With the first glimmer of dawn, during the jovial season of merry autumn, the voice of God had sung to me through times and space, and he told me there were things I would know and understand as others could not. He told me that if I opened to him and bult this mansion and never ceased construction that He would give me His strength and secrets. He has been driven to preserve me, and He loved me. There was nothing in the World I wanted more at this moment than to look God right in the eyes and understand Him, but all the gold and diamonds in the nineteenth century could not give Him a face. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism, I fancied God looked like my beloved husband William Winchester. I paced the area between the bookcases and the overstuffed Victorian chairs. I have learned the power of the night, of fear, of blood. Terror, certainly, has a vigour, but it is nothing compared to loving. As I came to the footmark of the staircase, for an instant I gazed at a stranger, on which war, with its fatigues and its wounds, had made a great alteration. A kind of cold face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several—I do not know how many—legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body. I screamed out and fell away backward from the step on which I stood, and the creature slipped downwards, I suppose, on to that same step. But the uncertainty last no longer than a few seconds before the visitor vanished. I believe I am acquainted with the extremity of terror and repulsion which a woman can endure without losing her mind. If corpses walked, some, not nearly revived enough, stood in plain view in Llanada Villa. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

Of course, there is also a room in my house in which people spend the night, and in the morning, they are found kneeling in the corner moaning and crying. One of the guests said that she heard a noise in the passing at night, opened her door, and saw someone crawling towards her on all fours with blood on his face and pale unseeing eyes, those of a dead man. I had seen queer things in my parlour. Each night around thirteen o’clock, I would wake up and go downstairs to watch these curious lights that played on my walls and ceiling. One night in particular, I saw a neat, black-clad figure moving with easy grace through the long slanting bars of moonlight. After I starred for a while, he vanished along with the lights. After these odd events, Daisy and I were discussing the occurrences. “What do you think it all means, Aunt Sarah?” she said. I waited a long time before answering. “I feel that someone is trying to contact me,” I replied. “Why?” It seemed like a simplistic question to ask, but Daisy had learned that when magic was involved, sometimes the most obvious questions brought the most interesting answers, so she asked it anyway. “Why, indeed?” I responded. “Maybe someone wants to give me more powers?” Daisy smiled and sipped her tea. She began to shiver a little. “Daisy,” I asked, “what seems to be troubling you?” “Well, Aunt Sarah, sometime after you had gone to bed last night, I remained downstairs reading, and I was going one the stairs, someone passed me. The lights flickering made it hard to see, but I thought it was one of the servants, perhaps. However, this morning I found that it could not have been so, as none of them had been out of their rooms at that hour.” I trembled a little and blinked. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

On the night of November 1, I saw the figure. I heard footsteps outside on the landing at about 3 a.m. I got up at once, and went outside. There was a bright full moon, and the apparition was then at the end of the landing at the top of the stairs, then went downstairs, stopping again when she reached the hall below. I opened the drawing-room door and she went in, walked across the room to the couch in the bow window, stayed there a little while, then came out of the room, went along the passage, and disappeared by the garden door. I spoke to her, but she did not answer. That afternoon I was in the greenhouse, and on my way to the site of the projected rose garden. I did not know much about the conditions most suitable to these nurseries, but I had a great gardener. Collin, my gardener, had disappeared mysteriously about the ground, and I was looking for him to fetch him to tea, and going down this path I suddenly saw him, not hiding in the bushes, as I rather expected, but sitting on the bench in the old summer-house—there was a wooden summer-house here, you know—up in the corner, asleep, but with such a dreadful look on his face that I really thought he must be ill or even dead. I rushed at him and shook him, and told him to wake up; and wake up he did, with a scream. I assure you the poor boy seemed almost beside himself with fright. He hurried me away to the house, and was in a terrible state all that night, hardly sleeping. Someone had to sit up with him, as far as I remember. He was better very soon, but for days I could not get him to say why he had been in such a condition. It came out at last that he had really been asleep and had had a very odd disjointed sort of dream. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

He never saw much of what was around him, but he felt the scenes most vividly. First he made out tht he was standing in a large room with number of people in it, and that someone was opposite to him who was “very powerful,” and he was being asked questions which he felt to be very important, and, whenever he answered them, someone—either the person opposite to him, or someone else in the room—seemed to be, as he said, making something up against him. All the voices sounded to him very distant, but he remembered bits of things that were said: “Where were you on the nineteenth of September?” and “Is this your handwriting?” and so on I can see now, of course, that he was dreaming of some trial: but we were never allowed to see the papers, and it was odd that he would be dreaming of what went on in court. All the time he felt, he said, the most intense anxiety and oppression and hopelessness (though I do not suppose he used such words as that to me). Then, after that, there was an interval in which he remembered being dreadfully restless and miserable, and then there cam another sort of picture, when he was aware that he had come out of doors on a dark raw morning with a little snow about. It was in a street, or at any rate among houses, and he felt that there were numbers and numbers of people there too, and that he was taken up some creaking wooden steps and stoon on a sort of platform, but the only thing he could actually see was a small fire burning somewhere near him. Someone who had been holding his arm left hold of it and went towards this fire, and then he said the fright he was in was worse than at any other part of his dream, and if I had not wakened him up, he did not know what would have become of him. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

A few weeks later, I was coming out of my dormant rose garden, and I walked toward the orchard, when I saw the figure of the ghostly woman cross the orchard, go along the carriage drive in front of the house, and in at the open side door, across the hall, and into the drawing room, I following. She crossed the drawing room and took up her unusual position behind the couch in the bow window. Daisy came in soon after, and I told her the ghost was there. Daisy could not see the figure, but went up to where I showed her the ghost was. She then went swiftly round behind Daisy, across the room, out of the door, and along the hall disappearing as usual near the garden door, we both following her. We looked out into the garden, having first to unlock the garden door, which my niece Daisy had locked as she same though, but we saw nothing of her. After a time, I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered what was going on. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. Some of my servants were queer people and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. After a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock on my hall door was being tried—cautiously, furtively, tentatively—with a key. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

My sensations upon recognizing this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard—and that was to my advantage in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder’s next move. After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I hard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realized the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale—just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

I could not, I decided, rish an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be though the less solidly built connecting doors of the rooms. In the passage outside, I saw the figure of a woman, apparently a servant, with grey hair and a white cap, the upper part of her dress being blue and the shift dark. Her arms were stretched out at full length and the hands were clasped. This figure moved with a very slow, furtive, gliding motion, as if wishing to escape notice, straight towards the head of the old staircase, which lead to the ceiling. On reaching it, she disappeared. In the full light of the archway down stairs, I saw the figure of a lady, with dark hair and dress, apparently lost in painful thought and oblivious to everything about her. Her dress was fuller than is the modern fashion and the figure, although opaque, cast no shadow. It moved with a curious gliding motion into the darkness and melted away at the spot within a yard of the place where a doorway, now walled up, led from a staircase to the hall. I saw these figures with such distinctness that I had no doubt at all I was looking at a real person, while, at the same time, although seated in a well-lighted room and chatting with friends, I was conscious of an uneasy, creepy feeling. I tried to see the features, but could not. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7

The Winchester Mystery House

Nineteenth-century America was perhaps the golden age of the ghost. It may have ceased to have any message or any advice for the living, but it was everywhere. The yearnings associated with the Romantic movement of English poetry found fruition in the spectacle of the melancholy ghost. There was much popular interest in spirit-rappings and in spirit-tappings. The fashion for mesmerism, in the middle of the century, provoked belief in some form of a plasma or magnetic fluid that might harbour the forms of spirits. Technological progress also seemed to affirm the existence of spectral bodies, with the appearance of photograph intending to reveal the ghostly occupants of rooms and chairs. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, lent seriousness and credibility to the quest for spirits. A questionnaire sent out by the society in 1894 revealed that out of seventeen thousand people, 673 claimed that they had seen a ghost in one form or another. It is perhaps curious, however, that the majority of them did not know the identity of the spirit in question. The manifestation appeared arbitrary and purposeless. It is also worth observing that many apparent “sightings” of ghost have been discredited, and that many photographs of spirits are the obvious products of fakery. In the field of ghost-hunting there are many frauds and charlatan, intent of producing a sensation rather than a verifiable record.  

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