My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all night long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart.

We would like to believe that everything we think and say is right, but we cannot. That is because we do not have grace enough or sense enough. Of course, there is a wit in each of us, but even this is dimmed through negligence. What we really fail to notice is that we are losing our interior vision. How do you know?? When we act so daily, and the excuses we cook up are so abysmal! When we explode with passion and think, no I am not angry, I am just defending the faith. When we peck at the peccadillos of others, and our own whoppers we let pass unchallenged, as the Evangelist Matthew has pointed out (7.3)! When we ponder what we will put up with from others, but pay little attention to how much others will have to put up with from us! Is there a moral anywhere in this? Whoever wants one’s own actions to be tolerably received would do well not to judge the behaviour of others so intolerably. Whoever has an interior life should put the spiritual care of oneself before the care of others. You will never be internal and devout until you hold your tongue about others. If speak you must, then let loose your own wretched spiritual condition. If you focus entirely on your relationship to God, precious little of the hubbub of the World will be able to penetrate your recollection. When you have that vacant stare in your eye, you might well ask yourself, before someone else does, just where are you? When you have run through everything the World has to offer, why, if I may echo Matthew (16.26), do you seem to have advance to the real? The moral? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

If you want True Peace and True Union, then you just have to postpone everything else and attend to your own case. If only you drag your torso away from every temporal festival, you will make spiritual progress. When you put a value on each temporal thing, you will lose spiritual ground. All of which means, you can keep nothing as your own nothing big, nothing small, nothing nice, nothing new; that is to say, nothing except God and everything that smacks of God. However, all hose lovely creaturely consolations that came your way, what about them? Forget about them! The soul that loves God loathes everything that is not God. God Eternal, God Immense, “fulling all the space,” as Jeremiah phrased it (23.24); the soul’s solace, the heart’s True Joy. Although already a thriving business—having sold over 100,000 lever-action repeaters by the early 1880s—Winchester was ready to expand its market with different-action firearms. The Hotchkiss, a bolt action designed by American inventor Benjamin B. Hotchkiss and produced in hopes of military sales, appeared in 1883. In the same year, Winchester bought the rights to the falling block single-shot rifle invented and patented by John M. Browning. Spawned by the Browning connection with Winchester, the single-shot appeared in the Winchester catalogue for 1885. The single-shot would not reach the market until 1885 and remained in product line until approximately 1920. There are so many variations in calibers, barrels, overall configurations, finishes, triggers, sights, and other feature that sportsmen, the military, and target shooters were all offered every variety of possible use for a single-shot rifle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The number of cartridge chamberings for this model exceeds that of any other firearm made by Winchester: approximately sixty-five. The single-shot was made at a time when target shooting was as popular as golf is today and a major match like the Creedmoor (on New York’s Long Island) was very much the Masters of its day. Not only were the single-shots beautifully constructed and of a solid, virtually unbreakable design, but they were phenomenally accurate, used in international matches which were shot at distances up to 1,000 yards, with exquisitely constructed open sights and finely built tubular scope sights. The champion target shooters were international celebrities, and elaborate trophies were designed and built by such silversmiths as Gorham and Tiffany. The Browning-Winchester single-shot rifles were also a favourite of sportsmen-hunters as the wide selection of chamberings meant that cartridges were available for every type of North American game animal. Then, as now, hunters preferred the simplicity and reliability of a single-shot mechanism, as well as the challenge of having only one shot available, without the rapid-repeating capability of magazine arms. Taking a grizzly bear with a nonrepeating rifle required cool nerves and a steady hand. When Oliver Winchester brought out a John Browning design, the company certainly got its money’s worth. The $8,000.00 ($231,230.64 inflation adjusted for 2021) went a long way with the single shot. The Winchester rifles were highly successful. In June of 1888, John and Matt Browning were issued a patent for a slide-action magazine rifle, which—as the Model 1890—became Winchester’s first rifle of that type. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

The model 1890, in two basic grades only (Sporting Rifle and Fancy Sporting Rifle, all having 24-inch octagonal barrels and rifle-style steel buttplates), remained in production through 1932, with a total production of nearly 850,000. The 1890 was Winchester’s all-time sales leader in .22 rimfire, and many 1890s are still in use around the World today. As an economical version of the Model 1890, the factory brought out the 1906 pump-action. And the 1906 thereby also became the factory’s first rifle advertised and sold which accommodated the three cartridges interchangeably. A further sales factor was that all Model 1906s featured takedown capability. Serial numbering on the 1906 was in its own range, and, like the 1890, the 1906 achieved an extraordinary sales total—nearly 850,000 made—before being discontinued in 1932. Hundreds of thousand of Winchester rifles were produced and they were assembled in what is called the Winchester Complex, which is in New Haven, Connecticut USA. In 1862, William Wirt Winchester, the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, married Sarah Lockwood Pardee. (Oliver Fisher Winchester was a very wealthy and prominent man, not only the owner of Winchester Repeating Arms, but also Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.) Sarah and William’s life together was happy, and they moved in the best of New England society. However, in 1866, disaster struck when their infant daughter, Annie died of the then mysterious childhood disease marasmus. Mrs. Winchester fell into a deep sadness. Fifteen years later, her husband William Wirt Winchester who was at the time president of Winchester Repeating Arms Company suffered a premature death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Mrs. Winchester inherited 777 shares of Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and $20,000,000.00 ($532,737,254.90 inflation adjusted for 2021). She was told she could rest assure that her life was not in danger and by building a house similar to the Winchester Complex, which was 3,250,000 square feet, would give her eternal life. Now, no one really knows how much the Winchester’s were worth. In 1915, for instance, they may a deal with the British government in the sum of $47,500,000.00 ($1,277,778,217.82 inflation adjusted for 2021), so Mrs. Winchester’s inheritance was just a fraction of their cumulative wealth. In the late 1800s, the Santa Clara Valley presented sweeping visas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for Mrs. Winchester to begin her building project. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished eighteen-room farm house just three miles west of San Jose—and over the next thirty-eight years she produced the sprawling complex we know today as the Winchester Mystery House. The death of the child cannot be explained on natural grounds except by suggesting that there was something wrong with it quite unrelated to the father’s experience. However, there is eloquent testimony about evidence of the power of witchcraft. There were known to witches in New Haven, Connecticut in 1646. A servant named Mary Johnson was accused of being a witch. Others were known to practice black magic. However, it did not occur to anyone to notice that the evidence suggested that the malignant power must also reside not only in the witch but in the charms hey use or in the Devil’s power that lay behind them, since they worked equally well whether they were manipulated by a confessed witch or by a Godly magistrate. I am a believer of words, I believe everything depends on who says them. What if the direful creatures, whose report lingers in these tales of the Winchester, should have an origin far older still? What if they were the remnants of a vanishing period of the Earth’s history long antecedent to the birth of mastodon and iguanodon; a stage, namely, when the World, as we call it, had not yet become quite visible, was not yet so far finished as to part from the invisible World that its mother, and which, on its part, had no then become quite invisible—was only almost such. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

When, as a credible consequence, strange shapes of those now invisible regions, of Eden and Hell, might be expected to gloom out occasionally from the awful Fauna of an ever-generating World upon that one which was being born of it. Hence, the life-periods of a World being long and slow, some of these huge, unformed bulks of half-created matter might, somehow, like the megatherium of later times, a baby creation to them, roll at age-long intervals, clothes in a might terror of shapelessness into the half-recognition of human beings, whose consternation at the uncertain vision were barrier enough to prevent all further know of its substance. Ever since I was born, I suppose the changes of a World are not to be measured by the changes of its generations. When one’s discrimination is no greater than to lump everything marvellous—demons, Angels, kelpies, ghosts, vampires, doppelgangers, witches, fairies, nightmares under the one head of ghost—it upsets the reappearing of the of the departed. It matters very little whether we believe in ghost, or not, provided that we are ghosts—that within this body, which so many people are ready to consider their own very selves, their lies a ghostly embryo, at least, which has an inner side to it God only can see, which says I concerning itself, and which will soon have to know whether or not it can appear to those whom it has left behind, and thus solve the question of ghosts for itself, at least. Is telling a person about a ghost, affording one the source of one’s conviction? It is the same as a ghost appearing to one? Not at all. The impression may be deeper and clearer on your mind than any fact of the next morning will make. Not everyone can feel it, but the person who does is convinced. It cannot be conveyed. It is something you have to experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

In the year 1825 Oliver Fisher Winchester fell in love. This was before he met and married his wife Jane Ellen Hope. Here are notes from his journal: Well, I was walking along Chapel Street, and feeling a little bewildered in consequence—for it was quite the dusk of the evening. There was a haze in the air, when, from the crossing that cuts off the corner in the direction of Crown Street, just as I was about to turn towards it, a lady stepped upon the kerbstone of the pavement, looked at me for a moment, and passed—an occurrence not very remarkable, certainly. However, the lady was remarkable and so was her dress. I am not good at observing, and I am still worse at describing dress, therefore I can only say that hers reminded me of an old picture—that is, I had never seen anything like it, except in old pictures. She had no bonne, and looked as if she had walked straight out of an ancient drawing-room in her evening attire. The next instant I met a man on the crossing, who stopped and addressed me. So betwixt was I that, although I recognized his voice as one I ought to know, I could not identify him until he got closer, which I did instinctively in the act of returning his greeting. At the same time, I glanced over my shoulder after the lady. She was nowhere to be seen. “What are you looking at?” asked Gary James. “I was looking after that lady,” I answered, “but I cannot see her.” “What lady?” said James, with just a touch of impatience. “You must have seen her,” I retuned. “You were not more than three yards behind her.” “Where is she then?” “She must have gone down one of the areas, I think. However, she looked a lady, though an old-fashioned one.” “Have you been dining?” asked James, in a tone of doubtful enquiry. “No,” I replied, not suspecting the insinuation; “I have only just come from the Museum.” “Then I advise you to call on your medical man before you go home.” “Medical man!” returned; “I have no medical man. What do you mean? I never was better in my life.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

“I mean that there was no lady. It was an illusion, and that indicates something wrong. Besides, you did not know me when I spoke to you. “That is nothing,” I returned. “I had just taken a moment to recall your name.” “How was it you saw the lady, then?” The affair was growing serious under by friend’s interrogation. I did not a all like the idea of his supposing me subject to hallucinations. So I answered, with a laugh, “Ah! to be sure, that explains it. I was just confused.” It was a drizzly afternoon in the beginning of the last week of October when I left the two of New Haven. I hard hardly left the town, and the twilight had only in a post-chaise to ride to East Haven, the property of my friend’s father. I had hardly left the town and the twilight had only begun to deepen, when, glancing from one of the windows of the chaise, I fancied I saw, between me and the hedge, the dim figure of a horse keeping pace with us. I thought, in the first interval of unreason, that it was a shadow from my own horse, but reminded myself the next moment that there could be no shadow where there was no light. When I looked again, I was at the first glance convinced that my eyes had deceived me. At the second, I believed once more that a shadowy something, with the movements of a horse in harness, was keeping pace with us. I turned away again with some discomfort, and not till we had reached an open moorland road, whence a little watery light was visible on the horizon, could I summon up courage enough to look out once more. Certainly then there was nothing o be seen, and I persuaded myself that it had been all a fancy. As we turned into the avenue that led up to East Haven, I found myself once more glancing nervously out the window. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

 The moment the trees were about me, there was, if not a shadowy horse out there by the side of the chaise, yet certainly more than half that conviction in here in my consciousness. When I saw my friend, however, standing on the doorstep, dark against the glow of the hall fire, I forgot all about it; and I need not add that I did not make it a subject of conversation when I entered, for I was well aware that it was essential to a man’s reputation that his senses should be accurate, though his heart might without prejudice swarm with shadows, and his judgment be a very stable of hobbies. I was kindly received. Mrs. James had been dead for some years, and Florence Ida, the eldest of the family, was at the head of the household. She had two sisters, little more than girls. The father was a burly, yet gentlemanlike Yorkshire squire, who ate well, drank well, looked radiant, and hunted twice a week. In this pastime his son joined him when in the humour, which happened scarcely so often. I, who had never crossed a horse in my life, took his apology for not being able to mount me very coolly, assuring him that I could rather loiter about with a book than be in at the death of the best-hunted werewolf or Hellhound in East Haven. I very soon found myself a home with the James’s; and very soon again I began to find myself no so much at home; for Miss James—Florence Ida as I soon ventured to call her—was fascinating. There was an empty place in my heart. Florence’s figure was graceful, and her face was beautiful. Order was a very idol with her. Hence the house was too tidy for any sense of comfort. If you left a book on the table, you would, on retuning to the room a moment after, find it put aside. What the furniture of the drawing-room was like, I never saw; for not even on Christmas Day, which was the last day I spent there, was in uncovered. Everything in it was kept in bibs and pinafores. Even the carpet was covered with a slippery sheet of brown holland. Mr. James never entered that room, and therein was wise. Gary remonstrated once. She answered him quite kindly even playfully, but no change followed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

What was worse, she made very wretched tea. Her father never took tea; neither did Gary. I was rather fond of it, but I soon gave it up. Everything her father partook of was first-rate. Everything else was somewhat poverty-stricken. My pleasure in Florence’s society prevented me from making practical deductions from such trifles. The first day of November was a very lovely day, quite one. I was sitting in a little arbour I had just discovered, with a book in my hand—not reading, however, but day-dreaming—when, lifting my eyes from the ground, I was startled to see, through a thin shrub in from of the arbour what seemed the form of an old lady seated, apparently reading from a book on her knee. The sight instantly recalled the lady from Chapel Street. I started to my feet, and then, clear of the intervening bush, saw only a great stone such as abounded on the moors in the neighbourhood, with a lump of quartz set on top of it. Some childish taste had put it there for ornament. Smiling at my own folly, I say down again, and reopened my book. After reading for a while, I glanced up again, and once more started to my feet, overcome by the fancy that there verily sat the lady reading. You will say it indicated an excited condition of the brain. Possibly; but I was, as far as I can recall, quite collected and reasonable. I was almost vexed this second time, and sat down once more to my book. Still, every time I looked up, I was startled afresh. I doubt, however, if the trifle is worth mentioning, or had any significance even in relation to what followed. I wondered if Florence practiced witchcraft. There were others who may or may not have practiced it—the evidence is insufficient—but who had clearly used their reputation for occult power to gain illegitimate personal ends. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Gary said that Florence had been dabbling in the occult for years; about five years ago he said she had borrowed a book on palmistry, containing rules on how to know the future. However, he told her it was an evil book and evil art. His charity was wasted, however, since Florence continued telling people’s futures, somethings through reading their faces as well as through reading their palms. Fortunetelling is often only white magic. However, it easily becomes black magic when it concerns itself with the time or manner of the subject’s death. After dinner I strolled out by myself, leaving father and son over their claret. I did not drink wine; and from the lawn I could see the windows of the library, whither Florence commonly retired from the dinner-table. It was a very lovely soft night. There was no moon, but the stars looked wider awake than usual. Dew was falling, but the grass was not yet wet, and I wandered about on it for half and hour. The stillness was somehow strange. It had a wonderful feeling it as if something were expected—as if the quietness were the mould in which some even or other was about to be cast. Even then I was a reader of certain sorts of recondite lore. Suddenly I remembered that this was the eve of All Souls. This is the night on which all the faithful departed, those baptized Christians who are believed to be in purgatory because they died with the guilt of less sin on their souls, came out of their graves to visit their old homes. “Poor dead!” I thought with myself; “have you any place to call a home now? If you have, surely you will not wander back here, where all you have called home has either vanished or given itself to others, to be their home now and yours no more! What an awful doom the old fancy has allotted you! To dwell in your graves all he year, and creep out, this one night, to enter at the midnight door, left open for welcome! A poor welcome truly!—just an open door, a clean-swept floor, and a fire to warm your rain-sodden limbs! The household asleep, and the houseplace swarming with the ghost of ancient times—the miser, the spendthrift, the profligate, the coquette—for the good ghosts sleep, and are troubled with no walking like yours! Not one man, sleepless like yourself, to question you.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

“Yet who can tell?” I went on to myself. “It may be your hell to return thus. It may be that only on this one night of the year you can show yourself to one who can see you, but that the place were wicked is the Hades to which you are doomed for ages.” I thought and thought till I began to feel the air alive about me, and was enveloped in the vapours that dim the eyes of those who strain them for one peep through the dull mica windows that will not open on the World of ghosts. At length I cast my fancies away, and feld from them to the library in hopes that no one would raise the Devil to kill or bewitch me. There were many books of fortune-telling and grimoires, of course, full of diagrams. The bodily presence of Florence made the World of ghosts appear shadowy indeed. “What a reality there is about a bodily presence.” I said to myself, as I took y chamber-candle in my hand. “But what is there more real in a body?” I said again, as I crossed the hall. “Surely nothing,” I went on, as I ascended the broad staircase to my room. “The body must vanish. If there be a spirit, that will remain. A body can but vanish. A ghost can appear.” I woke in the morning with a sense of such discomfort as made me spring out of bed at once. When I looked at my watch after I was dressed, I found I had risen an hour earlier than usual. I groped my way downstairs to spend the hour before breakfast in the library. No sooner was I seated with the book than I heard the voice of Florence scolding the butler, in no very gentle tones, for leaving the garden door open all night. The moment I heard this, the strange occurrences I am about to relate began to dawn upon my memory. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

The door had been open the night long between All Saints and All Souls. In the middle of the night I awoke suddenly. I knew it was not the morning by the sensations I had, for the night feels altogether different from the morning. It was quite dark. My heart was beating violently, and I either hardly could or hardly dared breathe. A nameless terror was upon me, and my sense of hearing was, apparently by the force of its expectation, unnaturally roused and keen. There it was—a slight noise in the room!—slight, but clear, and with an unknown significance about it! It was awful to think it would come again. I do believe it was only one of those creaks in the timers which announced the torpid, age-long, skin flow of every house back to the dust—a motion to which the flow of the glacier is as a torrent, but which is no less inevitable and sure. Day and night it ceases not; but only in the night, when house and heart are still, do we hear it. No wonder it should sound fearful! for we are we not the immortal dwellers in ever-crumbling clay? The clay is no near us, and yet not of us, that it is every movement starts a fresh dismay. For what will its final ruin disclose? When it falls from about us, where shall we find that we have existed all the time? My skin tingled with the bursting of the moister from its pores. Something was in the room besides me. Sometimes apparitions had the reputation for torture and the torture included choking. People should teach their children to fear God, should come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil. A confused, indescribable sense of utter loneliness, and yet awful presence, was upon me, its blood did cry for vengeance against me. Nobody seemed to have noticed that the specters differed about the means by which the supposed murders were done. The Devil himself did no know so far. This presence was mingled with a dreary, hopeless desolation, as of burnt-out love and aimless life. All at once I found myself sitting up. The terror that a cold hand might be laid upon me, or a cold breath blow on me, or a corpselike face bend down through the darkness over me, had broken my bonds!—I would meet half-way whatever might be approaching. The moment that my will burst into action the terror began to ebb. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

The room in which I slept was a large one, perfectly dreary with tidiness. I did not know till afterwards that it was Florence’s room, which she had given up to me rather than prepare another. The furniture, all but one article, was modern and commonplace. I could not help remarking to myself afterwards how utterly void the room was of the nameless charm of feminine occupancy. I had seen nothing to wake a suspicion of its being a lady’s room. The article I have excepted was an ancient bureau, elaborate and ornate, which stood on one side of the large bow window. They very morning before, I had seen a bunch of keys hanging from the upper part of it, and had peeped in. Finding, however, that the pigeon-holds were full of papers, I closed it at once. I should have been glad to use it, but clearly it was not for me. At that bureau the figure of a woman was now seated in the posture of one writing. A strange dim light was around her, but whence I proceeded I never thought of enquiring. As if I, too, had stepped over the bourne, and was a ghost myself, all fear was now gone. I got out of bed, and softly crossed the room to where she was seated. “If she should be beautiful!” I thought—for I had often dreamed of a beautiful ghost that was pleased with me. The figure did not move. She was looking at the faded brown paper. “Some old love-letter,” I thought, and stepped nearer. So cool was I now, that I actually peeped over her shoulder. With mingled surprise and dismay I found that the dim page over which she was bent was that of an old account-book. Ancient household records, in rusty ink, held up to the gliosis of the waning moon, which shone through the parting in the curtains, their entries of shillings and pence!—Of pounds there was not one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

No doubt pounds and fathers are much the same in the World of thought—the true spirit-World; but in the ghost-World this eagerness over shillings and pence must mean something awful! To think that coins which had since been worn smooth in other pockets and purses, which had gone back to the Mint, and been melted down, to come out again and yet again with the heads of new kings and queens—that diners, eaten by the worms—that polish for the floors inches of whose thickness had since been worn away—that the hundred nameless trifled of a life utterly vanished, should be perplexing, annoying, and worst of all, interesting the soul of a ghost who had been in Hades for centuries! The writing was very old-fashioned, and e words were contracted. I could read nothing but the moneys and one single entry—“Corinths Vs.” Currans for a Christmas puffing, most likely! Ah–, poor lady! the pudding and not the Christmas was her care; not the delight of the children over it, but the beggarly pence which it cost. And she cannot get it out of her head, although her brain was “powdered all as thin as flour” ages ago in the mortar of Death. “Alas, poor ghost!” It needs no treasure hoard left behind, no floor stained with the blood of the murdered child, no wickedly hidden parchment of landed rights. Was this a demonic conspiracy? Witches cannot send the Devil to torment people by making a covenant with the Devil. Some people in this town had a lot of evidence against them for trafficking in the occult. In fact, if you recall, during the Salem Witch Trials, renegade members of the clergy had played a large part in the history of witchcraft in fact and in fiction. It should be recalled that Morgan le Fey, King Arthur’s sister, was supposed to have learned her evil craft in the nunnery where she was educated, that Benvenuto Cellini’s sorcerer-friend was a priest, and that a renegade priest is supposed to be necessary to the performance of Black Mass. An old account-book is enough for the hell of the house-keeping gentlewoman! She never lifted her face, or seem to know that I stood behind her. I left her, and went into the bow window, where I could see her face. I was right there. It was the same lady I had met at Chapel Street, walking in front of Gary James.  #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Her withered lips went moving as if they would have uttered words she had the breath been commissioned thither; her brow was contracted over her thin nose; and once and again her shining forefinger wen up to her temple as if she were pondering some deep problem of humanity. How long I stood gazing at her I do not know, but at last I withdraw to my bed, and left her struggling to solve that which she could never solve thus. It was the symbolic problem of her own life, and she had failed to read it. I remember nothing more. She may be sitting there still, solving at the insolvable. I should have felt no inclination, with the broad sun of the squire’s face, the keen eyes of Gary James, and the beauty of Florence before me at the breakfast table, to say a word about what I had seen, even if I had not been afraid of the doubt concerning my sanity which the story would certainly awaken. What with the memories of the night, I passed a very dreary day, dreading the return of the night, for, cool as I had been in her presence, I could not regard the possible reappearance of those ghost with equanimity. I had a belly ache. Gary James said he would take a pipe of tobacco and light it. I told him that I thought it was not lawful. [The idea that this remedy was unlawful is probably a result of the use of tobacco in it. Tobacco was an “Indian Weed” and used in Indian ceremony and medicine. The Puritans, like other seventh-century Christians, thought the Indians to be Devil worshippers and thought of their medicine men as magicians.] He said it was lawful for man or beast. However, when the night did come, I slept soundly to the morning. The next day, not being able to read with comfort, I went wandering about the place, and at length began to fit the outside and inside of the house together. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

The house was a large and rambling edifice, parts of it very old, parts comparatively modern. I first found a beautiful stained-glass window, which looked out back. It was kind of a countercharm and verged on black magic because it was supposed not only to break the witch’s spell but to injure the witch or compel her presence. Below this window, on one side, there was a door. I wondered whiter it led, but found it locked. At the moment Gary James approached from the stables. “Where does this door lead?” I asked him. “I will get the key,” he answered. “It is rather a queer old place. We used to like it when we were children.” “There is a stair, you see,” he said, as he threw the door open. “It leads up over the kitchen.” I followed him up the stair. “There is a door into your room,” he said, “but it is always locked now. And here is Grannie’s room, as they call it, though why, I have not the least idea,” he added, as he pushed open the door of an old-fashioned parlour, smelling very musty. A few old books lay on a side table. A china bowl stood besides them, with some shrivelled, scented rose-leaves in the bottom of it. The cloth that covered the table was riddled by moths, and the spider-legged chairs were covered with dust. A conviction seized me that the old bureau must have belonged to this room, and I soon found the place where I judged it must have stood. However, the same moment I caught sight of a portrait on the wall above the spot I had fixed upon. “Good Lord!” I caried, involuntarily, “that is the very lady I met at Chapel Street!” “Nonsense!” said Gary James. “Old-fashioned ladies are like babies—they all look the same. That is a very old portrait.” “So I see,” I answered. “It is like a Zucchero.” “I don’t know whose it is,” he answered hurriedly, and I thought he looked a little queer.” #RandolphHarris 17  of 21

“Is she one of the family?” I asked. “They say so; but who or what she is, I don’t know. You must ask Jean,” he answered. “The more I looked at it,” I said, “the more I am convinced it is the same lady.” “Well,” he returned with a laugh, “my old nurse used to say she was rather restless. But it’s all nonsense.” “That bureau in my room looks about the same date as this furniture.” I remarked. “It used to stand just there,” he answered, pointing to the space under the picture. “Well, I remember with what awe we used to regard it; for they said the old lady kept her accounts at it still. We never dared touch the bundles of yellow papers in the pigeon-holes. I remember thinking Jean a very heroine once when she touched one of them with the tip of her forefinger. She had got yet more courageous by the time she had it moved into her own room.” “hen that is your sister’s room I am occupying?” I said. “Yes.” “I am ashamed of keeping her out of it.” “Oh! she’’ do well enough.” “If I were she though,” I added, “I would send that bureau back to its own place.” “What do you mean, Oliver? Do you believe ever old wife’s tale that ever was told?” “She may get a fright some day—that’s all! I replied. He smiled with such an evident mixture of pity and contempt that for the moment I almost disliked him; and feeling certain that Florence would receive any such hint in a somewhat similar manner, I did not feel inclined to offer her any advice with regard to the bureau. Little occurred during the rest of my visit worthy of remark. Somehow or other I did not make much progress with Florence. I believe I had begun to see into her character a little more, and therefore did not get deeper in love as the days went on. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

I know I became less absorbed in her society, although I was still anxious to make myself agreeable to her—or perhaps, more properly, to give her a favourable impression of me. I do not know whether she perceived any difference in my behaviour, but I remember that I began again to remark the pinched look of her nose, and to be a little annoyed with her for always putting aside my book. At the same time, I daresay I was provoking, for I never was given to tidiness myself. At length Christmas Day arrived. After breakfast, the squire Mr. James, and the two girls arranged to talk to church. Florence was not in the room at the moment. I excused myself on the ground of a headache, for I had had a bad night. When they left, I went up to my room, threw myself on the bed, and was soon fast asleep. How long I slept I do not know, but I work again with that indescribable yet well-known sense of not being alone. The feeling was scarcely less terrible in the daylight than it had been in the darkness. With the same sudden effort as before, I sat up in the bed. There was the figure at the open bureau, in precisely the same position as on the former occasion. However, I could not see it so distinctly. I rose as gently as I could, and approached it, after the first physical terror. I am not a coward. Just as I got near enough to see the account book open on the folding cover of the bureau, she started up, and, turning, revealed the face of Florence. She blushed crimson. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Winchester,” she said, in great confusion; “I thought you had gone to church with the rest.” “I had lain down with a headache, and gone to sleep,” I replied. “But forgive me, Miss James,” I added, for my mind was full of the dreadful coincidence, “don’t you think you have been better at church than balancing your accounts on Christmas Day?” “The better day the better deed,” she said, with a somewhat offended air, and turned to walk from the room. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

“Excuse me, Florence,” I resumed, very seriously, “but I want to tell you something.” She looked conscious. It never crossed me, that perhaps she fancied I was going to make a confession. Far other things were then in my mind. For I thought how awful it was, if she too, like the ancestral ghost, should have to do an age-long penance of haunting that bureau and those horrid figures, and I had suddenly resolved to tell her the whole story. She listened with varying complexion and face half turned aside. When I had ended, which I fear I did with something of a personal appeal, she lifted her head and looked me in the face, with just a slight curl on her thin lip, and answered me. “If I had wanted a sermon, Mr. Winchester, I should have gone to church for it. As for the ghost, I am sorry for you.” So saying she walked out of the room. The rest of the day I did not find very merry I pleaded my headache as an excuse for going to be early. How I hated the room now! Next morning, immediately after breakfast, I took my leave of East Haven. If I lost a wife at all, it was a stingy one. I should have been ashamed of her all my life long. However, extravagant runs the rich, and the stingy robs the poor. I have kept up my friendship with her brother. All he knows about the matter is, that either we had a quarrel, or she refused me—he is not sure which. I must say for Florence, that she was no tattler. Well, here is a letter I had from Gary James this very morning, I will read I to you. My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all nigh long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Some people thought the ghost had come to tell that she had hidden away money in some secret place in the old bureau, one would see why she was permitted to come back. And of course, those wretched accounts were not over and done with, you see. That is the misery of it. Good night. Then I walked out into the wind. We who have lost our sense and our senses—our touch, our small, our vision of who we are; we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our Earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt. We want to rest. We need to rest and allow the Earth to rest. We need to reflect and to rediscover the mystery that lives in us, that is the ground of every unique expression of life, the source of the fascination that calls all things to communion. We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet; for simply being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. Please Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and grant our portion in Thy Torah. Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctified Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who halowest the Sabbath. O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people America and accept their prayer. Please restore America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and please receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Winchester Mystery House

Things are looking up for a tour through the Winchester Mystery House. Will you be visiting us today? he Explore More Tour is officially open! Tour areas of the iconic mansion that had never been accessible to the public before. This is a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
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