In the fall of 1890, people reported an enormous cloud of smoke in the eastern sky, and a bloody fist, shaking threateningly. Many also saw the sun “dance” and look as though, at any moment, it would collide with the Earth. Those who witnessed it believed that the World would soon sink in flames of death. A fiery sword materialized over the fruit orchard. Someone witnessed an immense cross in the Heavens, with the full moon as its center. A local man with the gift of second sight had a vision: the whole town consumed in flames. Such apocalypticism was not unwarranted. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Calvinist region around the city of Lemgo, between the Teutoburg Forest and the Weser River, in what is today the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, was a nest of witch persecution. During four successive waves between 1561 and 1681, more than two hundred Lemgoers were executed as witches. Most were women, many of them elderly. By cleansing their communities of witches, people believed, they were subverting the Devil’s intentions, exposing his clandestine conspirators, and eradicating evil. To unmask witches, so they thought, was to do God’s will. Over subsequent centuries, this aspect of history became an increasingly uncomfortable memory Worldwide. When I opened my eyes, the clock said midnight. The moonlight was the only light in the room.  I looked around. I could see all the details of the room with remarkable clarity, the plaster crown moldings, even the fine cracks in the ceiling. I could see the grain in the wood of my dresser. I had the oddest feeling of being at home in the artificial twilight. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

There were voices in the night. I got up and went out on the balcony, and put my hands on the wooden railing. They wind iced me all over, quickening and refreshing me. How invulnerable I felt to the cold, how energized by it. I heard a chord of organ music stir from somewhere inside, which made me shiver and caused goosebumps to prick and raise themselves on my flesh. The voices were now louder, the chorus rising and falling, and rolling as I turned around and rough, and I was searching those voices for the dominant note, what was it? What did I want to hear, to know? Who was calling me? I clenched my hands into fits, unaware of doing so, the nails so tightly pressed into the palms that the skin broke and blood oozed on to the pads of my curled fingers. I was oblivious to it. Of course, I was still afraid. From that time on my front door remained closed for good. Several of the carpenters assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of the storm on December 2—the date on which the butler Han Fallada emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond humanities power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the cruse of The Winchester Rifle Fortune. A medium I consulted said that the only way to stop these horrors and put a stop to whatever monstrous menace which had begun was to build a great house for them. This house was even supposed to bring me eternal life. No one forgot the demons that had been unleashed: they just did not talk about them, or they talked about them only in highly coded ritualized ways. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

However, the past often slipped into view, like a ghost that wants to remind the living that its work on Earth is not done. Evidence of hauntings emerged at the start of construction. A woman with bare clawed feet came forward and made no sound on the floor, and stood before one of the carpenters with downcast eyes and mouth trembling in that pitifully human smile. He took her by the shoulders—velvety soft shoulders, of a creamy smoothness that was not the texture of human flesh. A little tremor went over her, perceptibly, at the contact of his hands. Claus Eberling caught his breath suddenly and dragged ger to him…sweet yielding brownness in the circle of his arms…heard her own breath catching and quicken as her velvety arms closed about his neck. And then he was looking down into her face, very near, and the green animal eyes met his with the pulsing pupils and the flicker of—something—deep behind their shallows—and through the rising clamor of his blood, even as he stopped his lips to her, Claus felt something deep within him shudder away—inexplicable, instinctive, revolted. What it might be he had no words to tell, but the very touch of her was suddenly loathsome—so soft and velvet and unhuman—ad it might have been an animal’s face that lifted itself to his mouth—the dark knowledge looked hungrily from the darkness of those slit pupils—and for a mad instant he knew that same wild, feverish revulsion he had seen in the faces of the others. “God!” he grasped, a far more ancient invocation against evil than he realized, then or ever, he ripped her arms from around him, swung her away with such a force that she reeled half across the room. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

Claus fell back against the door, breathing heavily, and stared at her while the wild revolt died slowly within him. She had fallen to the floor beneath the window, and as she lay there against the wall with bent head he saw, curiously, that her turban had slipped—the turban that he had been so sure covered baldness—and a lock of scarlet hair fell below the binding leather, hair as scarlet as her garment, as unhumanly red as her eyes were unhumanly green. He stared, and shook his head dizzily and stared again, for it seemed to him that the thick lock of crimson had moved, squirmed of itself against her cheek. At the contact of it her hands flew up and she tucked it away with a very human gesture and then dropped her head again into her hands. And from the deep shadow of her fingers he thought she was staring up at him covertly. Claus drew a deep breath and passed a hand across his forhead. The inexplicable moment had gone as quickly as it came—too swiftly for him to understand analyze it. During a walk through a narrow hallway on the fourth floor, a bundle of papers falling from an attic shelf had knocked Claus down. To servants at once helped him to his feet, but before long he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution. I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Apocalyptic rumors took flight, spreading fears of cosmic judgment and divine wrath. Fear of a lasting, even generational, curse produced powerful taboos. A holy man materialized out of nowhere and began curing the sick on my estate. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

My head was swimming with fatigue, my body aches all over; and in spite of the fear crawling like ice along my veins, I sank into a black and dreamless void. When I awoke the fire was still crackling, and for a moment I thought I had merely dozed, until I saw daylight in the window. The fog had cleared. The fog had cleared. I rose and bolted the door and washed as best I could, trying to subdue the voice that whispered You have murdered innocent people. When viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from the generational curse, and menace and suspense lurking leeringly in these miles of twisting and elusive hallways, where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity, the very sun of Heaven seemed distorted. Something very light fright had come over all the carpenters and servants. Each would have feld had he not feared the scorn of the others. At night the darkness was almost material. There was a sense of spectral whirling through the air. I have looked upon all that Llanada Vill has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. However, I do not think my life will be long. As my new born daughter and husband went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the demons still live. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this curse, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye. There are deep corridors in my home that no soul has ever traveled. There are dark narrow pathways where the walls slope fantastically, and where windows are without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On my estate there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated Victorian cottages brooding eternally over old Winchester secrets in the lee of great ledges. Words echo strangely in my home, as if I have heard them before. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

I conjure Thee, O spirits of The Winchester Mansion, by the authority of Lucifer the Father Almighty, by the Virtue of Eart and the stars, by the virtue of Angels, Domine, exaudi orationem meam, Domine, Deus meus, respice in me. BOSMELETIC, JEYMY, ETH, HODOMOS, BELUREOS. Forty-ninth Spirit Crocell and your 48 Legions of Spirits, I awaken the powers of darkness which dwell within you by the power of the blood of the three headed Dragon Zohak that you may serve to empower my great work! Through serving the greater cause of dark magick which break the shackles that bind the Blackened Fire of spirit, may you be uplifted and liberated! Awaken and empower the forbidden rites of Angra Mainyu! Awaken to empower our great work of counter creation as an Apostle of the Lord of Darkness eternal and as a warrior of the Path of Freedom. I do conjure thee, Crocell, by all the most glorious and efficacious names of the MOST GREAT AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE LORD GOD OF HOST, that thou comest quickly and without delay from all parts and places of the Earth and World wherever thou mayest be, to make rational answers unto my demands, and that visibly and affably, speaking with a voice intelligible unto ours understanding as aforesaid. I conjure Thee O thou Spirit Crocell and your 48 Legions of Spirits, by all the names aforesaid; and in addition by these seven great names wherewith Solomon the Wise bound thee and by thy companions in a Vessel of Brass, ADONAI, PREYAI OR PRERAI, TETRAGRAMMATON, ANAPHAXETON or ANEPHENETON, INESSENFATOAL or INESSENFATALL, PATHTUMON or PATHATUMON, and ITEMON; that thou appearest here before this Circle to fulfil our will in all things that seem good unto us. We thank you for your empowerments which have served to assist our evolution toward divinity and power. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9

Man has conquered Space before, and out of that conquest faint, faint echoes run still through a World that has forgotten the very fact of a civilization which must have been as our own. There have been too many myths and legends for us to doubt it. The myth of the Medusa, for instance, can never have had its roots in the soil of Earth. That tale of the snake-haired Gorgon whose gaze turned the gazer to stone never originated about any creature that Earth nourished. And those ancient Greeks who told the story must have remembered, dimly and half believing, a tale of antiquity about some strange being from one of the outlying planets their remotest ancestors once trod. When Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for an architectural monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save Mr. Jim Hansen, and a gardener, cook, her nice, a housemaid, and her a close family member had seen in at least ten years. Mrs. Winchester was sick for a long time. She had a vague resemblance to those angels in coloured church windows—sort of tragic and serene. Servants met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances. They walked right through the house and out the back and were not seen again. Already we knew that there was section of the house that no one had seen in thirty years, and which would have to be forced. They violence of breaking down the wall seemed to fill this wing of the mansion with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this section of the house. One room is particular was decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose colour, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the silver was tarnished, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. In one of the beds, we found a boy. For a long while we just stood there, looing down at the profound and fleshless grin. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9

 The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust. Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils. Now he is one of the mansion’s most famous ghost. He is called the Blue Boy. His spirit is a young child who was bricked up along with some documents and a few scraps of blue clothing. The bons of his fingers had been worn away to the bubs, suggesting that he had been bricked in while alive and that he had tried to scratch his way out. People have reported hearing the terrifying screams of the boy in the Crystal Bedroom before the sound stops and the spirit of the boy, dressed in blue and surrounded by a bright aura would approach. After the discovery of his body in the 1920s, his bones were interred in the local graveyard and sightings of his ghost declined. However, tour guides often report that one of the walls in the Crystal Bedroom lights up with bright flashes of blue light suggesting that his spirit is still active. I remember Edward B. Rambo, who was appointed as First West Coast Agent for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company telling a story about one of Mrs. Winchester’s nephews. This particular lad made the long train trip from the east to check on dear “Aunty’s” health. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9

However, the astute aunty never appeared. Instead she sent a maid downstairs with a check on a silver tray. Without coming to any conclusion, I do believe our family argued about the amount of that check for 20 years! Some believe this Blue Boy was possibly the nephew. Perhaps he decided to stay a spell and got lost in the mansion. There are after all trap doors, which fall twenty feet into the room below. It does not take a great stretch of imagination to suggest that the place is haunted, and the mansion does not disappoint in this respect as the amount of supernatural experiences people have reported during their visits to the mansion are astounding. In the summer of 2003, the night was quiet, due to the late hour, and the tour guide saw no activity in The Winchester Mystery House with his mind’s eye until his attention was directed to a corner of the mansion where he saw two men dressed in robes with hoods over their heads wearing odd looking pointed-toe slippers. Their unusual footwear attracted his attention, only then did he realize that they were not walking, but floating, a few inches above the floor. He recalls mysterious blood spots appeared and reappeared on the floor, while an organ upstairs started to play eerier much. He was determined to find out what was going on, and he started to run up the stairs. As he reached the third step, his legs seemed suddenly to freeze. He looked up and sensed, more than saw, a figure walking along the small passageway at the top of the stairs. The apparition’s face was contorted with rage. At this point, he admitted that he was really frightened. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9

The Winchester Mystery House

In November of 2007, preparing to close, a tour guide was mopping the floor in an unused room that had another old main doorway. This door was never used and was bolted from the inside. Yet he found bloody boot prints coming from the door and crossing the room. The next day he was found hiding in a closet. Two of the investigators determined the boot prints were made from Balmoral boots, which dated back to the 19^th century, and the blood type was one of the rarest types in existence, known as Rhnull blood. It had a complete lack of antigens. Only 43 people on Earth have ever been reported to have this blood type. The DNA was not present in any database and it is not known if a soul alive carries this blood type today. It is known as the “golden blood.” People who have this blood type have osmotically fragile red cells called stomatocytes with subsequent chronic haemolytic anaemia of varying degree. It is the most clinically significant blood group in transfusion medicine.

It is also referred to as Rhnull disease and a rare blood group with a reported frequency of approximately 1 in 6 million individuals. To date there are at least 43 persons belonging to 14 families with Rhnull phenotype. It is very important to medicine, but extremely dangerous to live with this blood type, so few people have it, but they can donate to anyone. An investigation produced a massive 500-page report in which it rejected foul play or the presence of satanic rituals. Cases like these have been shrouded in secrecy ever since. These cases deal with people who have been scared or in some way affected by poltergeists and ghost, or people dealing with casualties from the occult. British and American elders of witchcraft are fairly high-profile characters within their sphere, often found attending lectures, discussions and festivals throughout these countries. Their levels of activities range from passive pagans more interested in ecology and nature through to the most serious of witches who meet to practise intense ritual, either in their own homes or in some secluded spot in the countryside.

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