I was happy, living quiet sunny days without shadow or event. To my innocent mind, Llanada Villa seemed the soul of goodness and dignity and charm; in all the countryside there was no home that could compare with it. My home was much studied because of its peculiarly composite architecture; an architecture involving Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order or blend of orders—Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends spear truly.  However, when it came to construction plans, to rebel against my decisions, to question my wishes, to doubt my wisdom and righteousness—these were crimes beyond the range of anyone’s wildest thoughts. But I loved my staff dearly. Sometimes I even helped the garden boy to clear away the leaves from the carriage way. Even thought I was a kind person, people accused me of being a witch. The accusers said, “When I heard Sarah Winchester’s name, I thought it was a witch’s name; for of course the correct way to pronounce it is “Sarah Wastwych.” Particularly more dreadful is that what they were calling me was “Sarah Was-the-witch.” And the villagers thought that they had other proofs. Inquisitive individuals claimed to see me walking very fast, and on dark nights carrying a horn lantern. They also said that at midnight, I would glide over the ground. And that I have developed the curious habit of vanishing from the house. It was utterly wicked for people to suspect me of witchcraft. I spent my evenings sewing peacefully in my sewing room, and I ventured to laugh at their stories. People would wait in the dark shadow of some bushes close by the gate, lying all silvery in the moonlight to catch a glimpse of me. They shivered as they lingered in the cold, waiting to see what would happen. Eventually, I sat in silent grief because my heart was wrung with sorrow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

One villager stopped my servant and said, “You should not have a witch for a mistress. I shall not come to your house again, for I do not care to associate with the servants of a witch.” Then she went away. Had the sun fallen out of the sky, I could hardly have been more dismayed. “I do not believe that Mrs. Winchester is a witch,” she said. “I have never believed it. I will care for her and treat her kindly, and I will watch what happens. And then I shall tell the truth.” That evening, the housemaid knelt on the window seat and watched the dark shadows dancing outside. They saw a tall figure pass by, and a little later a small black object crept out of the bushes and followed it. After a while, the housemaid heard my voice calling angrily for her. Shaking in her shoes, she hid behind the curtains, but I saw her. She was dreadfully afraid of my temper. I made her stand like a culprit before me, and she could not think how to evade my first angry question as to her whereabouts. The housemaid wept and said, “I had gone to find out whether you are a witch.” “You impudent little girl!” I shouted. “What do you mean?” I looked so fierce that she could scarcely bring herself to reply. Making a vast effort, the housemaid said, “Villagers said that you are so cleaver, beautiful, and rich that you must be a witch, Mrs. Winchester. They said only a witch could build a castle such as this.” If I had been any angrier, I would have burst. “How dare you—how dare you?” I said. “You believed such rubbish as that?” “Not quite, Mrs. Winchester,” she sobered. “You see, other servants said the you flew over the gardens every night at midnight on your broomstick. And we watched. We did not see a broomstick, but we saw you floating. So then we thought that you must be a witch.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

My colour faded away. “You servants on the grounds at night! You will be killed!” And forgetting my angry, I dashed down the stairs like a young woman and rushed out to the gate, the housemaid after me. And there at the gate stood the cook and the butler, being stalked by shadows. I was so glad to see them safe and sound that anger had no time to return. “Well, I hope that you are satisfied that I am not a witch,” I said. The other servants saw that I knew. I gave a cry of alarm at the sight of all them standing there. They looked at my horn lantern. They were embarrassed when once they had the supreme mortification of hearing me say, “Look, there are the silly servants who though that I was a witch!” The next day was clear and warm. There had been a bitter freeze again right after Christmas day, and several inundating rains, but the weather was now like spring, and the pink and red azaleas were blooming all over the property. The sweet olive had regained all of its beautiful green leaves in the after math of the freeze, and a new bright colour was coming out of the palm trees and evergreens. I took a walk around the garden. All the dead tropical plants had been cleared away, but the new banana trees were already sprining up from the dark freeze-killed stumps, and even the gardenias were coming back, dropping their shriveled brown laves and breaking out in dark glossy new foliage. They bony white crepe myrtle trees were still bare, but that was to be expected. All along the front gate the camellias were covered with dark red blossoms. And the tulip magnolias had only just dropped their great saucerlike bloom; the pavement was littered with their large pink petals. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6

The house itself was shining clean and in perfect order. As we traversed half-mile or so through my house, I took occasion to ask the housemaid some question which brought up the topic of ghosts. As we came up to the Grandball Room, there to my horror I saw in the middle of the hallway a middle-aged man in a mackintosh. I could not see his face, but I noticed instantaneously that he was shining a torch onto the hallway itself. The housemaid and I stopped dead in our tracks. We felt a great cold, the coldness of a graveyard. So uncomfortable and nervous did I feel that I was ready to turn around and run, but as we looked at him, the figure turned and disappeared. “Come on,” I said to the housemaid, there is nothing there, and we went on; but later we talked about it and we had both seen the same thing, and she said, “I reckon it was a ghost.” Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our new emotions took—just what changed of immediate objective it was that so sharpened our senses of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what we feared—yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage-point. Probably I had not given up my zeal to glimpse apparitions themselves, though there was interposed a new goal in the form of crumpled sketches I had found. I had at once recognized a monstrous square tower figure over Llanada Villa, and took this as a message from the spirits as to what I was to build next. Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these hasty diagrams, made me think that it must for a feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by me. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

Moreover, this tower might form a good present link with the upper World. Or maybe it was a route the spirits wished to use to descend. After the construction of the nine-story tower, some people viewed my home as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and werewolves. It was believed that Llanada Villa was a temple, making it the center of a cult feared phenomena. The place is mentioned in a chronicle as being a substantial wooden priory housing a strange and powerful monastic order and surrounded by extensive gardens which needed no walks to exclude a frightened populace. Of my family before the date that I purchased this land, there is no evil report, but something strange must have happened then. In one chronicle there is a reference to the Winchesters as “cursed by God” in 1881, whilst village legendry had nothing but evil and frantic fear to tell of the mansion that went up on the foundations of the old temple and priory. The fireside tales were of the most grisly description, all the ghastlier because of their frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness. They represented my ancestors as a race of demons, and hinted whisperingly at their responsibility for the occasional disappearance of villagers through several generations. In 1890, there was a hideous tale of a housemaid, who shortly after her marriage to a farmer was killed by him and his mother, both of the slayers being absolved and blessed by the priest to whom they confessed what they dared not repeat to the World. These myths and ballads, typically as they were of crude superstition, upset me greatly. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

I was much less disturbed by the vaguer tales of wails and howlings in the Observational Tower; and of the floundering, squealing white thing on which one of my horses had trod one night in a lonely field; and of the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the priory in the full light of day. These things were hackneyed spectral lore. The accounts of vanished servants were less to be dismissed, though not especially significant in view of mediaeval custom. Prying curiosity meant death, and more than one served head had been publicly shewn on the bastions. A few tales were exceedingly picturesque, and made me wish I had learnt more of comparative mythology in my youth. There was, for instance, the belief that a legion of bat-winged devils kept Witches’ Sabbath each night at the mansion—a legion whose sustenance might explain the disproportionate abundance of coarse vegetables harvested in the vast gardens. And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the ghouls—the army of obscene which had burst forth from the mansion three years after construction that doomed it to desertion—a ravenous army which has swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable army a whole separate cycle of myths revolves, for its it scattered among the estate and brought curses and horrors in its train. Such was the lore that assailed me as I pushed to completion the work of building my home. It must not be imagined for a moment that these tales formed my principal psychology environment. On the other hand, I was constantly praised and encourage by Mr. Hansen and the antiquarians who surrounded and aided me. I enjoyed the great rooms, wainscoted walls, vaulted ceilings, mullioned windows, and broad staircases with pride. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6

The Winchester Mystery House

At The Winchester Mystery House, there have been reports of very ancient ghosts, some of them dating from prehistory. In the winter of 1924, a caretaker noticed there was curious mile long stretch of hallway in the mansion. The area was a place of ritual activity. As he was walking, he suddenly caught sight of a ghost to the north-east, who was travelling the same direction as himself. The ghost came closer to him until the caretake could see him closely. He reported, “To my unutterable horror, I saw a ghost standing beside me. The ghost wore a long loose cloak. His face was turned towards me, but I could not see his features. He seemed to be threatening me with an implement which he waved in his right hand above his head. At this time, being unacquainted with the psychology of ghosts, I was frozen with terror. I ran the whole length of the hallway, desirous of nothing except to put distance between us.” The caretaker was convinced that he had seen some revenant from an earlier age of the World, walking as the ghost had done some thousand years before. In the late 1930s, two young caretakers went to the police after being terrified by a ghost who floated soundlessly beside them in the same hallway.

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