There was a strange melody echoing throughout Llanada Villa. I had known it, somehow, when I had awakened this morning. I knew it more surely now, staring out of the library windows into the early afternoon sunlight slanting down among the mansion to cast a pattern of light and shadow. I knew that soon, perhaps even today, something important was going to happen. Whether good or bad I did not know, but I darkly suspected. And with reason; there are few good things that may unexpectedly happen to a person, things, that is, of lasting importance. Disaster can strike from innumerable directions, in amazingly diverse ways. A voice said, “Hey, Mrs. Winchester,” and I turned away from the widow, slowly. That in itself was strange for it was not my manner to move slowly. However, this time something made me turn slowly from the window. Something upstairs moaned and scrabbled and I heard the screech of rent timber. As I walked across the room, there was a heavy scrape from above as something at the top of the house took its first step down to me. Puffs of plaster dust were shaken out of the library’s ceiling around its wooden supports. I walked over to the window, and stood looking out. The sun had moved hardly at all. Yet the shadow pattern inside was different. I strode from the window over to the desk and banged my fist down. That is when I heard a loud bestial roar of something surprised, maybe even hurt. There were more noises from above. The entire house seemed to screech and shudder. It shifted. Floors buckled and walls bellowed inward and outward with shock and repercussion. Noise came in savage and frenetic squalls and faded abruptly. Drafts erupted and rippled and were gone. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
The music, though, had entirely ceased. Its absence was unnerving in the house, in the fine, falling precipitation of dust. There was a rumble and a roar from a landing above. It was a cry of primeval triumph. Then something sauntered and crashed downwards. I thought I heard music again. Demonic mutterings of thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart the walls. The thud of hooves was imperious down the stairs. A great physical faintness had overwhelmed me. My arms, my legs, lay like dead things. My heart was fluttering weakly. The curtain billowed in the breeze, though I was sure I had closed the casement. And then suddenly I threw back my head and screamed! For a dark universe crashed and shuddered in pain and rage above my head. I made my way into the corridor. There were many doors in the gloom of its considerable length. However, there was light under only one of them. It was pale in a narrow strip and softly inviting. I needed to get my bearings and could not do so in the darkness. The door opened on to a parlor lit by opaque globes of glass suspended from the ceiling by electrical wires, the wires covered by black fabric woven into plaits. It was now night, because outside the narrow windows all was dark. Cold perspiration broke out on my forehead due to the abysmal horrors of my mansion. It was acutely uncanny, even when frightful and uncanny things were common to heard the rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Llanada Villa. This sound naturally stirred me. I walked up a flight of stairs, my footsteps echoing loudly in the stillness, and into a long, panelled room, much lighter than the one below. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
And where were my servants? The house seemed deathly quiet. Moonlight blazed over the dark bulk of the house, silvering the slates and spilling along hallways like pooled water. Shadows were threatening to overwhelm the house. However, my eye was drawn, most of all, to the mesmerizing orange glow coming from the fourth floor. I stood motionless for several seconds, or so it seemed. Torrential rain fell causing the light to dim. The extreme, almost nocturnal darkness of the sky caused me to stumble sadly, but I was guided by the frequent flashes of lighting. I felt suddenly too weak in spirit to go further. It was getting chilly. The stormy vigil caused me to reflect on my ghastly night. My mind turned to that odd question which had kept recurring since the deaths of my husband and daughter. Why had not the demons taken their victims in natural order? With what manner of far-reaching tentacles did it prey? In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to intensify them, there fell near by a terrific bolt of lightning followed by the sound of sliding Earth. At the same time the wolfish wind rose to demonic crescendos of ululation. I was sure that the Observational Tower had been struck again. As I went to inspect the damage, the rain howled deafeningly so. Clutching at the edge of the table, I stood there swaying. The events of the past few hours rose before me in all their horror now, and I could see the black significance of every detail. As I entered the Observational Tower, it was cloaked in gloom, and a narrow corridor stretched before me. The floor was littered with rubble and fallen masonry; the ceiling interlaced with a thousand cobwebs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Feeling the strange tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reaching into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time, I stumbled forward, my eyes quickly accustoming themselves to the half-light from the almost opaque windows. At the end of the corridor a second door barred my passage. I thrust it open—and stood swaying there on the sill staring inward. From the skylights, a sprinkling of stars was visible for some of the clouds had cleared. Beyond was a small room, barely ten feet square, with low-raftered ceiling. And by the light of the open door, I saw side by side in the center of the floor—two white wood coffins. How long I stood there leaning weakly against the stone all I do not know. There was an odor of an ancient grave drifting out the chamber. In one of the coffins lie my butler. Dieter Hulsmann, was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head, there was no longer a face. Once again, the thunderstorm starting brewing. I believed that my mind was partly unhinged by the evens, and I was in fear of opening the other coffin. That shock had done something to my brain, and I could think only of the quest for a horror now grown to a cataclysmic stature in my imagination. The scenes of this night would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary person. Baleful primal shadows of unholy size, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish nightmare; thunder, hushing the clawing wind, admitted but little rain. Beyond the coffins in the background, illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning, rose spirits. History had led me to build this mansion. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
I now believed that the lurking fear was no material thing, but ghosts that rode the midnight lightening. There came a seeming echo of howling, shrill, faint, and eerie. I walked unresistingly to the window sill. Behind e was the blackness of an unknown chamber. I was afraid, but hid my fear. As I raised my glance, I saw glistening in the distance two demonic reflections, two reflections glowing with a baneful and unmistakable effulgence, and provoking maddeningly nebulous memories. I stopped automatically, though lacking the brain to retreat. The eyes approached, yet of the thing that bore them I could distinguish only a claw. But what a claw! Then far overheard I heard a faint crashing. It was the wild thunder of the mountain, raised to hysteric fury, and those eyes still stared with vacuous viciousness. I ran, staggering. I blundered through the hallway and to the elevator. As I took the elevator down nine stories, I breathed deeply, fished out my handkerchief and mopped my face. My hand was quivering like a grass stalk in a breeze, as I experienced virtual convulsions of fright. As I came back to the main house, I stood looking up at the tower. It was a peaceful, Arcadian scene, but I knew there was something sinister lurking about. Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden powers. Through the precipitous abysses of my haunted mansion, I stumbled upon a passageway and with great determination, I was eager to reach the innermost secret of the fear, which I had once more come to deem definite, material, and organic. The moon no longer shone through the skylights and a bone chilling breeze blew out my candle and left me in stark blackness. Every second I was consumed with a mixture of fear and curiosity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
The apparition came abruptly, a demon, scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting stifled grunting, and burst through the wall—a loathsome night spawned flood or organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. God knows how many there were—there must have been hundreds. These demons were deformed, dwarfed, hairy devils. In spite of my daze of fright and disgust, I did not run. These ghoulish beasts where what was lurking in the walls of my home. They were the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning fear that lurk in the darkness. I am afraid I am not mad—I hoped at first that I might be, but I was not. I am not now. Llanada Villa is perplexing. It also produced a music which enchanted me for hours with strains I have never heard before; strains which must have been of its own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for this music was immortal. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality. Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to myself. Voices drifted down out of the darkness like gossip from another World. But to me in the night another voice was clearer, louder, more insistent—now like the striking of crystal cymbals, now like an elfin chuckling, always a breathless, never-ending whisper. I stood in the full moonlight, my face turned up to receive it, drinking in its brightness. It tingled in me like a draft from the things I had forgotten, in another World. It dissolved the dull ache of cold that was in my body and mind, that stiffened my swollen limbs, and lay like an icy nugget behind my eyes. It soaked into me, and into the World about me, so that every corner of my mansion shone with pale light, white and vaporous, as far as I could see. It was a strange World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
At Midnight, on the night of December 5th 1889, Mrs. Winchester and her niece Daisy made themselves comfortable on a third floor landing outside one of the haunted rooms and settled down for a all-night vigil. At 1am they heard the sound of bare feet running across the floor, then knocking sounds as if someone was rapping with their knuckles on the bare boards. Other noises followed in quick succession—a hallow cough and a rustling—suggesting that a presence was making itself known. By 3am, Mrs. Winchester assumed that the show was over and was planning to retire to bed leaving Daisy on the landing, but before she could do so Mrs. Winchester saw a sight that was to haunt her for the rest of her life. A closet door swung open and the figure of her husband, attired in a Navy suit, with his head inclining downwards, and one had pressed upon the chest as if in pain, strode slowly towards her. The specter advanced toward Mrs. Winchester, and passed right through her. Mrs. Winchester recollected nothing for several hours afterwards.
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Randolph Harris II International 