Whispers in the distance as a pale, vaporous moon lights the mansion. Shadows are deep. Then from across the hall came the sound of a shrill scream. A chair scraped and feet hit the floor of the corridor, walking away toward the sound of the scream. A door opened and closed. The room was illuminated only by the two ornate tabletop candelabra, their candles white, dripping wax. My floating thoughts were being drawn unwillingly from their free-roaming hinterland towards consciousness. There is in my heart, a dragging sorrow that seems to coagulate the blood, so that movement in my veins is slothful, wearisome, somehow making all effort to exist a ponderous affair. However, the whispering, almost sibilant, voice dispels much of that inner lassitude. “Sarah…” it calls again. I walk to the door and stand as if fearing to touch it. The voice said, “Come,” and I pulled the door open the rest of the way and went outside, past the desk and the empty chair that had been just outside the door of my chamber. With my heart beating wildly, I crept downstairs.  After I made it around the corner, I was in front of the main hall. There was an empty desk. I walked past it and to the front door. It was bolted. I threw the bolt open and twist the handle, the metal’s coldness leaping along my arm like iced energy released from a brumal host. The shock is mild against the damp chill of my own body. I pull the door open and the darkness beyond is more dense; it seems to sell into the foyer, a waxing shadow. An illusion. I shrink away, reluctant to make contact with this fresh darkness. My vision adjusts, and the inkiness dissipates as if weakened by its own sudden growth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5

That fall on the stairs: I remember thinking that it had opened a crack in my mind, just enough to let in glimpses of a world beyond—a World I never wanted to see. As I advanced again, timorously rather than cautiously, passing through the doorway to stand shivering on the veranda, the stars were bright diamonds in the sky. Was one of them my star of destiny? Outside, the torches flicked with the burn of pitch and there were screams and glass shattering and the lusty voices sang. Walking through the wet grass, the droplets glittering like emeralds in the moonlight. The shape of a body showed in the wet grass, where he had lain facedown under a fallen tree. The footprints were sharp in the grass, and his feet had left dark, wet blotches where he had climbed the rock. He had lain there for a long time. Long enough it was for time to have lost its means. I turned back to look at my house, just before the trees grew so thick as to obstruct my view. I saw light on the glass of one of the Observational Tower’s thick windows. However, it was no more than a hint of moonlight. Its light fell upon his upturned face, on his sunken, brilliant eyes and the puffy blue of jowls on which the beard had started to grow, then stopped. The moonlight shone down on the World of trees and rocks of which he was a part, and gave it life. The night was warm. In the valley, the rain had long been gone. Flowers were pushing up through the moist Earth; frogs were Panpiping in every low spot. All through the warm night, squadrons of birds were passing across the face of the moon. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5

Time passed, but whether it was minutes or hours, or whether there were still such things as minutes and hours, I could not have said. Time had no meaning for me in this new, strange World. Time passed, because the moon was higher and its light stronger and warmer on my flesh, but I did not sense it passage. I wondered how long my butler had been sprawled out on the law, dead? I moved close to a great evergreen tree whose limbs reached high above the tops of the other trees around it, and felt the quick chill as its shadow fell across me. A few minutes later I was sitting in the drawing room. I went along the corridor. It was as though I was being led through the almost-darkness, although I felt no physical touch upon me; I saw no physical presence beside me. But I walked confidently, although quietly on tiptoe, knowing I was not walk into anything nor stumble. The hallways echoed with the sounds of footsteps, and the voices of uncountable spirits could be heard engaged in unintelligible chatter or quietly chanting or singing hymns that droned on into the night. As the door to the kitchen swung open, I turned to see who was there. To my amazement, nobody was there. I stared for the door, but it swung shut before I could reach it. At the edge of my field of vision something moved. It drifted noiselessly through the mansion, like a puff of luminous cloud. It settled on the gasolier above my head, and I twisted my neck back and stared up at it. I could feel it warmth. Petrified with terror, I suddenly froze. In the silence there came a slight sound from the window—the shutter must have rattled in the night-wind. I had a curious desire to look out of that window at the glittering roofs and spires of Llanada Villa. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5

What I did succeed in doing was tiptoeing to the fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the top of the Observational Tower. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of Earth, and at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. It must have been the apparitions from the Underworld beneath the kitchen floor, with its endless tunnels stretching away into the dark. I listened at the door and heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real—the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward, I waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician’s feeble effort to raise from the floor by the assistance of a chair. I renewed my rapping. I heard someone stumble to the window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. As the door opened, I walked into the room, but there was no one inside. Shaking pathetically, I sat on the floor for some time inactive. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5

Black vapor lay close over the room like a carpet. It was dense and impenetrable, dull, and lifeless. The chill had come on me again, numbing my nerves, dulling my labouring brain. As the black mist closed over me, all feeling went from my hands. Cold—terrible, numbing cold—ate its way like acid into my flesh and bones. The mist was draining the warmth—the life—out of me, through my hands and arms—sucking me dry. I swayed to my feet, then collapsed onto the floor. I lay there helpless for a long time. Little by little the moonlight revived me. Little by little the numbness went out of my muscles, and I could move my legs and grip things with my fingers. I pulled my legs under me and got to my feet, learning against the wall for support. I stared at the stairs. The black fog that lay on the stairs was deadly, draining the life-force out of whatever touched it. It was death! Something rattled in the shadow of the observational tower. Its black runways ribbed the glowing floor of the tower on every side. It made a wall of cold about the place where I was. The sun rose, bringing a scathing golden light that shrived my pallid flesh, allowing me to make my way down the stairs. Llanada Villa was full of life. It was alive with growing things, and the white mist that rose from them and clothed them filled it in the brim with a broth of light through which demons and apparitions cut sharp black lines of cold. There was another night, and I stood in the bright light of the shrinking moon, staring at that speck of golden light. There was something I should know about it—something that was hidden in that other World I had been in. There was something that drew me to it—an invisible thread, stretched across space through the white night, binding me to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5

The Winchester Mystery House

Sometimes, visitors and staff get the impression that the spirits occupying The Winchester Mystery House are oblivious to the fact tht their time has passed. Spectral sounds have resonated throughout the historic mansion on occasion. Footsteps walking around the building have been heard after the mansion is closed. Some have told of the sound of harp music emanating from the vacant front parlor after closing hours. At times, the reverberations have been so intense that they have set off the electronic alarm system. In 2010, a tour guide apparently caught a glimpse of the spirits responsible for the strange sounds. Once quiet evening, while walking through the front hall after hours, he was surprised by the sound of music. When he walked into the large front drawing room, he was astonished to see a group of people dressed in nineteenth-century attire moving about and talking. The tour guide left the room and walked to one of the offices to ask another staff member about the costume party across the hall. The staff member, who was unaware of any parties scheduled in the mansion at that hour, accompanied the young man back to the drawing room. The room was deathly quiet. Dust covering the tables and furniture indicated that no one had used the room for quite a while.

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