson, a relative, [music] revealed that at the funeral, she had overheard Fann’s sisters-in-law and aunts discussing that Fanny had confided she was worried about an incestuous relationship between Charlie and daughter Marie.
Jetty Lawson, one of those aunts, had died early in 1928, meaning Fanny had known at least that long before the murders.
Some historians believe Marie may have been pregnant with Charlie’s child and that was the real motive for the massacre.
The murders drew horrified attention.
An estimated 5,000 people attended the Lawson family funeral.
They were buried together in a large plot at the private Browder family cemetery just outside German.
Charlie Lawson shares a headstone with the wife and six children he killed.
No one asked the surviving family if they agreed.
[music] In 1929, no one asked.
Immediately after the massacre, Charlie’s brother, Marian Lawson, took over the house on Brook Cove Road and opened it as a tourist attraction, charging 25 cents admission.
People came to see the house to look at the Christmas cake Marie had baked, still displayed on the table.
[music] The Lawson family tragedy did not end in 1929.
In 1945, James Arthur Lawson, the sole surviving child, died at age 31 in a truck accident in Walnut Cove, North Carolina, not far from German.
The massacre also produced one of America’s most famous murder ballads.
In 1930, the Carolina Buddies recorded The Murder of the Lawson Family for Colombia Records.
The song was later covered by the Stanley brothers in March 1956 and later still by Doc Watson and Robbie Folks.
[music] The house was eventually demolished.
Nothing remains on the land except the cemetery where the killer and his victims lie side by side under the same [music] stone.
That is the kind of ending no one designs, but no one corrects either.
Number three, Cabin 28, Ketty, California.
Ketty is a small mountain town in northern California in the Sierra Nevada about 87 miles from Reno, Nevada.
In 1981, the population was a few hundred.
The kind of community where everyone knows everyone, watches one another’s children, and no one locks their doors at night.
The Ketty Resort sat along the railroad line, a collection of small wooden cabins rented by the month.
Sue Sharp, a single mother, had moved from Quincy, California to start over.
She rented cabin 28 with her five children, John, 15, Sheila, 14, Tina, 12, Rick, 10, and Greg, [music] 5.
On the night of April 11th, 1981, Sheila stayed overnight at cabin 27 with the neighboring Seabolt family.
Rick and Greg also spent the night at friends houses.
Inside cabin 28 were Sue, John, youngest son, Greg, who had returned.
John’s friend Dana Windgate, 17, and Tina.
On the morning of April 12th, Sheila Sharp, 14, walked into cabin 28 after her sleepover.
She found the bodies of her mother, her brother John, and Dana Windgate.
All three had been bound, gagged with duct tape and electrical cord, then beaten, and stabbed to death.
Investigators concluded the killer had brought a claw hammer and used an additional hammer plus two knives found inside the cabin.
The murders were extremely violent.
But here is the detail no one has ever explained.
Rick, 10, and Greg, five, were sleeping in the room right next door, one wall away.
They were unharmed, not injured, not awakened.
Or they were awakened and someone decided to let them live.
Why?
Tina, 12, was missing.
Not until April 1984, more than 3 years later, did a bottle collector at Camp 18 in But County, about 100 m from Ketti, find the skull and some bones of the girl.
According to the forensic examination, Tina had died sometime after November [music] 1st, 1981, 6 months after the massacre.
That means someone kept the girl alive for months after killing her mother and brother.
The primary suspects were Martin Smart, who lived with his partner Marilyn and son Justin in cabin 26, only steps from the Sharp family, and John Bowetti, a friend of Smarts, who had arrived in Ketty a few days before the murders.
Neither was ever formally charged.
The case went cold.
Smart left Ketty after the murders, moved to Clamoth, California, and died in 2000.
In 2004, cabin 28 was demolished.
No public announcement, no memorial service.
The cabin simply disappeared as if someone wanted to erase the very memory of it.
Investigators say they are closer to solving this case than ever before.
But as of 2026, there have been no arrests, no charges, no official answers.
The cabin is gone.
[music] But Sheila Sharp, the 14-year-old girl who walked in that morning and found her mother, is still here.
She has spent the rest of her life demanding answers.
Number two, Fox Hollow Farm, Westfield, Indiana.
Walk through the gates of an 18 acre estate in Westfield, Indiana, a northern suburb of Indianapolis, and you will see a large, beautiful house, the kind of property architecture magazines photograph.
Built in 1978, sitting beside the Monan Trail, worth about a million dollars when Herbert Balmeister and his wife Julie bought it in May 1988.
Bowmeister was a successful businessman who ran the Save AOT thrift store chain in Indianapolis.
Wife, three kids, nice house, thriving business, the picture of the American suburban dream.
He was also murdering people.
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, young gay men began disappearing in the Indianapolis area.
They were last seen at gay bars downtown.
Then they vanished.
Police were not especially interested at first.
The victims were gay.
In Indiana in the 1980s and 1990s, that meant they were searched for less.
Private detective Virgil Vandergri was the first to connect the disappearances.
He believed a serial killer was at work.
Police disagreed.
Vandergriff kept investigating on his own.
Eventually, a lead pointed to a car registered to Herbert Bowmeister.
In November 1994, Bowmeister’s 13-year-old son found a human skull on the property while playing in the woods.
The boy brought it to his mother.
Bowmeister explained it was an anatomical model from medical school that his father had bought.
Julie believed him, at least then.
By early 1996, Julie Bowmeister wanted a divorce.
She told detectives that Herbert had been acting strangely.
She remembered the skull.
She agreed to let police searched the property while Bowmeister was away on vacation.
On June 24th, 1996, investigators began digging.
They found bones, then more bones, then more.
In total, roughly 10,000 fragments of burned, crushed bones scattered across the 18 acre estate were recovered.
The remains belong to at least 11 people, eight of whom were identified at the time.
Investigators believe at least 25 people may have been victims.
Bowmeister selected victims at gay bars, brought them back to Fox Hollow Farm, strangled them, then burned and crushed the bones before scattering them in the woods on the property.
When the news broke, Bowmeister had already fled to Canada.
On July 3rd, 1996, he shot himself in the head at a park in Ontario before police could arrest him.
He left no confession, no explanation.
He was never tried.
As of 2026, the investigation remains active.
In January 2024, the Hamilton County Coroner’s Office announced the identification of additional victims from the bone fragments recovered in 1996, raising the total of confirmed identified victims to 13.
Nearly 10,000 bone fragments are still being analyzed.
A four-part documentary from ABC Studios, The Fox Hollow Murders: Playground of a Serial Killer, premiered on Hulu in February 2025.
And here is the part I want you to pause on for a second.
Fox Hollow Farm is still a private residence.
Someone lives there, right on the land where 10,000 human bone fragments were found.
Where forensic experts are still trying to put names to every piece.
The house is beautiful.
The grounds are beautiful.
And under the soil in the woods behind it, there may still be bones no one has found yet.
That is either the most reassuring thing or the most unsettling depending on how your mind works.
Number one, the Edge Gene Farm, Planefield, Wisconsin.
The number one spot is not because this is the most famous case.
It is because of what was left when everything was over, or rather because of what was not left.
Planefield is a small village in Washara County in central Wisconsin.
Population at the time Edge Gene was arrested in 1957 was about 700.
The kind of place where everybody knows everybody.
Everybody waves when you drive by and no one really thinks anything bad could happen here.
Ed Gene was just the slightly odd neighbor.
Edward Theodore Gene was born August 27th, 1906 in Lacrosse County, Wisconsin.
The second of two sons of George and Augusta Gene.
The family moved to a dairy farm in Planefield when Ed was young.
Augustine was an extremely religious, controlling, doineering woman.
She spent every afternoon reading the Bible to her sons, often choosing passages about death, murder, and divine punishment.
She taught her sons that all women except herself were instruments of the devil.
Older brother Henry died in 1944 in a brush fire under suspicious circumstances.
Augusta died in 1945.
Ed Gene lived alone on the isolated 195 acre farm 6 milesi from town down a dirt road doing odd jobs for a living.
Neighbors found him strange but harmless.
Most of the house grew increasingly filthy and filled with trash.
But one room was kept pristine, clean, sealed perfectly.
Augusta’s bedroom.
On November 16th, 1957, Bernice Warden, owner of the hardware store in Planefield, disappeared.
Blood on the store floor led police to the Gene Farm.
Sheriff Arthur Schlle and the officers initially thought they were investigating a simple murder.
They found Bernice Warden’s body hanging upside down in the shed, gutted like a deer.
Then they went into the house.
What they found inside went far beyond anything two murders could suggest.
Gene had been digging up women’s graves from local cemeteries for years.
He had made chairs upholstered in human skin, bowls from skulls, masks from women’s facial skin, a belt of nipples, lampshades, waste baskets, a vest sewn from a woman’s torso, skin intact.
First responders were reportedly unable to speak for a long time after coming back outside.
Gene confessed to killing Warden and another woman, Mary Hogan, in 1954.
He was convicted of Warden’s murder, but found insane and committed to a mental institution.
He died July 26th, 1984 at the Wisconsin State Mental Hospital at age 77.
[music] And this is the part that explains why this is number one.
Not because of the body count.
Gene only killed two people, but because what he did gave birth to three of the most iconic horror characters in American film history.
Norman Bates in Psycho in 1960, Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974, Buffalo Bill in the Silence of the Lambs in 1991, all based on [music] Ed Gene, a farmer in a town of 700 people in Wisconsin permanently changed the way America imagines fear.
And because of what happened to the house.
On March [music] 20th, 1958, 4 months after Gin’s arrest, the farm was scheduled for auction.
A few days before the sale, the Planefield Fire Department was called to the scene and found the house on fire.
The fire was officially ruled arson by an unknown party, but almost everyone believes local residents burned it themselves because they did not want it still standing.
The irony [music] is that Frank Warden, son of victim Bernice Warden, served as chief of the Planefield Fire Department and was one of the men who responded [music] to that fire.
Today, the land where the Gene Farm once stood is private farmland.
[music] No buildings, no marker, just a field at the end of a rural road in central Wisconsin.
And if you drive out there, and people do, you stand in the middle of an empty field in the Wisconsin wind and look at nothing.
And somehow that is worse than if something still stood there.
With a house, at least you have something to look at, walls to point to, windows to say that is where [music] it happened.
With nothing, the horror has nowhere to attach itself.
It just floats [music] over the ground, invisible.
And that in its own way is more frightening than any haunted house.
Nine houses, nine small towns, ordinary streets, ordinary mailboxes.
Welcome mats by the door.
Some were burned.
[music] Some were painted and sold many times over.
Some still have people eating breakfast every morning in the same room where [music] someone died.
If you know a place like this, a house with a history that most people in town have forgotten or never knew.
Leave it in the comments.
There are more places like this than anyone wants to admit.
And every one of them deserves to be remembered, if only so we know exactly what we are driving past.
If stories like these make you stop and think, subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss the next videos.
We have many more houses, many more towns, and many more stories that no one wants to tell, but everyone needs to hear.
Thank you for staying until the end.
See you in the next video.
