The land on which Llanada Villa is constructed is naturally cheerful. Sun and sky are bright, and the shade is enough. A spring gurgles; there is firewood at hand from the mahogany tree. However, the thing most people will remember about Llanada Villa is not the enormous lobby and dinning room, nor the elaborately carved mahogany woodwork framing the library, nor the men and women of the estate themselves, with their bright eyes and pale faces. The thing they will remember most is that behind the dark brocade curtains hang so heavily that there is little wonder that this fortress shelters a number of extremely active phantoms. For years, inhabitants of my mansion have claimed to see numerous ghostly reenactments of tragedies that have saturated the psychic ether of the environment. On this night, I lay sleepless in an unfamiliar bed. With a fire a blaze in the fireplace, I lay with my eyes open, thinking of absurd, disjointed things, wondering now why I had not pushed away this trivial bout of anxiety. Instead, I felt utterly alone, crippled by uncertainty and susceptible to fear. Suddenly I was frightened: it seemed to me quite possible that a panic attack might come on. It was a cold night and, of course, apart from the occasional noise from the house settling, very quiet. Then, there was a terrible scream. It seemed to come from downstairs. It was spine-chilling. It crescendoed for some seconds and then stopped suddenly. I can only liken it to the shriek I once heard when a cat was killed by a fox; this was also in the night. I thought to myself, “Somebody’s been killed.” I summoned one of the chambermaids and told of what I heard. She told me that she had heard it several times during her ten years’ service, but it was better to forget it. I still was not satisfied. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5

I walked down the hall towards the stairs. I passed by an old room which was being sealed off from the main house. Suddenly I was aware of a hand and arm stretched out from the room to bar my passage. Being scared, I jumped, and for a moment turned by back to the room. On looking around, I saw a man dressed in dark clothes, walking back to the wall. He was wearing no hat when he reached the wall, and seemed to walk right into it. I could hear no sound of steps, and on close investigation after he disappeared, I could see no man and no hole in the wall. He vanished. I felt him vanish. I felt the warmth and the sudden movement in the air. It was as if something has been sucked away, and the chandeliers swung violently. And suddenly I did not know what I had seen, or what I had felt. My heart was skipping dangerously. I felt another wave of dizziness and continued to move along the wall, silent, as I heard learned to do in many a night. I hugged the wall, so that floor boards would not creak. A gust of cool air fanned my rosy cheek, and I put out a hand and found the edge of an open door. Mr. Hansen had told me a history regarding cupboard in this room. According to what he related, this young woman’s spirt comes out of this cupboard: but I do not fully recollect the matter. Not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, a farmer feloniously, willfully, and of malice made an assault and with a certain knife value a penny throat of one of the housemaids then and there did cut, of which the housemaid then and there did die, and the body of the housemaid was cast into a certain pond of water situate on this estate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5

As I was recalling this history of this misfortune, footsteps that came downstairs sounded light and active, like a small, spry man. For an instant of horror, I feared there was no next room. My backward-groping foot could not find a floor to stand on, and only a quick, noiseless grab for the door-jamb kept me from falling. Then my foot stretched lower and touched solid woof. Another stairway here, going down—I painfully descended another step, another. I groped around a turn in the stairs and to a door below tightly closed. For long minutes I waited, hand on latch. I lifted the latch, slipped through, and closed the door behind me. There were noises in the distance. I became certain that I was hearing words in a tribal dialect that I did not understand carried on the wind of the inky winter nights. I knew that somewhere in this corridor resides a secret room in which a monster resides. For generations of servants have sworn that they have heard its shuffling feet and hideous half-human cries as it emerges for its nocturnal prowlings. According to my butler Herr Enderlin, in 1888, the spirits compelled the carpenters to built a ghastly chamber deep within the wall to hide a secret transmitted from the past, which is only know to three persons. When one of the triumvirates dies, the survivors are compelled by a terrible oath to elect a successor. According to legend, because of the family curse, a demon was incarnated. It was a half-human monster, misshapen, and was found to be a grotesque monstrosity, and the brutish creature was hidden away in this secret room. For decades, three people have been selected to care and look after the monsters. I was determined to discover the location of the secret room and view the monster for myself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5

It was darker here than upstairs. I knelt and touched a cement floor, then a cement wall. There was a big rectangular chamber, with double doors at the far end. These led to an entry from lower ground behind the house. The basement had been furnished with a long bench of dark wood along one wall. There was something of a horrible spirit lurking in the abyss. I felt as petrified as men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photography them or study their habits. Half-paralysed with terror though I was, there was nevertheless fanned within me a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end. However, I certainly did not mean to face what I feared—yet I will not deny that I may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from a hidden vantage-point. The sub-levels of my home perhaps embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by me. I reflected on how in these days, while I was being terrorized by ghosts, some people were having serious difficulties with finances, employee morale, yet we all managed to keep a spirit of camaraderie, of heartiness. Of course, it was the natural consequence of people in Victorian times. One simply could not resist, in such a context, the droll remark, the grateful laugh, the sense of cheerful complicity in even an unfortunate fate. How puzzling the human personality is, I thought, as I was preparing to enter the basement, moving uncharacteristically slowly, when with others there is a public self, alone there is a private self, and yet both are real…Both are experienced as real. A heavy echoing thump startled me. I heard the floor creak as I moved cautiously but purposefully toward the basement stairs. Whatever the lurking horror might be, I believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly manifest. And yet, when I did venture down the stairs towards the dark basement, my first impression was one of anticlimax. The moon light beam from the skylight upstairs made a halo of radiance at the door. Light must have seeped at once through the cracks, for the shadows, halfway downstairs, paused. My heart was racing and my lip caught in my teeth, I tiptoed to the door and stood next to its hinges. A hand rattled the latch, lifted it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5

The door was thrown open, screening me from the rest of the cellar. A specter appeared in my own resemblance, and she seemed to be habited in the same clothes and dress which I hath on at the same time. Revolver shots rang in the cellar like a bombardment. As I cleared the door, I darted up the stairs. I tripped on the top one, but kept my feet. Four mighty leaps carried me to the Grand Ball Room. I was taken up by the skirt of my doublet by this female demon, and carried a height into the air. I was soon missed by my servants, and after no news could be heard of me until at length (near half an hour later) I was heard singing and whistling in the fruit orchard where they found me in kind of a trance. I solemnly protested to them that the demon had carried me so high that my house seemed to me to be but as a sand castle, and during all that time I was in perfect sense, and prayed to Almighty God not to suffer the devil to destroy me; and I was then suddenly set down in the fruit orchard. The workmen found one shoe on the side of my house, and the other on the other side, and in the morning espied my hat hanging on the top of a tree; by which it appears I had been carried a considerable height, and that what I am telling is not a fiction. In the month of June, in a pond of water, with the throat cut: a knife belonging to a prisoner was found in that same water, and something dark came up out of the water at the edge of the pond farthest away from him, and so up the bank. And when it got to the top where he could see it plain against the sky, it stood up and flapped the arms up and down, and then run off very swiftly. And inside of Llanada Villa, it was also very noticeable what a silence the servants kept, and further (though this might not be otherwise than natural in that season of the year), what a darkness and obscurity there was in the mansion, lights being brought in not long after two o’ clock in the day, and yet no fog in town. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5

The Winchester Myster House

On November 18, of the year of 2020, caretakers were decorating for the season. Suddenly, one man was startled by knocking sounds coming from behind the largest cupboard door in the house. He thought to himself, “there is someone hiding within, and I would know what she wants.” And with that he gave a sort of cry or a shout and ran out of the house into the dark, and another caretaker felt the cupboard door pushed out against her while she held it, but before she pressed to keep it shut as hard as she could, it was forced out against her, and she had to fall back. What came out? She could not see what it was: it fleeted very swiftly over the floor and out the door. What did it look like? It ran very low, and it was of a dark colour. She was daunted and made all the haste she could after it to the door that stood open. And she looked out, but it was dark and could see nothing. There were no tracks on the floor, but there was a voice heard without the house.

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