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A Thousand things May Happen to Bring Your Marriage to Mr. Winchester to an End!
Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven. He went wining through the darkness of the cosmos. He flew fast and hard, not stopping to fool around with the stars and planets scattered in his path like grains of diamond dust. He passed the Milk Way without even going in for a dip, passing it up for the sake of his mission. Satan had come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil, but he will bewitch many people to death, and their faces will turn towards God as their blood cries for vengeance against him, begging to be clothed in white robes in Heaven when Satan is cast into Hell. The time of the old cults is returning. There are people who can repeat conversation to others and make them believe that they know it not from eavesdropping but from occult powers. Reverend George Burroughs, who had been minister of Salem Village from 1680 to 1682 bewitched many people to death, including his own first two wives. The fist he smothered and the second he strangled, and nobody seemed to notice that their specters differed about the means by which the supposed murders were done. Reverend Burroughs often would tell people, “My God makes known your thoughts unto me,” both he and his hearers understood his god to be the Devil; the Christian God does not deal in the occult, particularly at the level of family gossip, but the Devil does. When people are in the clutch of malignant demons, they are bound to die. Dr. Harold M. Johnson, a Hawaiian physician, reported both severe skin lesion and death among victims of Kahuna sorcerers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
However, he had succeeded in curing bewitched patients by giving them methylene blue tablets, which turned their urine blue and persuades them that a powerful countercharm has been worked on their behalf. Witchcraft deaths have been reported for a very long time, yet it is only recently that they have received serious medical attention. Most of the physical effects of witchcraft are attributable to hysteria, but not death. However, people do not die from hysteria, but death. Like the hysterical symptoms of bewitchment, begins with the victim’s fear of the witch’s power. Dr. Walter B. Cannon of Harvard Medical School published an article entitled “Voodoo Death,” in which he began by acknowledging that “the phenomenon is so extraordinary and so foreign to the experience of civilized people that it seems incredible.” In all cases, death comes inexorably and in a relatively short time. As one observer put it, “the victims die…as though their strength ran out as water.” The only know cure was a countercharm, and when this was successfully employed, recovery was so rapid and complete that Western observers found it remarkable. Dr. Cannon suggested that witchcraft death might well be a genuine phenomenon, and also put forward a hypothetical explanation. “It may be explained,” he thought, “as due to shocking emotional stress—to obvious or repressed terror.” It would occur, he felt, chiefly in primitive cultures, “among human beings to primitive, so superstitious, so ignorant that they are bewildered strangers in a hostile World. Instead of knowledge they have a fertile and unrestricted imagination which fills their environment with all manner of evil spirits capable of affecting their lives disastrously.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
It was believed that these humans may be dying of psychogenic deaths as were the victims of witchcraft. However, Dr. Cannon had suggested that fear might be the emotional cause, with consequent overstimulation of the sympathicoadrenal system, accelerated of the heartbeat, and death with the heart contracted in in systole. However, Dr. Curt P. Richter found that while acceleration of the heartbeat was the initial reaction, it was shortly followed by a steady, gradual decrease in rate, with the heart eventually stopping in diastole, like a run-down clock. This meant that the emotional cause of death was not fear but hopelessness, produced by one’s conviction that there was no possible means of escape, with consequent overstimulation of the parasympathetic rather than the sympathic-coadrenal system. However, when people are removed from fearful situation in hasty fashion, they know their situation is not hopeless. So, they will not die psychogenic deaths. If individuals about to die a psychogenic death were removed from the situation they recovered rapidly, like human victims who have been reprieved by a countercharm. In short, Dr. Richter found that the first response in such cases was fear but that the emotional cause of death was hopelessness that succeeded fear, and that death could be prevented either by restoring hope or by training the subject to be hopeful in a particular situation. Therefore, prayer may very well save countless lives by removing fear and giving people who. This is probably also why stress has been noted to kill people and cause disease, it stresses the body and causes it to attack itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Stress and fear may prolong and make medical conditions worse and could very well facilitate in killing a person if it is ongoing and not resolved, and a person cannot find help. Dr. R. S. Fisher, corner of the City of Baltimore, who had found that “a number of individuals die each year after taking small, definitely sublethal doses of poison, or after inflicting small, nonlethal wounds on themselves; apparently they die as a result of the belief in their doom.” Dr. Richter’s findings throw much new light on the history of Massachusetts witchcraft. They should enable us at long last to take as seriously as it deserves Cotton Mather’s detailed account of his treatment of the Goodwin girl. When he gave her religious sustenance by spelling the crucial words she was unable to hear spoken, he may have been saving his patient from much more than convulsive fits. By giving her continued hope he may literally have been keeping her alive. Dr. Richter’s findings also explain the frequent reports of death in both European and American witchcraft cases. There are about a dozen such reports in the documents of Salem witchcraft, but in most instances one cannot be at all certain of the actual cause of death. Even when death does appear to be psychogenic it is usually impossible to say whether the victim’s hopelessness was simply a result of private fears or whether those fears had their origin in a specific magical act. And if the testimony concerning Roger Toothaker and his daughter may be taken at face value—and there is reason to believe it may—we have one case of murder by witchcraft—one case in which occult means were used to take a human life away. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Some people have become blasé to strange manifestations. When you consort with the occult, out-of-body experiences are like your daily bread and butter. We have special preparation for those who want their loved one’s memories restored. However, many do not use it, because they often find their beloved more charming without memories, and therefore without a clue as to what to scold about, at least for a while. Though Mrs. Sarah Winchester had a comfortable home, a home of a god as vast and resounding as the sea, and loving hearts around her, she wore a grave, melancholy look on her face. A disappointment! Yes, the old story of a lost love and new born baby is the reason for Mrs. Winchester’s looks. She had good offers often; but since she lost the love of her heart, she had never indulged in the happy dream of loving and being loved. The grave look, which was habitual with her, was a rare thing in her young and happy days, and passed over her face sometimes when she thought no one was looking. Before his death, Mr. Winchester had been persuaded to sit for his portrait. It was a fair likeness, but a very modern work of art. The background was so very dark, and Mr. Winchester’s naval costume was so deep in colour, that the face came out too white and staring. It was a three-quarter picture; but only one hand showed in it, gripping indisputably one of the most spectacular and historic of all Winchesters, number 14327. As George said, he looked much more like the commander of a Venetian galley than a modern mate. However, the picture pleased Mrs. Winchester. So the picture was duly framed—in a tremendously heavy frame, of Mr. Winchester’s ordering—and hung up in the dining-room. Mr. Winchester’s Father, Oliver, was a gunmaker, politician, clothing maker, and sailor by profession. He sailed the great and mysterious sea, and had been especially known as a good Arctic sailor, having share more than one expedition in search of the North Pole and the North-West Passage. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
It was no surprise when William Winchester wanted to go out for a voyage in search of his cousin Robert and his missing expedition. And now the time for William’s departure was growing nearer. The USS Jeannette was nearly ready to sail, and her crew only waited orders. The officers grew acquainted with each other before sailing, which was an advantage. Mr. Winchester took up very warmly with the commander, George W. De Long, and, with permission, brough him to dinner once or twice. Poor chap, he had no friends nearer than New York, and it is precious lonely work. So George came to dinner at the Winchester Estate in New Haven, Connecticut. However, Mrs. Winchester was not favourably impressed by him, and almost wished she had no consented to his invite. He was a tall, pale, fair young man, with a hard New York face and a cold, grey eye. There was something in his expression, too, that was unpleasant—something cruel or crafty, or both. It was in very bad taste for him to pay such marked attention to Mrs. Winchester, coming, as he did, as a friend of her husband. George kept by her constantly and anticipated Mr. Winchester in all the little attentions which a husband delights to pay. Mr. Winchester was a little put out about it, though he said nothing, attributing his friend’s offence to lack of breeding. Mrs. Winchester did not like it at all. She knew that she was not to have Mr. Winchester with her much longer, and she was anxious to have him to herself as much as possible. But as George was her husband’s friend, she bore the infliction with the best possible patience. The commander did not seem to perceive in the least that he was interfering where he had no business. He was quite self-possessed and happy, with one exception. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
The portrait of Mr. Winchester seemed to annoy George. He had uttered a little impatient exclamation when he first saw it which drew Mrs. Winchester’s attention to hi; and she noticed that he tried to avoid looking at it. At last, when dinner came, he was told to sit exactly facing the picture. He hesitated for an instant and then sat down, but almost immediately rose again. “It’s very childish and that sort of thing,” he stammered, “but I cannot sit opposite that picture. I know nothing about art, but it is one of those unpleasant pictures whose eyes follow you about the room. I have inherited horror of such pictures. My mother married against her father’s will, and when I was born she was so ill she was hardly expected to live. When she was sufficiently recovered to speak without delirious rambling she implored them to remove a picture of my grandfather that hung in the room, and which she vowed made threatening faces at her. It’s superstitious, but constitutional—I have a horror of such paintings!” I believe Mr. Winchester thought this a ruse of his friend’s to get a seat next to Mrs. Winchester; but it sure was not, for that was a real alarmed expression of his face. Before the ship departed, George has started visiting the Winchester’s more and more each day. He even went as far as to tell Mrs. Winchester that he loved her. He told her that a man could no more help falling in love than he could help taking a fever. Mrs. Winchester stood upon her dignity and rebuked him as if he was Satan; but he told her he could see no harm in telling her of his passion, though he knew it was a hopeless one. “A thousand things may happen,” he said at last, “to bring your marriage to Mr. Winchester to an end. Then perhaps you will not forget that another love you!” The butler was very angry, and was forthwith going to give him his opinion on his conduct, when Mrs. Winchester told him he was gone, that she had bade him go and had forbidden him the house. She had only told the butler in order to protect herself, for she did not intend to say anything to Mr. Winchester, for fear it should lead to a duel or some other violence. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
That was the last Mrs. Winchester saw of George De Long before the Jeannette expedition. Mr. Winchester came the same evening, and was home until daybreak, when he had to tear himself away and join his ship. After shaking hugging Mrs. Winchester at the door, in the cold, grey, drizzly dawn, Mrs. Winchester went inside and started sobbing on the sofa. She could not help starting when she looked at Mr. Winchester’s portrait. The strange light of daybreak could hardly account for the extraordinary pallor of the face. The picture was covered with moisture, and he looked so pale. The Jeannette sailed. Mrs. Winchester received two letters from Mr. Winchester, which he had taken the opportunity of sending by homeward-bound whalers. In the second he said it was hardly likely he should have an opportunity of sending another, as they were sailing into high latitudes—into the solitary sea, to which none but expedition ships ever penetrated. They were all in high spirits, he said, for they had encountered very little ice and hoped to find clear water further north than usual. Moreover, he added, George had held a sinecure so far, for there had not been a single case of illness on board. Then came a long silence, and a year crept away very slowly for poor Mrs. Winchester. Once she heard of the expedition from the papers. They were reported as pushing on and progressing favourably by a wandering tribe of Esquimaux with whom the captain of a Russian vessel fell in. They had laid the ship up for the winter, and were taking the boats on sledges, and believed they had met with traces of the lost crews that seemed to show they were on the right track. The winter passed again, and spring came. It was a balmy, bright spring such as they got occasionally, even in the changeable and uncertain climate of theirs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
One evening Mrs. Winchester was sitting in the dining-room with the window open, for, although she had long given up fires, the room was so oppressively warm that she was glad of the breath of the cool evening breeze. Mrs. Winchester was working. Though she never murmured, she was evidently pining at Mr. Winchester’s long absence. The butler was leaning out of the window, studying the evening effect on the fruit blossom, which was wonderfully early and plentiful, the season was so mild. Mrs. Winchester was sitting at the table, near the lamp, reading the paper. Suddenly there swept into the room a chill. It was not a gust of cold wind, for the curtain by the window did not swerve in the least. However, the deathly cold pervaded the room—came, and was gone in an instant. Mrs. Winchester shuddered with an intense icy feeling. She looked up, “How curiously cold it has got all in a minute,” she said. “We are having a taste of poor William’s Polar weather,” she said with a smile. At that moment, she instinctively glanced towards his portrait. When she saw struck her dumb. A rush of blood, at fever heart, dispelled the numbing influence of the chill breath that she seemed to freeze her. The lamp was lighted; but it was only that she might read with comfort, for the violet twilight was still so full of sunset that the room was not dark. However, as she looked at the picture, she saw it had undergone a strange change. She saw it as plainly as possible. It was no delusion, coined for the eye by the brain. In the place of Mr. Winchester’s head, a grinning skull! She started at it hard; but it was no tick of fancy. She could see the hollow orbits, the gleaming teeth, the fleshless cheekbones—it was the head of death! Without saying a word, she rose from her chair and walked straight up to the painting. As she drew nearer a sort of mist seemed to pass before it; and as she stood close to it, she saw only the face of Mr. Winchester. The spectral skull had vanished. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
“Poor William!” she said unconsciously. The butler Robert looked up. The tone of her voice had alarmed him, the expression on her face did not reassure him. “What do you mean? Have you heard anything, Mrs. Winchester? She came over to him, laying her hands on his arm, and looked into his face sadly. “No, my dear; how should I hear? Only I could not help thinking of the privation and discomfort he must have gone through. I was remaindered of it by the cold. “Cold!” said Robert, who had left the window by this time. “Cold! what on Earth are you talking about? Cold, such an evening as this! You must have had a touch of ague, I should think.” Mrs. Winchester felt it bitterly cold for a minute or two. “Did you not feel it, Robert?” “Not for a bit; and I was three parts out of the window I ought to have felt it if anyone did.” It was curious, but that strange chill ad been felt only in the room. It was not the night wind, but some supernatural breath connected with the dread apparition she has seen. It was, indeed, the chill of polar winter—the icy shadow of the frozen North. It was a hot evening and Mrs. Winchester seemed to have caught a violent cold, for she was shivering very much. Mrs. Winchester, felling unwell, had gone to bed. The next day Mrs. Winchester was well again, and did not mentioned the events of the preceding night. However, from that day on she was ever inwardly dreading the arrival of bad news. And at last, it came as expected. The newspaper said there had been a “Fatal Accident to one of the Officers of the USS Jeannette.” It stated that news had been received at Admiralty stating that the expedition had failed to find the missing crew, but had come upon some traces of them. Want of stores and necessaries had compelled them to turn back without following those traces up; but the commander was anxious, as soon as the ship could be refitted, to go out and take up the trail where he left it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
An unfortunate accident had deprived him of one of his most promising officers, Lieutenant Winchester, who was precipitated from an iceberg and killed while out shooting with the commander. He was beloved by all, and his death had flung a gloom over the gallant little troop of explorers. There stood Mrs. Winchester, with her face as pale as death, with her lips apart, and with a blind look about her eyes. The doctor was sent for, and restorative were promptly administered. Mrs. Winchester came to herself again, but lay dangerously ill for some weeks from the shock. It was about a month after she was well enough to come downstairs again. One afternoon shortly after, there came a loud knock at the front door. As Mrs. Winchester looked up at Mr. Winchester’s portrait, puzzling who could it be at the door, she would not figure out if she was dreaming or awake? One hand on the picture used to be resting on a shotgun, but now the forefinger was raised, as if in warning. She looked hard at the picture, to assure herself it was no fancy, and then she perceived, standing out bright and distinct on the pale face, two large drops, as if of blood. She walked up to it, expecting the appearance to vanish, as the skull had done. It did not vanish. It was surely blood. When the butler opened the door, George came in. He was greatly altered. He was thinner and paler than ever; hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked. He had acquired a strange stoop, too, and his eyes had lost the crafty look for a look of terror, like that of a haunted beast. He kept glancing sideways every instant, as if unconsciously. It looked as if he heard someone behind him. Mrs. Winchester never had liked that man. She told him of course she was glad to see him back, but that she could not ask him to continue to visit her. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Mrs. Winchester was glad to hear the particulars of poor William’s death. He related with reluctance, how they had gone out to shoot a white bear which they had seen on an iceberg stranded along the shore. The top of the berg was ridged like the roof of a house, sloping down on one side to the edge of a tremendous overhanging precipice. They had scrambled along the ridge in order to get nearer the game when Mr. Winchester incautiously ventured on the sloping side. The surface was as smooth and slippery as glass with oil on it. He tried to turn back, but slipped and fell. And then began a horrible scene. But his fate was sealed; and he could only tell George to bring his last farewell to his wife! He clung to the edge of the precipice instinctively for one second, and was gone. However, there was something always at George’s side, which none could see, but which cast a shadow. As they were talking, Mr. Winchesters portrait had fallen, and the corner of the heavy frame had struck him on the head, cutting it open, and rendering him insensible. The staff had carried him upstairs, by the direction of the doctor. He was laid down in the guest room. George was delirious. The doctor said it was a queer case; for, though the blow was a sever one, it was hardly enough to account for the symptoms of brain-fever. When he learnt that George had just retuned in the Jeannette from the North, he said it was possible that the privation and hardship had told on his constitution and sown the seeds of the malady. They sent for a nurse, who was to sit up with him, by the doctor’s directions. In the middle of the night, Mrs. Winchester was roused by a loud scream. She slipped on her slippers and bed coat, and rushed out to find the nurse, who explained the mystery to her. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
It appears that about midnight, George sat up in bed, and began to talk. And he said such terrible things that the nurse became alarmed. Nor was she much reassured when she became aware that the light of her single candle flung what seemed to be two shadows of the sick man on the wall. Terrified beyond measure, she saw George siting up in bed, gazing at the unseen figure to which the shadow belonged. Mrs. Winchester was now in the nurse’s company. In a voice that trembled with emotion, George begged the haunting spirit to leave him, and prayed for its forgiveness. “You know the crime was no premeditated. It was a sudden temptation of the devil that make me shoot you twice. It was the devil tempting me with the recollection of her exquisite face—of the tender love that might have been mine, but for you. Bu she will not listen to me. See, she turned away from me, as if she knew I was your murderer, William Winchester!” Mrs. Winchester was horrified to hear this awful confession. However, George had risen in his delirious terror, opened the window, and leaped out. Two days later his body was found in the river. In 1884, Mrs. Winchester left New Haven, Connecticut, and the graves of her husband and only child, moved to San Jose, California, and began the obsession that was to las for the rest of her life. She purchased an eighteen-room farmhouse outside the small agricultural town, and for the next 38 years, the sound of construction on Mrs. Winchester’s house never stopped. Mrs. Winchester hired carpenters to work around the clock building and rebuilding room after room, as the spirits—or her mood—directed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Some say the construction had actually started much earlier and went on for centuries, in fact. It is the cobwebs that finally tip some off; and the ancient dust on the cobwebs. Stretched out in this mansion is an entity—it is impossible to tell at a glance whether it is a man or a god, or perhaps something else. The entity seems to be of the masculine persuasion, is of medium height and has medium brown hair flecked with gray. The being sometimes sits on the couch in the parlor, opens his eyes, blinks rapidly several times, then vanishes. The Winchester house was furnished with the finest materials and was a showcase of Victorian elegance and taste. The homes of the gods are bigger, more beautiful, more awe-inspiring. However, no one can say with this is so, since any god can build a house of any size and get any interior decorator one wants. Some says the real architect was William Writ Winchester, reaching out from beyond the grave and building a wedding present for his wife. It just seems to be a quality of the major gods to have an air that is godlier than the less godly air of the minor gods. The house represents the spirit of something entirely new, a new principle, a new life, a new set of values. It gave Mrs. Winchester a feeling of gratitude for the unbending nature of things, which does not demand that we obsess constantly over what is to happen next, but merely put one foot in front of the other until something numinous takes place. Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor: Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. Atte ye induynge of ye holy vestures. In the mystery of these vestures of the Holy Ones, I gird up my power in the girdles of righteousness and truth in the power of the Most High: Ancor: Amacor: Amides: Theodonias: Anitor: let be mighty power my power: let it endure for ever: in the power of Adonai, to whom the praise and the glory shall be; whose end cannot be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Winchester Mystery House
Winchester Mystery House presents 30 Nights of All Hallows’ Eve – our all new Halloween event for Fall 2021! Tickets for All Hallows’ Eve offer multiple estate wide activities including the Lost in the House Tour – a paranormal investigation adventure and the family-friendly Jack O’ Lantern Trail. All Hallows’ Eve offers something for everyone on select nights starting September 10th.
👻 Frightening Lost in the House Tour
🎃 Family Friendly Lighted Displays on the Jack O’ Lantern Trail
🍿 Fall themed food & drinks
🏠 Lost in the House Projection Show using the front of the mansion as a canvas!
and more! https://www.instagram.com/p/CR6y_fFN78M/
For more information and for tickets:
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
If Speak You Must, then Let Loose Your Own Wretched Spiritual Condition!
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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When Once that Peace, Christ’s Peace, is Got into the Heart, Storms Cannot Hurt as Much!
Be vigilant and diligent in the service of God. Ask yourself frequently, Why did I leave the World behind and come to the monastery? To live for God, that is why. Next step? To pray to God. So hit the road in hot pursuit of spiritual progress. It will not take long before you see the reward of your labours. The fear and pain that has held you in its grip for so long will begin to ease up. All of which means, labour for a bit now, and you will find great rest, even perpetual joy, in the end. Remain faithful and fervent along the way, and without a doubt God will be faithful and generous to you when the time comes. That is how Jesus son of Sirach put it in his book of Wisdom (51.30). Do not ever doubt that you will reach the palm of victory; but do not think you can take Confidence a prisoner along the way; that would be a tactical blunder; you would be tempted to think you could sail around the World without a sail. When someone is nervous, one is fearful one day, hopeful the next. In a moment of great spiritual pain, or so the story goes, one such Devout fled to a church, where he flopped in front of an altar. “If only I could have known then what I know now,” he prayed, “I would have saved myself a lot of grief!” He knew his prayer would be answered, but he did not know when. “If you did know, what would you do?” came the Divine Response immediately. “That is what you should do now. Once you start down this pathway, you will begin to feel better about the long-term future.” Consoled and comforted, he committed himself to the Divine Will and rose from the cold stone floor. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As the day passed, his nervousness did indeed begin to disappear. However, more than that had changed. He no longer was trying to satisfy his curiosity about the future. Rather, as Paul urged the Romans (12.1), he spent his time trying to figure out how to turn the present to his spiritual advantage. “Hope in the Lord, and do good things,” sang the Psalmist: “plough the fields, and they will feed you wealthily,” (37.3). what makes us shrink from spiritual progress and fervent change? One thing only. The horrific difficulty of keeping the pressure on. Which is another way of saying that, over time, the good person can be subject to battle fatigue. Even if you may not believe it, every word in this story is true. It was autumn, and we were at the Winchester Estate. Chadwick Kempis had been employed by Mrs. Winchester as a sort of overlooker on the estate. He had died the previous winter; leaving nothing behind him except some debts; for he was not provident; and his handsome son Ken. Ken Kempis, who was rather superior as far as education went, disliked work: he would make a show of helping his father, but it came to little. Chadwick had not put him to any particular trade or occupation, and Ken, who was as proud as Lucifer, would not turn to it himself. He liked to be a gentleman. All he did now was to work the Victorian garden, and feed the fowls, ducks, rabbit, and pigeons, of which he kept a great quantity, selling them to the houses around and sending them to the market. However, as every one said, poultry would not maintain him. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Ken was engaged to be married to a lady named Bianca Toffler. Ken was scoring a big success with Bianca’s mother Cordelia Toffler. She regarded him as a stable and steady person, someone with whom it is really a pleasure to associate, not like some of the stylish young dandies. However, as every one said, poultry would not maintain him. People began to whisper a query as to how Ken got his corn for the poultry: he was not known to buy much: and he would have to go out his house at Christmas, for its owner, Mrs. Winchester, had given him notice. Mrs. Toffler, anxious about Bianca’s prospects, asked Ken what he intended to do then, and he answered, “Make his fortune: he should begin to do it as soon as he could turn himself round.” However, the time was going on, and the turning round seemed to be as far off as ever. After Midsummer, a nice of the schoolmistress’s, Miss Osborn, had to the school to stay: her name was Natalie Rose. The father, Chace Rose, was half-brother to Miss Osborn. He had married a Frenchwoman, and lived more in France than in England until his death. Natalie was a showy, free-mannered, good-looking girl, and made speedy acquaintance with Ken Kempis; or he with her. They improved upon it so rapidly that Bianca Toffler grew jealous, and the people of Llanda Villa began to say he cared for Natalie more than for Bianca. When got home at the latter end of October, to spend Merriam’s birthday, things were in this state. Alvin Updike, he bailiff who had been taken on by the Squire in Chadwick Kempis’s place (but a far inferior man to Kempis; not much better, in fact, than a common workman), gave Mrs. Winchester an account of matters in general. Ken Kempis had been drinking lately, Updike added, and his head was not strong enough to stand it; and he was also beginning to look as if he had some care upon him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Natalie Rose was in all probability a practicing witch. She had a long-standing reputation for witchcraft; it was rumored that she had bewitched her first boyfriend to death. In 1898, during her second relationship, she had been brought before the Court of Assistants for witchcraft. The records of that trial do not survive, but it is probable that a major factor in her release at the time was the good opinion of Father Jose de Jesus Vallejo. But Father Vallejo changed his mind by 1900, and accused her of witchcraft; two women testified that “the Devil did come bodily unto her, and the she was familiar with the Devil, and that she sat up all the night long with the Devil.” Natalie was well aware of her reputation. But there was much more against Natalie Rose than her reputation and her malice. Two men testified that being employed by Mrs. Winchester to help take down the cellar wall of the estate, they found hoes in the old wall belonging to he said cellar, found several puppets made of rags and hogs’ bristles with headless pint to then with points outward and Natalie’s diary. The doll with pins in it is the classic charm of black magic, and burying it in a wall is still a technique of witches; such charms have been found in the walls of rural English cottages in the twenty-first century. To be sure, the evidence was circumstantial—nobody had seen Natalie Rose stick the pins in the dolls of bury them in the walls. “A nice lot, he, for them two women to be fighting for,” cried Mrs. Winchester, who was no friend of Ken. “There will be mischief between ‘em if they don’t draw in a bit. It’s something like the Bible story of Leah and Rachel, young gents, Ken Kempis likes the one, and he’s bound by promise too the t’other. As to the French jade,” concluded Mrs. Winchester. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
It was all very well for surely Mrs. Winchester to call Ken Kempis a “nice lot,” but he was the best-looking fellow in church on Sunday morning—well-dressed too. However, his colour seemed brighter; and his hands shook as they were raised, often, to push back his hair, that the sun shone upon through the south-window, turning it to gold. He scarcely looked up, not even at Natalie Rose, with her hazel eyes roving everywhere, and her streaming pink ribbons. Cordelia Toffler was pale, quiet, and nice, as usual; she had no beauty, but her face was sensible, and her deep grey eyes had a strange and curious earnestness. The new parson preached, a young man just appointed to the Mission San Jose. He went in for great observances of Saints’ says, and told his congregation that he should expect to see them at church on the morrow, which would be the Feast of All Saints. Ken Kempis walked home with Mrs. Toffler and Bianca after service and was invited to dinner. Natalie Rose passed, her pink ribbons and her modest gay silk dress gleaming in the sunlight. She stared at Ken, and he stared back again. And now, the explanation of matters being over, the real story begins. The tea-things waited on Mrs. Toffler’s table in the afternoon; waited for Ken Kempis. He had left the shortly before to go and attend to his poultry. Nothing had been said about his coming back for tea: that he would do so had been looked upon as a matter of course. However, he did not make his appearance, and the tea was taken without him. A half-past five the Winchester Estate’s bell rang out for an evening séance. And Bianca put on her things. Mrs. Toffler did not go out at night. “You are starting early, Bianca. You will be at the Winchester estate before other people.” “That will not matter, mother.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
A jealous suspicion lay on Cordelia—that the secret of Ken Kempis’s absence was his having fallen in with Natalie Rose: perhaps had gone of his own accord to seek her. She walked slowly along. The gloom of dusk, and a deep dusk, had stolen over the evening, but the moon would be up later. As Bianca approached the Winchester mansion, a dark shadow came over it. When she knocked on the door, a rare thing happened. Mrs. Winchester answered the door and asked with energy, “Did you ever see a ghost?” Bianca said, “The spirit of the dead come abroad in the night. The dead are allowed to revisit the World after dark and they hover in the air, waiting to appear to any of their living relatives, who may venture out, lest they should forget to pray for the rest of their some.” “Well, I never!” cried Mrs. Winchester, staring excessively. Twelve o’ clock at night at the Winchester Mansion, most people were in bed. However, Bianca kept waiting for Ken. She wanted to have it out with him. What ill fate brought her looking for him up this late?—perhaps because she had fruitlessly searched in every other spot. At the back of the east wing, there were some steps, and an unused door. Unused partly because it was not required, the principal entrance being in front; partly because the key of it had been for a long time missing. Stealing out at this door, a bag of corn upon his shoulders, had come Ken Kempis in a smock-frock. Bianca saw him, and stood back in the shade. She watched him lock the door and put the key in his pocket; she watched him give ghe heavy bag a jerk as he turned to come down the steps. Then she burst out. Her loud reproaches petrified him, and he stood there as one suddenly turned to stone. It was that moment that Mrs. Winchester reappeared. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Mrs. Winchester understood it all soon; it needed not Bianca’s words to enlighten her. Ken Kempis possessed the lost key and could come in and out at will in the midnight hours when the World was sleeping, and help himself to the corn. No wonder his poultry throve; no wonder there had been grumblings at the mansion about the mysterious disappearance of good grain. Bianca Toffler was mad in those few first moments. Stealing is looked upon in an honest valley as an awful thing; a disgrace, a crime; and there was the night’s earlier misery besides. Ken Kempis was a thief! Ken Kempis was false to her! A storm of words and reproaches poured forth from her in confusion, none of it very distinct. “Living upon thief! Convicted felon! Transportation for life! Mrs. Winchester’s corn! Fattening poultry on stolen goods! No wonder your chickens are as fat as butter, and as strong as an ox! Buying gold chains with the profits for that bold, flaunting French girl, Natalie Rose! Taking his stealthy walks with her!” Ken Kempis came down the steps; he had remained there still as a statue, immovable; and turned his white face to Mrs. Winchester said: the blow had crushed him; he was a proud man (if anyone can understand that), and to be discovered in this ill-doing was worse than death to him. “Don’t think of me more hardly than you can help, Mistress Sarah,” he said in a quiet tone. “I have been almost tired of my life this long while.” Putting down the bag of corn near the steps, he took the key from his pocket and handed it to Mrs. Winchester. The poor dead thought vengeful spirits were stealing her corn. The man’s aspect had so changed; there was something so grievously subdued and sad about him altogether, that Mrs. Winchester felt as sorry for him as if he had not been guilty. Bianca Toffler went on in her fiery passion. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“You be more tired tomorrow when the police are taking you to San Quentin. Mrs. Winchester will not spare you, though your father was her many-years bailiff. She could not, you know, if she wished.” “Let me have the key again for a minute, Mistress,” Ken said, as quietly as though he had not heard a word. And Mrs. Winchester gave it to him. She was not sure but she should have given it to him. He swung the bag on his shoulders, unlocked the granary door, and put the bag beside the other sacks. The bag was his own, as we found afterwards, but he left it there. Locking the door again, he gave Mrs. Winchester the key, and went away with a weary step. “Goodbye, Mistress Sarah.” Mrs. Winchester answered back goodnight civilly, though he had been stealing. When he was out of sight, Bianca Toffler, her passion full upon her still dashed off towards her mother’s cottage, a strange cry of despair breaking from her lips. The next day, Natalie came to the Winchester Estate. “Is Ken home?” She asked, going to see Ken the first thing before breakfast. She meant to tell him that is he would keep right, she would keep counsel. “He went out at dawn, Natalie,” answered Mrs. Winchester, who did for him, and sold his poultry at the market. “He will be in presently: he have had no breakfast yet.” “Then please tell him when he comes, to wait in, and see me: please tell him it’s all right. Can you remember, Mrs. Winchester?” “I will remember, safe enough, Natalie.” Natalie went to church, and she was one of ten people sitting in the pews, with her pink ribbons, the twisted gold chain showing outside a short-cut velvet jacket. After church, strolling by the Winchester mansion: a certain reminiscence I suppose took her there, for it was not a frequented spot: Natalie saw Bianca Toffler coming along. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Well, it was a change! The passionate woman of the previous night had subsided into a poor, wild-looking, sorrow-stricken thing, ready to die of remorse. Excessive passion had wrought its usual consequences; a reaction: a reaction in favour of Ken Kempis. She same up to him, clasping Natalie clasping her hands in agony—beseeching that, she would spare her; that she would not tell of her; that she would give her a chance for the future: and her lips quivered and trembled, and there were dark circles round her hollow eyes. Many would have said she had been bewitched. In fact, a physician was apt to attribute everything he could not explain organically to witchcraft, just as the twentieth-century physician is apt to call whatever he or she cannot understand psychosomatic. However, Bianca’s symptoms were identifiably hysterical, and therefore may well have been due to a frightening experience at the Winchester mansion. Mrs. Winchester said, “The girl seemed demented: She has been going in and out ever since daylight like a dog in a fair.” “Is Ken here,” asked Natalie. “No,” Bianca said, looking more wild, worn, haggard than before; “that’s what I have been to ask. I am just going out of my sense. He has gone for certain. Gone!” “I have just seen him,” the butler said. “Here; not a minute ago. I saw him twice. He is angry, very, and will not let me speak to him; both times he got away before I could reach him. He is close by somewhere.” Natalie looked round, naturally; but Ken was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing to conceal him expect the water tower, and that was locked up. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Natalie’s face grew puzzled again. Unable to rest, she wandered over to the water tower again, and saw Ken standing at the corner of the water tower, looking very hard at her. She thought he was waiting for her to come up, but before she got close to him he had disappeared, and she did not see which way. She hastened past the front of the water tower, ran round to the back, and there he was. He stood atop the seven-story tower looking out for her; waiting for her, as it again seemed; and was gazing at her with the same fixed stare. But again she missed him before she could get quite up; and it was at that moment that Mrs. Winchester arrived on scene. She went all round the water tower, and up to the seven-story town, but could see nothing of Ken. It was an extraordinary thing where he could have got to. Inside the water tower he could not be: it was securely locked; and there was no appearance of him in the mansion or in the open gardens. It was, so to say, broad daylight yet, or at least not far short of it; the red light was still in the west. Beyond the field at the back of the water tower, was a grove of trees in the form of a triangle. The Winchester mansion had the reputation of being haunted; for Soren Lewis had an experience fourteen years before, when he was staying at the mansion and saw a woman standing between the cradle in the room and the beside and [she] seemed to look upon him. So he did rise up in his bed and it vanished. Then he went to the door and found it locked. And unlocking and opening the door he went to the entry door and looked out, and then did see the same woman he had a little before seen in the room, and in the same garb she was in before. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Then he said to her, “In the name of God, what do you come for” Then she vanished away. So he locked the door again and went to bed. And between sleeping and waking he felt something come to his mouth or lips, cold, and thereupon started and looked up, and again did she the same woman with something between both her hands, holding [it] before his mouth. Upon which she moved, and the child in the cradle gave a great screech out, as if it was greatly hurt, and she disappeared. And taking this child up [he] could not quiet it in some hours. From which time the child, that before was a very likely thriving child, did pine away and was never well (although it lived some months after, yet in a said condition) and so died. Some time after, within a week or less, he did see the same woman in the same garb or clothes that appeared to him as aforesaid, although he knew not her nor her name before. Yet both by her garb and countenance doth testify that it was the same woman that they called Natalie Rose. The death of the child cannot be explained on natural grounds except by suggesting that there was something wrong with it quite unrelated to its father’s experience. Nor can one account for Lewis’s having hallucinations of Natalie Rose before he knew her or knew her name except by suggesting that he was mistaken. The Winchester mansion was a lively spot altogether for those who liked mystery. So, they asked the butler again, “Are you sure you saw Ken?” “Sure!” he returned in surprise. “You do not think I could mistake him, do you? He wore that seal-skin winter-cap of his tied over his ears, and his thick grey coat. The coat was buttoned closely round him. I have not seen him wear either since last winter.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Mrs. Winchester wondered how people had had premonitions about Natalie Rose, years before she arrived? Why was her journal and witchcraft dolls in the mansion, and what had happened to Ken Kempis? “That Ken must have gone into hiding somewhere seems quite evident; and yet there is nothing but ground to receive him,” said Mrs. Winchester. Natalie said she had lost sight of him the last time in a moment; both times in fact; and it was absolutely impossible that he could have made off to the triangle or elsewhere, as she must have seen him cross the open land. On the whole, not two minutes had elapsed since Mrs. Winchester came up, though it seems to have been longer in telling it; when, before the crew could look further, voices were heard approaching from the direction of the orchard; and Bianca, not caring to be seen, went away quickly. Mrs. Winchester was stilled puzzling about Ken’s hiding-place, when they reached her—the maid, and two or three men. The made came slowly up, her face dark and grave. “I say, Mrs. Winchester, what a shocking thing this is!” “What is a shocking thing?” said Mrs. Winchester to the maid. “You have not heard of it?—But I don’t see how you could hear it, said the maid.” “I have heard nothing. I do not know what there is to hear,” Mrs. Winchester said to the Natalie Rose in a whisper. “Ken Kempis is dead, Mistress.” “What?” “He has destroyed himself.” Not more than half-an-hour ago. Hung himself in the orchard.” Mrs. Winchester turned sick, taking one thing with another, comparing this recollection with that. RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Ken Kempis was indeed dead. He had been hiding all day in the three-cornered grove: perhaps waiting for night to get away—perhaps only waiting for night to go home again. Who can tell? #About half-past two John Hansen, a man who worked for Mrs. Winchester, happening to go through the grove, saw him there, and talked with him. The same man, passing back a little before sunset, found him hanging from a tree, dead. Hansen ran with the news to the maid, and they were now flocking to the scene. When facts came to be examined there appeared only too much reason to think that the unfortunate appearance of the galloping policeman had terrified Ken into the act; perhaps—they all hoped!—had scared his senses quite away. Look at it as they would, it was dreaful. However, what of the appearances of him throughout the estate? At the time, Ken had been dead at least half-an hor. Was is reality or delusion? That is, did her eyes see a real, spectral Ken Kempis; or were they deceived by some imagination of the brain? Opinions were divided. Nothing can shake one’s own steadfast belief in its reality; to her it remains an awful certainty, true and sure as Heaven. But there is no stumbling-block differ to be got over. Ken, when found, was wearing the seal-cap tied over the ears and the thick grey coat buttoned up round him, just as described by witnesses who saw him around the estate while he was also supposedly hanging from the tree; and he had never worn hem since the precious winter, or taken them out of the chest where they were kept. When Mrs. Winchester was told that he died in these things, she protested that they were in the chest, and ran up to look for them. But the things were gone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Did you know we ring the bell 13 times on the 13th hour of every Friday the 13th? Come join us for a frightfully fun night of Flashlight Tours on August 13th. Tickets available now!
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Ten Minutes on the Clock, but a Thousand Centuries in My Heart!
The Greek philosopher Aristotle had a recipe for handling relationships smoothly. You must be able, he said, “to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way.” Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer call such self-control “emotional intelligence.” Emotional intelligence refers to a combination of skills, such as empathy, self-control, and self-awareness. People who excel in life tend to be emotionally intelligent. Indeed, the costs of poor emotional skills can be high They range from problems in marriage and parenting to poor physical health. A lack of emotional intelligence can ruin careers and sabotage achievement. Perhaps the greatest toll falls on people who are still developing or marginalized members of the community. For them, having poor emotional skills and being subjected to dealing with those who have substandard emotional skills, makes them become victims of depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, unwanted lifestyle choices, aggression, and violent crimes, or they can also become violent criminals. The Devil has a sure foothold in Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 because many people seemed to be lacking emotional intelligence. People who were skeptical of witchcraft were thought to must undoubtedly be a witch. For instance, that Martha Corey’s skepticism was held against her is clear evidence that by this time the magistrates’ attitudes had hardened into those of the witch hunter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
It was at Martha Corey’s examination that one typical kind of behaviour first appeared. She bit her lip, and several of the afflicted children complained that they were bitten She was charged with biting her lip, and she quite naturally asked what harm was there in it. The Reverend Mr. Nicolas Noyes of Salem Town explained: “I believe it is apparent she practiseth witchcraft in the congregation; there is no need of images.” That is, instead of tormenting images she was using her own body as an image, biting the children by biting her own lips, and later pinching them by clenching her fingers together. From Martha Corey’s examination on, any motion on the part of the accused was apt to produce a corresponding effect in the afflicted children. It must have been a most convincing spectacle, as though black magic were being worked before the very eyes of the beholders. And as the effects produced on the children were obviously painful, they were that much more convincing. In some cases there were seen to be marks of bites or pinches on the children’s flesh; on other occasions there were pins literally stuck in their flesh. There are at least three explanations for this behaviour. In the first place, hysterics are extremely suggestible, and for hysterics familiar with the idea of image magic, it would be easy to assume that an accused person biting her lip was trying to bit them. A similar phenomenon is the “arctic hysteria” of North American Indians, in which the group imitates the motions of the shaman. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Secondly, hysteric will often try to injure themselves; they will beat their heads on the floor, or run into fire or water. (But they seldom succeed in injuring themselves seriously because they are most apt to make these attempts when other people are present, an able to stop them.) Surely this is the explanation for the pins in their flesh; the afflicted stuck them there themselves. However, this is not to say there was conscious fraud; people in fits are after all not responsible for their actions. Some of the bites and pinches, too, were probably self-inflicted, but it is also probable that some were not. Skin lesions are among the commonest of psychosomatic symptoms, and surely some of these bites and pinches were psychosomatic. Hathorne and Corwin, of course, thought the cause was witchcraft, and they committed Martha Corey to jail for further examination and eventually trial. And with her commitment to jail, Salem had very nearly committed itself to a witch hunt. Yet there would be moments during the succeeding month when the course of events would seem to hesitate and waver; moments wen the slightest change of circumstances might have averted the final catastrophe. On Saturday, March 19, two days before the examination of Martha Corey, the Reverend Deodat Lawson arrived in Salem Village. He has been its minister from 1684 to 1688 and had now returned as a visiting preacher and for personal reasons as well; the afflicted girls were saying that his wife and daughter, whom he had buried there, had been killed by witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Reverend Deodat Lawson tells us that there were at that time ten afflicted persons—three girls from nine to twelve years old: Elizabeth Parris, Abagail Williams, and Ann Putnam; three adolescent girls: Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Elizabeth Hubbard; and for married women: Goodwives Putnam, Pope, Bibber, and Goodall. He conducted both the morning and the afternoon services on Sunday, but without incident. Several of the afflicted persons were present. This was not Lawson’s first introduction to the behavior of the afflicted. He had lodged the night before at Ingersoll’s Tavern, and there had seen Mary Walcott, who, “as she stood by the door was bitten, so that she cried out of her wrist, and looked on it with a candle we saw apparently the marks of teeth, both upper and lower set, on each side of her wrist.” He had also visited the parsonage, where Abigail Williams “had a grievous fit.” He would see more on Monday, at Martha Corey’s examination, and on Wednesday, when he went to Thomas Putnam’s to see his wife, Ann Putnam, Senior. “I found her lying on the bed, having had a sore fit a little before. She spake to me and said she was glad to see me. Her husband and she both desired me to pray with her while she was sensible, which I did, though the apparition said [id est, to Ann Putnam, Senior] I should not go to prayer. At first beginning she attended but after a little time was taken with a fit, yet continued silent and seemed to be sleep. When prayer was done, her husband going to her found her in a fit. He took her off the bed to set her on his knees, but at first she was so stiff she could not be bended. But she afterwards set down, but quickly began to strive violently with her arms and legs.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Shortly afterward she began to argue with an apparition, and she thought that telling it a passage from the Christian Bible would make it vanish. She said, “I am sure you cannot stand before that text!” Then she was sorely afflicted, her mouth drawn on one side and her body strained for about a minute, and then said “I will tell, I will tell; it is, it is, it is!” three or four times, and then was afflicted to hinder her telling. At last she broke forth and said “It is the third chapter of the Revelations.” I did something scruple the reading it. [Reverend Lawson was reluctant because in this case reading the Bible might be construed as using it as a charm.] However, thought not versed she opened her eyes and was well. This fit [had] continued near half an hour. Her husband and the spectators told me she had often been so relieved by reading texts that she named, something pertinent to her case. The next day was Lecture Day at Salem Village and Reverend Lawson preached the sermon, which he published shortly thereafter under the title Christ’s Fidelity the Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity. Historians have consistently represented it as an attempt to sir up the emotions of the community, but in fact it was nothing of the sort. To be sure, Reverend Lawson did reaffirm that the girl’s afflictions were the “effects of Diabolical malice and operations, and that it cannot rationally be imagined to proceed from any other cause whatsoever.” Reverend Lawson was far from depending on the magistrates to cure the country of its troubles. In fact he warned the community that there was ultimately no legitimate secular defense against witchcraft. There was, for example, no legitimate means of testing to see whether an accused person was a witch: “we find no means instituted of God to make trial of witches.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Nor could one rightly defend oneself against witchcraft with white magic, such as boiling one’s urine or nailing a horseshoe over the door, because such charms were in themselves, “a kind of witchcraft,” and might well give a more secure foothold to the Devil. Careless accusations of suspected persons might also backfire, Reverend Lawson warned. “Rash censuring of others, without sufficient grounds, or false accusing any willingly…is indeed to be like the Devil, who is a calumniator, of false accuser.” Most important, he warned his listeners that the Devil might appear in the shape of an innocent person. Indeed, he suspected this was precisely what had happened when church members saw the apparitions of other church members afflicting them. The Devil had taken “some visible subjects of our Lord Jesus and [used] at least their shapes and appearances…to afflict and torture other visible subjects of that same Kingdom. Surely his design is that Christ’s Kingdom may be divided against itself.” Given all these difficulties the only sure protection against witchcraft, the “Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity,” was faith in Christ, and the application of that faith in prayer. And such prayer would be answered, particularly if it came from a people bound to the worship of God, like those of New England, by their church covenants: “whensoever God hath declared a person or people to be in covenant with Him, as the objects of His special mercy and favour, He will assuredly and shortly suppress the malice of Satan, however violently engaged against them.” In the late 19th century, it seemed that San Jose, California had come under a spell. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Sarah Winchester moved to San Jose, California after the tragic loss of her baby daughter and husband and began to construct one of the most unique and elaborate Queen Anne Victorian mansions the World had ever witnessed. According to legend, Mrs. Winchester enacted a nightly séance to help with her building plans and for protection from “bad” spirits. While she sometimes drew up simple sketches of the building ideas, there were never any blueprints! In the morning, she would meet with Mr. John Hansen, her dutiful foreman, and go over new changes and additions. During the early years of construction, this resulted in some unusual and impractical concepts such as columns being installed upside down—though some suggest this was done deliberately to confuse the evil spirits. However, this is how the Winchester Mystery House became known as “the house built by the spirits.” Mr. John Hansen stayed with Mrs. Winchester for many years, redoing scores of rooms, remodeling the in one week and tearing them apart the next. It is doubtful whether Mr. Hansen ever questioned his boss. Mrs. Winchester may have been trying to confuse evil spirits, or simply unsure if she was pleased with aspects of traditional designs, but there was so budget ceilings or deadlines to meet. This resulted in many features being dismantled, built around, or sealed over. Some rooms were remolded many times. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
It is estimated that the Winchester mansion once contained 500 to 600 rooms, but because so many were redone, only 160 remains (110 open for touring). This naturally resulted in some peculiar effects, such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, door that go nowhere and that open onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof! Once a room was completed, and most importantly, not targeted for further alterations, it was adored with some of the best furnishings money could buy. Mrs. Winchester appreciated beauty, and she was a woman with exquisite taste. Freight cars loaded with gold- and silver-plated chandeliers, imported Tiffany art glass windows then valued at up to $1,500 ($39,587.50 in 2021 dollars), German silver and bronze inlaid doors at twice that amount, Swiss molded bathtubs, rare precious woods like mahogany and rosewood, and countless other items were docked onto a side track at San Jose. Everything was then transported to the house, where much of the material was never even installed. However, the employees often times seem to be bewitched by the Devil. “Oh, how I wish I were out of this dreadful, dreadful house!” said Stella the maid. “Please do not think me very ungrateful for saying this, after taking such pains to provide us with a Heaven upon Earth, as you thought, Mrs. Winchester.” What happened could, of course, have been neither foretold, nor guarded against, by any human being. Stella, Mrs. Winchester’s maid came to her with a very long face, and said, “If you please, Mistress, did you know that this house was haunted? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Mrs. Winchester was so startled. She replied, “Good Heavens! No! is it?” Stella then explained, “Well, Mistress, I’m pretty nigh sure it is,” and the expression of her countenance was about as lively as an undertaker’s; and then she told Mrs. Winchester that cook had been that morning to order in groceries from a shop in the neighbourhood, and on her giving the man the direction where to send the things to, he had said, with a very peculiar smile, “The Winchester mansion–, eh? H’m! I wonder how long you’ll stand it; last cook held out just a fortnight.” He looked so odd that she asked him what be meant, but he only said, “Oh! nothing; only that help never did long at the Winchester mansion. He had known staff go in one day, and out the next, and during the last four years he had never known any remain over a month.” Feeling a good deal alarmed by this information, the cook naturally enquired the reason; but he declined to give it, saying that if se had not found out herself, she had much better leave it alone, as it would only frighten her out of her wits; and on her insisting and urging him, she could only extract from him, that the house has such a mysterious history. “You know, Mrs. Winchester, how firmly I believe in apparitions, and what an unutterable fear I have of them; anything material, tangible, that I can lay hold of—anything of the same fibre, blood, and bone as myself, I could, I think, confront bravely enough; but the mere thought of being brought face to face with the ‘bodiless dead,’ makes my brain unsteady.” Mrs. Winchester had the prettiest mansion in California. She told Setlla, “Most good things that had ever been in the World had had a bad name in their day; and moreover, the grocer probably a motive for taking away the house’s character.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Mrs. Winchester derided Stella’s “babyish fears,” to such an extent that she felt half ashamed, and yet not quite comfortable, either and then came the usual rush of the mansion’s engagements, during which one has no time to think of anything but how to speak, and act, and look for the moment then present. Marriam Marriot, Mrs. Winchester’s niece was to arrive the previous day and, in the morning, the weekly hamper of flowers, fruit, and vegetables arrived. Stella always dressed the flower-vase, while other servants ate so tasteless; and as she was arranging them, it occurred to her—you know Stella’s passion for flowers—to carry up one particular cornucopia of roses and mignonette and set it on Marriam’s toilet-table, as a pleasant surprise for her. As Stella came downstairs, she had seen Ashely, another maid. Ashely was a fresh round-faced country girl—she went into the room, which was being prepared for Mrs. Marriot, with a pair of sheets that she had been airing over her arm. Stella went upstairs very slowly, as her cornucopia was full of water, and she was afraid of spilling some. She turned the handle of the bedroom-door and entered, keeping her eyes fixed on her flowers, to see how they bore the transit, and whether any of them had fallen out. Suddenly a sort of shiver passed over her; and feeling frighten—she did not know why—she looked up quickly. The girl was standing by the bed, leaning forward a little with her hands clenched in each other, rigid, every nerve tense; her eyes, wide open, starting out of her head and a look of unutterable stony horror in them; her cheeks and mouth not pale, but livid as those of one that died awhile ago in mortal pain. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
As Stella looked at her, her lips moved a little, and an awful hoarse voice, not like hers in the least said, “Oh! my God, have see it!” and then she fell down suddenly, like a log, with a heavy noise. Using Mrs. Winchester’s call system, she alerted Mr. Hansen to what area in the mansion they were in. The message was loudly audible and Mr. Hansen came running in, and between the two of them they managed to lift Ashely on to the bed, and tried to bring her to herself by running her feet and hands, and holding strong salts to her nostrils. And all the while they kept glancing over their shoulders, in a vague cold terror of seeing some awful, shapeless apparition. Two long hours she lay in a state of utter unconsciousness. Meanwhile Mr. Hansen, who had been down to his guest house, returned. At the end of the two hours they succeeded in bringing Ashely back to sensation and life, but only to make the awful discovery that she was raving mad. She became so violent that it required all the combined strength of Mr. Hansen and Walley (the butler) to hold her down in the bed. Of course, the sent off instantly for a doctor, who, on her growing a little calmer towards evening, removed her in a carriage to his own house. The doctor had come later to tell Mrs. Winchester that Ashley was pretty quiet, not from any return to sanity, but from sheer exhaustion. Stella, Mrs. Winchester, Mr. Hansen and Walley were, of course, utterly in the dark as to what she saw, and her ravings were far to disconnected and unintelligible to afford them the slightest clue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Everyone was so completely shattered and upset by the awful occurrence. No one was allowed to occupy that room again. Mrs. Winchester would shudder and run by quickly as she passed the door. Eventually Mr. Hansen boarded it up. Legend has it this room is one of the 50 not opened to guests on tours. Mrs. Winchester was still unconvinced as to the house being at fault. You know, she felt like the mansion was a godmother, a protector to her, and was responsible for its good behaviour. She thought the girl simply had a fit. Why not? She knew of a man who was subject to seizures of that kind, and immediately on being attacked his whole body became rigid, his eyes glassy and staring, his complexion livid, exactly as in that case. Or it was also possible that, if no a fit, that perhaps the girl was subject to madness? The doctor had to ascertain where there was not insanity in her family. Even allowing the possibility, nay, the actual unquestioned existence of ghost in the abstract, is it likely that there should be anything to be seen so horribly fear-inspiring, as to send a perfectly sane person in one instant raving mad, which, after many years of residence in the house that Mrs. Winchester had never caught a glimpse of? According to this hypothesis, everyone in the mansion should have, by that time, been stark raving mad and in a lunatic asylum. Stella told Mrs. Winchester that she was leaving that “terrible, hateful, fatal house. I wish I had escaped from it sooner! Oh, my dear Mrs. Winchester, I shall never be the same woman again if I live to be a hundred.” After Stella left, Ashley was removed to the lunatic asylum, Agnews State Hospital, where she remained in the same state. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Ashely had several lucid intervals, she was closely, pressingly questioned as to what it was she saw; but she maintained an absolute, hopeless, silence, and only shuddered, moaned, and would hide her face in her hands when the subject was broached. Stella went to see her, and on her retuned was sitting resting in the drawing-room, before going to dress for dinner, talking to Mrs. Winchester about her visit, when Theophilus Riesinger walked in, he had always been waling in the last ten days, and Mrs. Winchester always flushed up and looked happy, whenever he made his appearance. He looked very handsome, dear fellow, just came in from the park in a coat that fitted like a second skin, black gloves, and a top hat. He seemed in tremendous spirits, and was as sceptical as Mrs. Winchester to the ghostly origins of Ashley’s seizure. “Let me come here tonight and sleep in that room; Mrs. Winchester,” he said, looking very eager and excited, “with the gas lit and a poker, I’ll engage to exorcize every demon that shows his ugly nose; even if I should find seven white ghostisses, sitting on seven white postisses.” “You don’t mean really?” asked Stella, incredulously. “Don’t I? that’s all,” he answered, emphatically. “I should like nothing better. Well, is it a bargain?” Mrs. Winchester turned quite pale. “Oh, don’t,” she said, hurriedly, “Please, don’t; why should you run such a risk, besides the room has been boarded up? How do you know that you might not be sent mad too?” He laughed very heartily, and coloured a little with pleasure at seeing the interest she took in his safety. “Never fear,” he said, “it would take more than a whole squadron of departed ones, with the gentleman at their head, to send me crazy.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
He was so eager, so persistent, so thoroughly in earnest, that Mrs. Winchester yielded at last, though with a certain strong reluctance to his entreaties. Her eyes filled with tears, she had the room opened up and walked away hastily to the conservatory. Nonetheless, Father Riesinger got his wish; it was so difficult to refuse him anything. Mrs. Winchester gave up her engagements for the evening. And at about 10.00pm, she went to bed. Then he went, jumping up the stairs three steps at a time and humming a tune. The human victims of this tragedy should never be forgotten. With a magnitude registering 7.9, high intensity shaking was felt at 5.13am on April 18, 1906. It felt like the most powerful Earthquake on Earth. All of the sudden the whole Earth started shaking like crazy, and the shaking got worse and worse. Devastating fires soon broke out in the San Francisco Bay Area and lasted for several days. More than 3,000 people died and over 80 percent of San Francisco was destroyed. The position of the people in Agnews was critical; a number of insane persons escaped from the demolished asylum, and were running at random about the country. 117 patients and staff were killed and buried in mass graves on the site. The main building and some others were irreparably damaged. The ground just opened up. Back at her mansion, Mrs. Winchester was in her Daisy Bed Room, when she was awakened by the jolt, “Every time I took a step,” she said, “I fell. I heard an awful sound. The seven-story town went flying up and crashed down onto the house, trappimg me in my bedroom and destroying most of the fourth floor along with it.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
People were running, but the valley just opened up and swallowed them. Dozens of people sank into the Earth. “The house seemed to shake forever and ever. I felt a lump in my throat, a gasping for breath—ten minutes on the clock, but a thousand centuries in my heart. Then again, loud, sudden, a violent banging on the door! I made a simultaneous rush to the door. My servants came and saved me. They said I had been trapped in my room for days. As we walked down the hall, there was Father Riesinger, standing in the middle of the floor of the room we had boarded up, rigid, petrified, with that same look—that look that is burnt into my heart in letters of fire—of awful, unspeakable, stony fear on his brave young face. For one instant he stood thus; then stretching out his arms stiffly before him, he groaned in a terrible husky voice, ‘Oh, my God, I have seen it!’ and fell down dead. Yes, dead. Not in a swoon or in a fit, but dead. Vainly we tried to bring back the life to that strong young heart; it will never come back again till that day when the Earth and the sea give up the dead are therein. I cannot see for the tears that are blinging me; he was such a dear fellow.” Then an omnipresent, malevolent voice, said, “Can you feel that? Drowning deep in my sea of loathing, broken your servant I kneel. Will you give it to me? There is no turning back now. You’ve woken up the demon in me.” This is a true story. The Winchester mansion is a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester rifle. The study of theology also tells us that a distinction between spirit and soul has remained obtuse till present day. As a result, the learned theologians of the most advanced organized religions take one for the other, keeping the identities and so interrelationship between the two hazy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This obtuse relationship has been trickling down for the millenniums, from when humans lived in caves in the Mesolithic era, around 14,000 years BC. Sorcery is also visible in burial rites and construction of monuments. Belief in a deity or an afterlife could be an evolutionarily advantageous by-product of people’s ability to reason about the minds of others. The Victorian period was an era of deep and sustained religious belief in the supernatural. People have a bias for believing in the supernatural. Yet people think there is a dark force behind many of the tragic events that are happening today. A force that has a significant impact on Society. Repeatedly we see cases involving law-breaking, or violence on the rise, and in many cases people believe it proceeds from an unknown dark force. Perhaps the Victorian belief in the spiritual and occult was not too farfetched. And God say everything He had made, and found it very good. And He said: This is a beautiful World that I have given you. Take good care of it; do not ruin it. It is said: Before the World was created, the Holy One kept creating Worlds and destroying them. Finally He created this one, and was satisfied. He said to Adam: This is the last World I shall make. I place it in your hands: hold it in trust. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. May the prayers and supplications of the House of America be acceptable unto their Father in Heaven; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
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O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Today is the return of our guided Mansion Tour! The tour guide-led experience allows guests to access areas of the mansion that have been closed since March 2020. Click the link in our bio for more information. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
Be Thou a Spirit of Health or Goblin Damned?
The Heaven was full of fiery shapes, Mrs. Winchester was terribly shocked by the death of her month-old baby girl; in fact, it can be well believed she never fully recovered and this surely influenced some of her eccentricities. Added to this loss was the death of her husband, William Wirt Winchester, 15 years later from Tuberculosis. On arrival in San Jose, Mrs. Winchester started remodeling the newly purchased, unfinished eight-room farm house. She found that the planning kept her grief-disturbed mind occupied and she became thoroughly enthused. Financial problems were certainly no deterrent; in the late 1880s, Mrs. Winchester brought a fortune of $20,000,000.00 ($523,635,294.12 in 2021 dollars) with her and had an average income of $1,000 ($26,181.76 in 2021 dollars) a day. Just how such precise amounts came to be public knowledge is unknown. In the period, 1881 to 1889, the dividends from her 777 shares of stock in the Winchester Company gave her an annual average income of $43,335.00 ($1,134,586.77 in 2021 dollars). It must be quickly added that upon the death of her mother-in-law in 1897, Mrs. Winchester’s holdings were increased to 2777 shares. Her lack of architectural training gave her little concern. Every morning she made the rounds with her ever patient foreman inspecting the latest progress. Some days Mrs. Winchester sketched plans on the spot using a saw-horse drawing table and any handy material, often brown wrapping paper (and used both sides). From the foreman came no argument; he had no problem of interpretation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
One afternoon in the mansion, a variety of circumstance concurred to being about the dreadful scene through which I was that night to pass. In the first place, I was literally overpowered with fatigue, and longing for sleep; in the next place, the effect of this extreme exhaustion upon my nerves resembled that of a narcotic, and rendered me less susceptible than, perhaps I should in any other condition have been, of the exciting fears which had become habitual to me. Then again, a little bit of the window was open, a pleasant freshness pervaded the room, and, to crown all, the cheerful sun of day was making the room quite pleasant. What was to prevent my enjoying an hour’s nap here? The whole air was resonant with the cheerful hum of life, and the broad matter-of-fact light of day filled every corner. I yielded—stifling my qualms—to the almost overpower temptation; and merely throwing off my coat, and loosening my cravat, I lay down, limiting myself to half-an-hour’s doze in the unwonted enjoyment of a feather bed, a coverlet, and a bolster. It was horribly insidious; and the demon, no doubt, marked my infatuated preparations. Dolt that I was, I fancied, with my mind and body worn out for want of sleep, and an arrear of a full week’s rest to my credit, that such measure as half-an-hour’s sleep, in such a situation, was possible. My sleep was death-like, long, and dreamless. Without a start of fearful sensation of any kind, I waked gently, but completely. It was, as you have good reason to remember, long past midnight—I believe, about two o’clock. When sleep has been deep and long enough to satisfy nature, thoroughly, one often wakens in this way, suddenly, tranquilly, and completely. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There was a figure seated in that lumbering, old sofa-chair, near the fireplace Its back was rather towards me, but I could not be mistaken; it turned slowly round, and merciful heavens! there was the stony face, with its infernal lineaments of malignity and despair, gloating on me. There was now no doubt as to its consciousness of my presence, and the hellish malice with which it was animated, for it arose, and drew close to the bedside. There was a rope about its neck, and the other end, coiled up, it held stiffly in its hand. My good angel nerved me for this horrible crisis. I remained for some seconds transfixed by the gaze of this tremendous phantom. He came close to the bed, and appeared on the point of mounting upon it. The next instant I was upon the floor at the far side, and in a moment more was, I do not know how, upon the lobby. However, the spell was not broken; the valley of the shadow of death was not yet traversed. The abhorred phantom was before me there; it was standing near the banisters, stooping a little, and with one end of the rope round its own neck, was poising a noose at the other, as if to throw over mine; and while engaged in this baleful pantomime, it wore a smile so sensual, so unspeakably dreadful, that my senses were nearly overpowered. I saw and remember nothing more, until I found myself in the maid’s room. I had a wonderful escape—there is no disputing that—an escape for which, while I live, I shall bless the mercy of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
No one can conceive or imagine what it is for flesh and blood to stand in the presence of such a thing, but one who has had the terrific experience. A shadow has passed over me—a chill has crossed my blood and marrow, and I will never be the same again—never, never! Our handmaid, a mature girl of two-and-fifty, as I have said, stayed her hand, and by little and little drew near to me, with open mouth, her brows contracted over her little, bready black eyes, till stealing a glance over her shoulder now and then, she established herself close behind us. During the relation, she had made various earnest comments, in an undertone; but these and her ejaculations, for the sake of brevity and simplicity, I have omitted in my narration. “It is often I heard tell of it,” she said, “but I never believed it rightly till now—though, indeed, why should I not? Does not my mother, down there in the lane, know quare stories, God bless us, beyant telling about it? But you ought not to have slept in the back bedroom. She was loath to le me be going in and out from that room even in the time, let alone for any Christian to spend the night in it; for sure she says it was his own bedroom.” “Whose own bedroom?” I asked, in a breath. “Why, his—the ould Judge’s—Judge John Conduit’s, to be sure, God rest his sowl”; and she looked fearfully round. “Amen!” I muttered. “But did he die there?” “Die there! No, not quite there,” she said. “Shure, was not it over bannisters he hung himself, the ould sinner, God be merciful to us all? and was not it in the alcove they found the handles of the skipping rope cut off, and the knife where he was settling the cord, God bless us, to hang himself with? #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“It was his housekeeper’s daughter owned the rope, my mother told me, and the child never throve after, and used to be starting up out of her sleep, and screeching in the night time, wid dhrames and frights that cum an her; and they said how it was the speerit of the ould Judge that was tormentin’ her; and she used to be roaring and yelling out to hould back the big ould fellow with the crooked neck; and then she’d screech ‘Oh, the master! the master! he’s stampin’ at me, and beckoning to me! Mother, darling, don’t let me go!’ And so the poor crathure died at last, and the doctors said was marasmus, for it was all they could say.” “How long ago was all this?” I asked. “Oh, then, how would I know?” she answered. “But it must be a wondherful long time ago, for the housekeep was an ould woman, with a pipe in her mouth, and not a tooth left, and better nor eighty years ould when my mother was first married; and they said she was a rale buxom, fine-dressed woman when the ould Judge come to his end; an’, indeed, my mother’s not far from eighty years ould herself this day; and what made it worse for the unnatural ould villain, God rest his soul, to frighten the little girl out of the World the way he did, was what was mostly thought and believed by every one. My mother says the poor little crathure was his own child; for he was by all accounts an ould villain every way, an’ the hangin’ est judge that ever was known.” “From what you said about the danger of sleeping in that bedroom,” said I, “I suppose there were stories about the ghost having appeared there to others.” “Well, there was things said—quare things, surely,” she answered, as it seemed, with some reluctance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
“And why would not there? Sure was it not up in that same room he slept for more than twenty years? and was it not in the alcove he got the rope ready that done his own business at last, the way he done many a better man’s in his lifetime?—and was not the body lying in the same bed after death, and put in the coffin there, too, and carried out to his grave from it in St. Joseph’s Cathedral Basilica, after the coroner was done? But there was quare stories—my mother has them all—about how one Archbishop Patrick William Riordan got into trouble on the head of it. Some years later he died of pneumonia at the 1000 Fulton Street Mansion in San Francisco, California.” “And what did they say of this Archbishop Riordan?” I asked. “Oh, for that matther, it’s soon told,” she answered. And she certainly did relate a very strange story, which so piqued my curiosity, that I took occasion to visit the ancient lady, her mother, from whom I learned many very curious particulars. Indeed, I am tempted to tell the tale, but my fingers are weary, and I must defer it. But if you wish to hear it another time, I shall do my best. When I had heard the strange tale I have not told you, I put one or two further questions to her about the alleged spectral visitations, to which the house had, ever since the death of the wicked old Judge, been subjected. “No one ever Mrs. Winchester myself telling how the children used to be lifted up in the bed at night, she could not see by what mains; and how they were starting and screeching every hour, just all as one as the housekeeper’s little girl that died till at last one night poor Chadwick had a dhrop in him, the way he used now and again; and what do you think in the middle of the night he thought he heard a noise on the stairs, and being in liquor, nothing less id do him but out he must go himself to see what was wrong. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“Well, after that, all she ever heard of him was himself sayin’, ‘Oh, God!’ and a tumble that shook the very house; and there, sure enough, eh was laying on the lower stair, under the lobby, with his neck smashed double undher him, where he was flung over the banisters.” Then the handmaiden added—“I’ll go down the lane, and send up Hansen Solomon to pack up the rest of the taythings, and bring all the things across to your new lodgings.” And so we all sallied out together, each of us breathing more freely, I have no doubt, as we crossed that ill-omened threshold for the last time. Now, I may add thus much, in compliance with the immemorial usage of the Winchester legacy, which see the hero not only through one’s adventures, bur fairly out of the World. You must have perceived that what the flesh, blood, and bone hero of romance proper is to the regular compounder of legends, this ancient Victorian mansion of brick, wood, glass, and mortar is to the humble recorder of this true tale. Gods have different properties, due to different antecedents. The definitive book on gods and their qualities has yet to be written. Mrs. Winchester built the door to nowhere for the gods to enter. However, a human being has the key—the big key. The all-important key. The long-lost secret key that lets a human talk to the gods, command them, bring them down to Earth. Solomon’s key. A man gets that key, he be stronger than the gods. You do not want to mess with that key stuff. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Remember that persons skeptical of witchcraft did not doubt the practice of it, but only whether or not it worked, or worked through spiritual means. Thus the skeptic John Webster, in his Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, was willing to concede that there were witches and devils who “have power to perform strange things.” However, he spent his twelfth chapter on the question “whether they do not bring the to pass by mere natural means.” What was at issues here was the reality of the spiritual World, the “invisible World,” as Dr. Mather called it. The controversy over witchcraft, therefore, raised theological issues fundamental to the seventeenth-century Christian. “We shall come to have no Christ but a light within, and no Heaven but a frame of Mind,” said Dr. Mather, if the materialists—the Saducees—should succeed in destroying the belief in an invisible World. Whatever one’s own belief, or lack of it, one has to admit that he was right. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries scientific materialism was to triumph, and the pious were to find that all the concreteness had left their religion, leaving nothing behind but a “light within” and a “frame of mind.” Conceive, then, of Dr. Mather’s excitement. At a time which he recognized to be a crisis in the history of religious belief he had discovered a clear case of witchcraft which he thought could not possibly be explained on material grounds. He made it the central matter of his Memorable Providences (1689), a book which he hoped might once and for all confute materialism and reestablish Christianity on the firm foundation of a real and concrete spiritual World. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The book met with considerable success. Richard Baxter, one of the most distinguished English Puritans, wrote a laudatory preface to the first London edition, and in Baxter’s own Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691) he spoke of it as the ultimate proof of the existence of a spiritual World. Any doubter, he said, “that will read…Mr. Cotton Mather’s book of the witchcrafts in New England may see enough to any incredulity that pretendeth to be rational.” The four or so cases we have reviewed over the past few weeks confirm in detail what we have seen to be true in general. Accusations of witchcraft were continual among common people, so continual that Dr. Cotton Mather took time in his “Discourse” to warn his congregation sharply against them “Take heed that you do not wrongfully accuse any other person of this horrid and monstrous evil…What more dirty reproach than that of witchcraft can there be? Yet it is most readily cast upon worthy persons when there is hardly a shadow of any reason for it. An ill look or a cross word will make a witch with many people who may on more ground be counted so themselves. There has been a fearful deal of injury done in this way in this town to the good name of the most credible persons in it. Persons of more goodness and esteem than any of their calumnious abusers have been defamed for witches about this country—a country full of lies.” However, the charges of irresponsible accusers were checked by the responsibility of the community’s leaders, the ministers and magistrates. They had been reluctant to act in Mrs. Hibbins’ case. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
At Groton, Mr. Willard’s investigation had been so careful that two accusations of witchcraft were retracted and the case never brought to court, on the ground that it was possession rather than witchcraft. At Hartford a confessor and her husband had been hanged and at Boston a confessor, but in both instances, although more persons were accused, the individual case did not develop into a witch hunt. There were other individual convictions, but they were outnumbered by the acquittals. For example, the records of the Court of Assistants show that in 1662 Eunice Cole of Hampton was found not guilty as indicated, although there was “just ground of vehement suspicion.” In 1666 John Godfrey of Salem was discharged as not legally guilty, although there were again grounds for suspicion. (Mr. Godfrey seems to have been a thorough reprobate; at various times he was convicted of stealing, swearing, drunkenness, and suborning witnesses.) In 1637 Anna Edmunds was acquitted and her accusers order to pay charges. In 1675 Mary Parsons of Northampton was found not guilty, in 1681 Mary Hale of Boston, and in 1683 Mary Webster of Hadley. Also in 1683 James Fuller of Springfield, who had confessed but then retracted his confession, was found not guilty but was whipped and fined for “his wicked and pernicious willful lying and continuance in it until now, putting the country to so great a change.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
In All the American colonies during the seventeenth century there were fewer than fifty executions for witchcraft, and excluding Salem there were fewer than thirty. This is a genuinely exemplary record, considerably superior to Europe for intelligence and restraint. Before the Glover case a part of this restraint may have proceeded from the New Englander’s conviction that he belonged to a chosen people. God, many thought, would not permit Satan to afflict the elect. The Devil might appear among “the wigwams of Indians, where the pagan Powaws often raise their masters in the shapes of bear and snakes and fires,” but there would be a few demonic terrors in the New Jerusalem. This belief was shattered by the events of 1688. Goodwife Glover had demonstrated clearly that witchcraft did exist in Massachusetts, and witchcraft of the most serious and dangerous sort. The Devil was abroad in Zion, seeking whom he might devour. When the Devil broke forth again, at Salem Village in 1692, he was not immediately recognized. “When these calamities first began,” wrote the Reverend Samuel Parris, “which was in my own family, the affliction was several weeks before such hellish operations as witchcraft were suspected. A quack doctor, who called himself William Griggs, moved into my family home, and catastrophe ultimately befell it. He filled the parlour widow with bottle of indescribable horrors preserved in brandy, and the fairly new concept in the American colonies called the newspaper with the usual grandiloquent and mendacious mix of local social and culture news. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
“This gentleman among his virtues did not reckon sobriety, and one night, being overcome with much wine, he set fire to his bed curtains, partially burned himself, and totally consumed the hose. It was afterwards rebuilt, and for a time an undertaker established himself in the premises. I fear some young persons, through vain curiosity to know their future condition, have tampered with the Devil’s tools so far that hereby one door was opened to Satan to play those pranks, Anno 1692. I knew one of the afflicted persons who (as I was credibly informed) did try with an egg and a glass to find her future husband’s calling [id est, occupation], till there came up a coffin, that is, a specter in likeness of a coffin. And she was afterward followed with diabolical molestation to her death, and so died a single person—a just warning to others to take heed of handling the Devil’s weapons lest they get a wound thereby. Another, I was called to pray with, being under sore fits and vexations of Satan. And upon examination I found that she had tried the same charm, and after her confession of it and manifestation of repentance for it, and our praters to God for her, she was speedily released from those bonds of Satan.” As human beings, we interact with the environment around us and affect it through our bodies as extensions of our minds. However, the thing is, we are never satisfied with the simplistic nature of these interactions. We are aware of limitations of our human nature and that has always been a driving force for us as a race to look for other ways to affect our environment in a more impactful way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Witchcraft is another way, a “tool” if you will, to impact the environment in a way so unique that simple, everyday folk like us cannot wrap our minds around it. It surpasses the wonders of mechanics as there is no external connection, the power of witchcraft extends from an internal World, bypassing the need to learn complex machinery or spend years labouring over physics and math textbooks. Alongside the innovation we traditionally ascribe to the Victorian period, was an older, persistent belief in the supernatural. Although the laws against witchcraft had been repealed in 1736, folklore continued to be active and potent force in everyday life. Many people believe that supernatural forces are what compelled Mrs. Winchester, at a cost of $5,000,000.00 ($171, 188, 461.51 in 2021 dollars) alone spent on materials to build the Winchester mansion with 10,000 windows, nine kitchens, and 47 fireplaces built of rosewood, cherry, mahogany, Italian marble, oak, teak, and pipestone; all hand carved, and no two alike. Construction went on for 38 years. At one point the mansion was as high as nine stories, had 200 rooms, and was 50,000 square feet. Once an enterprising young realtor leaked the rumor to Mrs. Winchester’s servants that across the road (now Stevens Creek Chevrolet) an investor was planning to build an Inn. “Saloon” was the word in those says. Mrs. Winchester quickly purchased the property at an exorbitant figure. Of course this was a false alarm but it brought her holdings to 160 acres. In the book of life, blessing, peace, and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord who establishest peace. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻 🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
It is Difficult for an Education in Which the Hearts is Involved to Remain Forever Lost!
Trying to sneak a pitch past him is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster. Three hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a half-century, an explosion was heard that sent concussive shock waves racing across the Earth, demolishing ancient societies and creating a wholly new civilization. This explosion was, of course, the industrial revolution. And the giant tidal force it set loose on the World—the Second Wave—collided with all the institutions of the past and changed the way of life of millions. During the long millennia when First Wave civilization reigned supreme, the planet’s population could have been divided into two categories—the “primitive” and the “civilized.” The so-called primitive peoples, living in small bands and tribes and subsisting by gathering, hunting, or fishing, were those who had been passed over by the agricultural revolution. The “civilized” World, by contrast, was precisely that part of the planet on which most people worked the soil. For wherever agriculture arose, civilization took root. From China and India to Benin and Mexico, in Greece and Rome, civilizations rose and fell, fought and fused in endless, colourful admixture. However, beneath their differences lay fundamental similarities. In all of them, land was the basis of economy, life, culture, family structure, and politics. In each community, life was organized around the village. Each of which, life was a simple division of labour prevailed and a few clearly defined castes and classes arose: a nobility, a priesthood, warriors, helots, slaves, or serfs. For all of these people, power was rigidly authoritarian. #RandolphHarris 1 of 28
In all of these cases, birth determined one’s position in life. And for any one of these people, the economy was decentralized, so that each community produced most of its own necessities. There were exceptions—nothing is simple in history There were commercial cultures whose sailors crossed the seas, and highly centralized kingdoms organized around giant irrigation systems. However, despite such differences, we are justified in seeing all these seemingly distinctive civilizations as special cases of a single phenomenon: agricultural civilization—the civilization spread by the First Wave. During is dominance there were occasional hints of things to come. There were embryonic mass-production factories in ancient Greece and Rome. Oil was drilled on one of the Greek islands in 400 B.C, and in Burma in A.D. 100. Vast bureaucracies flourished in Babylonia and Egypt. Great urban metropolises grew up in Asia and South America. There was money and exchange. Trade routes crisscrossed the deserts, ocean, and mountains from Cathy to Calais. Corporations and incipient nations existed. There was even, in ancient Alexandria, a startling forerunner of the steam engine. Yet nowhere was there anything that might remotely have been termed an industrial civilization. These glimpses of the future, so to speak, were mere oddities in history, scattered through different places and periods. They never were brought together into a coherent system, nor could they have been. Until 1650-1750, therefore, we can speak of a First Wave. #RandolphHarris 2 of 28
Despite patches of primitivism and hints of the industrial future, agricultural civilization dominated the planet and seemed destined to do so forever. This was the World in which the industrial revolution erupted, launching the Second Wave and creating a strange, powerful, feverishly energetic countercivilization. Industrialism was more than smokestacks and assembly lines. It was a rich, many-sided social system that touched every aspect of human life and attacked every feature of the First Wave past. It produced the great Willow Run factory outside Detroit, but it also put the tractor on the farm, the typewriter in the office, the refrigerator in the kitchen. It produced the daily newspaper and the cinema, the subway and the DC-3. It gave us cubism and twelve-tone music. It gave up Bauhaus buildings and Barcelona chairs, sit-down strikes, vitamin pills, and lengthened life spans. It universalized the wristwatch and the ballot box. More important, it linked all these things together—assembled them, like a machine—to form the most powerful, cohesive, and expansive social system the World had ever known: Second Wave civilization. As the Second Wave moved across various societies it touched off a bloody, protracted war between the defenders of the agricultural past and the partisans of the industrial future. The forces of First and Second Wave collided head-on, brushing aside, often decimating, the “primitive” peoples encountered along the way. #RandolphHarris 3 of 28
In the United States of America, this collision began with the arrival of the Europeans bent on establishing an agricultural, First Wave civilization. A white agricultural tide pushed relentlessly westward, dispossessing the Indian, depositing farms and agricultural villages father and father toward the Pacific. However, hard on the heels of the farmers came the earliest industrializers as well, agents of the second Wave future. Factories and cities began to spring up in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Northeast had a rapidly growing industrial sector producing firearms, watches, farm implements, textiles, sewing machines, and other goods, while the rest of the continent was still ruled by agricultural interests. Economic and social tensions between First Wave and Second Wave forces grew in intensity until 1861, when they broke into armed violence. The Civil War was not fought exclusively, as it seemed to many, over the moral issue of slavery or such narrow economic issues as tariffs. It was fought over a much larger question: would the rich new continent be ruled by farmers or industrializers, by the forces of the First Wave or the Second? Would the future American society be basically agricultural or industrial? When the Northern armies won, the die was cast. The industrialization of the United States of America was assured. From that time on, in economics, in politics, in social and culture life, agriculture was in retreat, industry ascendant. The First Wave ebbed as the Second came thundering in. #RandolphHarris 4 of 28
The same collision of civilizations erupted elsewhere as well. In Japan the Meiji Restoration, beginning in 1868, replayed in unmistakably Japanese terms the same struggle between agricultural past and industrial future. The abolition of feudalism by 1876, the rebellion of the Satasuma clan in 1877, the adoption of Western-style constitution in 1889, were all reflections of the collision of the First and Second Waves in Japan—steps on the road to Japan’s emergence as a premier industrial power. In Russia, too, the same collision between First and Second Wave forces erupted. The 1917 revolution was Russia’s version of the American Civil War. It was fought not primarily, as it seemed, over communism but once again over the issue of industrialization. When the Bolsheviks wiped out the last lingering vestiges of serfdom and feudal monarchy, they pushed agriculture into the background and consciously accelerated industrialism. They became the party of the Second Wave. In country after country, the same clash between First Wave and Second Wave interests broke out, leading to political crisis and upheavals, to strikes, uprisings, coup d’etat, and wars. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the forces of the First Wave were broken and the Second Wave civilization reigned over the Earth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 28
Today an industrial belt girdles the globe between the twenty-fifth and sixty-fifth parallels in the Northern Hemisphere. In North America, and much of the other developed nations, some 80 percent of the population lives an industrial way of life. Despite dizzying differences of language, culture, history, and politics—differences so deep that wars are fought over them—all these Second Wave societies share common features. Indeed, beneath the well-known differences lies a hidden bedrock of similarity. And to understand today’s colliding waves of change we must be able to identify clearly the parallel structures of all industrial nations—the hidden framework of Second Wave civilization. For it is this industrial framework itself that is not being shattered. And you, MAGNIFICENT AND MOST HONOURED LORDS, you upright and worthy magistrates of free people, permit me to offer you in particular my compliments and my respects. If there is a rank in the World suited to conferring honour on those who hold it, it is without doubt the one that is given by talents and virtue, that of which you have made yourselves worthy, and to which your fellow citizens have raised you. Their own merit adds still a new luster to yours. And I that find you, who were chosen by humans capable of governing others in order that they themselves may be governed, are as much above other magistrates as a free people; and above all that one which you have the honour of leading, is, by its enlightenment and reason, above the populace of other states. #RandolphHarris 6 of 28
May I be permitted to cite an example of which better records ought to remain, and which will always be near to my heart. I never call to mind without the sweetest emotion the memory of the virtuous citizen to whom I owe my being, and who often spoke to me in my childhood of the respect that was owed you. I sill see him living from the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the most sublime truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch and Grotius mingled with the instruments of his craft before him. I see at this side a beloved son receiving with too little profit the tender instruction of the best of fathers. However, if the aberrations of foolish youth made me forget such wise lessons for a time, I have the happiness to sense at last that whatever the inclination one may have toward vice, it is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost. Such, MADNIFICENT AND MOST HONOURED LORDS, are the citizens and even the simple inhabitants born in the state you govern. Such are those educated and sensible human concerning whom, under than name of workers and people, such base and false ideas are entertained in other nations. My father, I gladly acknowledge, was in no way distinguished among his fellow citizens; he was only what they all are; and such as he was, there was no country where his company would not have been sought after, cultivated, and profitably too, by the most upright humans. It does not behoove me, nor, thank Heaven, is it necessary to speak to you oft the regard which humans of that stamp can expect from you: your equals by education as well as by the rights of the nature and of birth; your inferiors by their will and by the preference they owe your merit, which they have granted to it, and for which you in tern owe them some sort of gratitude. #RandolphHarris 7 of 28
It is with intense satisfaction that I learn how much, in your dealings with them, you temper with gentleness and cooperativeness the gravity suited to the ministers of law; how much you repay them in esteem and attention for the obedience and respect they owe you; conduct full of justice and wisdom, suited to putting at a greater and greater distance the memory of unhappy events which must be forgotten so as never to see them again; conduct all the more judicious because this equitable and generous people makes a pleasure out of its duty, because it naturally loves to honour you, and because those who are most zealous in upholding their rights are the ones who are most inclined to respect yours. It should not be surprising that the leaders of a civil society love its glory and happiness; but, unfortunately for the tranquility of humans, that those who consider themselves as the magistrates, or rather as the masters, of a more holy and more subline homeland manifest some love for the Earthly homeland which nourishes them. How sweet it is for me to be able to make such a rare exception in our favour, and to place in the rank of our best citizens those zealous trustees of the sacred dogmas authorized by the laws, those venerable pastors of souls, whose lively and sweet eloquence the better instills the maxims of the Gospel into people’s hearts as they themselves always begin by practicing them. Everyone knows the success with which the great art preaching is cultivated in Geneva. #RandolphHarris 8 of 28
However, since people are too accustomed to seeing things said in one way and done in another, few of them know the extent to which the spirit of Christianity, the saintliness of mores, severity to oneself and gentleness to others reign in the body of our ministers. Perhaps it behooves only the city of Geneva to provide the edifying example of such a perfect union between a society of theologians and men of letters. It is in large part upon their wisdom and their acknowledged moderation and upon their zeal for the prosperity of the state that I base my hopes for its eternal tranquility. And I note, with a pleasure mixed with amazement and respect, how much they abhour the atrocious maxims of those sacred and barbarous humans of whom history provides more than one example, and who, in order to uphold the alleged rights of God—that is to say, their own interests—were all the less sparing of human blood because they hoped their own would always be respected. Could I forget hat precious half of the republic which produces the happiness of the other and whose gentleness and wisdom maintain peace and good mores? Amiable and virtuous women and citizens, it will always be the fate of your gender o govern ours. Happy it is when your chase power, exercised only within the conjugal union, makes itself felt only for the glory of the state and the public happiness! Thus it was that in Sparta women were in command, and thus it is that you deserve to be in command in American. #RandolphHarris 9 of 28
What barbarous man could resist the voice of honour and reason in the mouth of an affectionate wife? And who would not despise vain luxury on seeing your simple and modest attire, which, from the luster it derives from you, seems the most favourable to beauty? It is for your to maintain always, by your amiable and innocent dominion and by your insinuating wit, the love of laws in the state and concord among the citizens to reunite, by happy marriages, divided families; and above all, to correct, by the persuasive sweetness of your lessons and by the modest graces of your conversation, those extravagances which our young people come to acquire in other countries, whence, instead of the many useful things they could profit from, they bring back, with a childish manner and ridiculous airs adopted among fallen women, nothing more than an admiration for who knows what pretended grandeurs, frivolous compensations for servitude, which will never be worth as much as august liberty. Therefore always be what you are, the chaste guardians of mores and the gentle bonds of peace; and continue to assert on every occasion the rights of the heart and of nature for the benefit of duty and virtue. I flatter myself that events will not prove me wrong in basing upon such guarantees hope for the general happiness of the citizens and for the glory of the republic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 28
I admit that with all these advantages it will not shine with brilliance which dazzles most eyes; and the childish and fatal taste for this is the deadliest enemy of happiness and liberty. Let a dissolute youth go elsewhere in search of easy pleasures and lengthy repentances. Let the alleged men of tastes admire someplace else the grandeur of palaces, the beauty of carriages, the sumptuous furnishings, he pomp of spectacles, and all the refinements of softness and luxury. In American we will find only men; but such a sight has a value of its own, and those who seek it are well worth the admirers of the rest. May you all, MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED AND AOVEREIGN LORDS, deign to receive with the same goodness the respectful testimonies of the interest I take in your common prosperity. If I were unfortunate enough to be guilty of some indiscreet rapture in this lively effusion of my heart, I beg you to pardon it as the tender affection of a true patriot, and to the ardent and legitimate zeal of man who envisage no greater happiness for oneself than that of seeing all of you happy. With the most profound respect, I am MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED AND SOVEREIGN LORDS, you most humble and most obedient servant and fellow citizen. The Angels had wondered at the glorious plan of redemption. They watched to see how the people of God would receive His Son, clothed in the garb of humanity. Angels came to the land of the chosen people. Other nations were dealing in fables and worshipping false gods. To the land where the glory of God had been revealed, and the light of prophecy had shone, the Angels came. #RandolphHarris 11 of 28
They came to unseen America, to the appointed expositor of the Sacred Oracles, and the ministers of God’s house. Christ’s arrival had been announced. Already the forerunner was born, His mission attested by miracle and prophecy. The tidings of His birth and the wonderful significance of His mission had been spread abroad. And American was preparing to welcome her Redeemer. With amazement the Heavenly messengers beheld the excitement that the people whom God had called to communicate to the World the light of sacred truth. The American nation had been preserved as a witness that Christ was to be born of the seed of Abraham and of David’s line. The priests and teacher rehearsed their sacred prayers, and performed important rites of worship to honour the Lord, and prepare for the revelation of the Messiah. Hearts were Heavenly enthralled and were blessed by the joy that thrilled all Heaven. Everyone has the experience of doing, few of being. Yet that is the most precious, most important of all life’s experiences. This is the experience which makes the fully mature human happiest. It is usually short but its next advent will always be eagerly awaited. It is often isolated by long intervals of prosaic commonplace living, but they only serve to give it even greater value by contrast. The inner need of humans is forever demanding this experience, for it is Heaven. Whether it is born out of appreciation of beauty or an infinite humiliation of the ego, or out of some totally difference occasion, this awareness of the Overself’s presence is essential to the completion and fulfilment of human life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 28
To enter Heaven is to enter into fulfilment of our Earthly life’s unearthly purpose. And that is, simply, to become aware of the Overself. This holy awareness brings such joy with it hat we then know why the true saints and the real ascetics were able to disdain all other joys. The contrast is too disproportionate. Nothing that the World offers to tempt us can be put on the same level. One will find that somewhere within there is a holy presence not oneself, a sublime power not one’s own. One will understand then that no one is truly alive who has not made this discovery. The glimpse of Heaven lies at the core of religion, the precious gem which each devotee must find for oneself underneath all the sermons, chantings, rituals, prayers, and observances of one’s creed. A stillness which is simply the absence of noise but which is rich, fruitful, and uplifting in beauty and refinement of its presence—this is the best. No good fortune that comes one’s way will ever after be counted so great as the good fortune which one now feels to be one’s in the realization of the Overself. Would but the desert of the Fountain yield One glimpse—if dimly, yet indeed revealed, to which the fainting traveler might spring. Another significance of the glimpse is that of initiation. We cannot know God in the fullness of His consciousness but we can know the link which we have with God. If you mist, call it the soul, or if you prefer the Overself, but catch a glimpse of this link to be reborn. #RandolphHarris 13 of 28
The glimpse gives one a journey to a land flowing not with milk and honey, but with goodness and beauty, with peace and wisdom. It is the best moment of one’s life. When a human’s consciousness is turned upside-down by a glimpse, when one thought most substantial is revealed as least so, when one’s values are reversed the Good takes on a new definition, one writes that day down as one’s spiritual birthday. What better thing can one find than the divine Overself! That would be the decisive moment of one’s entire bodily existence, as establishing oneself permanently in its fullness and finality would be the grandest sequel. There is no higher happiness than this discovery of the real human. Joseph Smith knew that if his important work of translating was to be finished, he must have a capable scribe who could spend hours at a time at the job of writing. As usual when he needed guidance, Joseph prayed that such a person might be found. Meanwhile, back in Palmyra, a schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery had come to live in the Smith home. Oliver, who was about Joseph’s age, had not been in the family of Joseph’s parent long before they told him the strange story of the golden plates and the Angel visits. Oliver liked the Smiths and believed the story. Oliver also prayed. He wanted to help in great new work. In his heart he began to feel that his place was beside Joseph. Because he felt so strongly that he could be helpful, he went to Pennsylvania in April, 1829. Upon hi arrival at the home of Joseph and Emma, Oliver told them why he had come. Joseph was not surprised because he knew God had sent this young man in answer to his prayer for help. #RandolphHarris 14 of 28
Joseph and Oliver became friends immediately. They trusted each other because each felt that God had told him, even before they met, that they would work together. Joseph had not had much opportunity to go to school to learn from books, and he was to appreciate the help of schoolteacher Oliver, who had excellent schooling, was a great reader, and a fine writer. Soon after the meeting of these two young men, the Lord Jesus Christ, spoke to them saying: “A great and marvelous work is about to come forth unto the children of men: behold, I am God, and give heed unto my word. Keep my commandments, and seek to bring forth and establish the cause of America. Seek not for riches but for wisdom; and, behold, the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto you, and then shall you be made rich. Behold, one that hath eternal life is rich. If you desire, you shall be the means of doing much good in this generation. Say nothing but repentance unto this generation: keep my commandments, and assist to bring forth my work…and you shall be blessed. Behold, thou knowest that that thou hast inquired of me, and I did enlighten thy mind; and now I tell thee these things, that thou mayest know that thou hast been enlightened by the spirit of truth. Yea, I tell thee, that thou mayest know that there is none else save God, that knowest thy thoughts and the intents of thy heart. I tell thee these things as a witness unto thee, that the words of the work which thou hast been writing is true. Treasure up these words in thy heart. Be faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, and I will encircle thee in he arms of my love. #RandolphHarris 15 of 28
“I say unto you, as I said unto my disciples, Where two or three are gathered together in my name, as touching one thing, behold, there will I be in the midst of them; even so am I in the midst of you. Fear not to do good, my sons, for whatsoever ye sow, that shall ye also reap: therefore, if ye sow good, ye shall also reap good for your reward. Therefore fear not, little flock, do good. Look unto me in every thought, doubt not, fear not. Be faithful; keep my commandments, and ye shall inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.” Two days after their meeting, Oliver began to write as Joseph translated. They worked hour after hour, day after day, happy in their new-found friendship and the work which bound them together. Oliver describes this work in these words: “These were days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a vice dictated by the inspiration of Heaven. Day after day I continued to write as he translated with the Urim and Thummim.” Sometimes as they worked, on the translation they came to things they did not understand. They prayed for explanations. It was on such an occasion that the Lord explained to them how they might know the answers to many of their problems and receive the knowledge by the Holy Spirit. The Lord said: “Verily I say unto you, that assuredly as the Lord liveth, who is your God and your Redeemer, even so sure shall you receive a knowledge of whatsoever things you shall ask in faith, with an honest heart, believing that you shall receive. Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart by Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you, and which shall dwell in your heart. Now, behold, this is the spirit of revelation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 28
“Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, wen you took no thoughts, save it was to ask me; but, behold, I say unto you, that you mut study it out in your mind. Then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall fell that it is right. However, if it be not right, you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought, that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong.” The Lord provided this means whereby Joseph and Oliver, and all the people, might know by His Holy Spirit the truth of all things. We must look upon these glimpses as sacred one. And this is so even if they rise of themselves in our best moments. For in these times we, and especially the younger ones among us, need wider definitions of such matters. These moments, when spiritual presence is distinctly felt, may be rare or frequent, misunderstood or recognized, but they are moments of blessing. And this is true even if they open the door only slightly and let in merely a ray of light. In these moments of a glimpse, one discovers the very real presence of the Overself. They provide one with a joy, an amiability, which disarms the negative side of one’s character and brings forward the beneficial side. These are precious moments; they cannot be too highly valued. And though they must pass, some communication with them is always possible through memory. #RandolphHarris 17 of 28
Remember this truth: The Old Testament is God’s will concealed, and the New Testament is God’s will revealed—every word is equally anointed, relevant, and eternally true. The glimpse is of supreme worth morally, helping to free one, bestowing goodwill and humility, uplifting one’s ideals however fleetingly. Instead of being an escape from life, as some sceptics unwisely think, they are its fulfilment. Although life is really like a dream, some phases of the dream are more worthwhile than others—those which bring the Glimpse, for instance. It is far better than being ignorant to know what is read in books or heard at lectures on this topic, but far better than both of these is to feel vividly the Overself’s presence and reality, to know the truth of It with complete certainty. No better fortune can come to a human than one’s serene inward well-being and this certitude of universal truth. We must have Good Conscience and live a Virtuous Life! Why? Because a lot of us spend more time studying hard than living well. That is such a mistake! All that does is produce a tree that bears in fruit, except perhaps the odd pear or single peace. Plowing vices under and planting virtues in their place—that is hard work. Harder even than the grunt and the grind of the great philosophical issues. However, if the priestly scholar had already done that hard and serious work in one’s own life, one would find it easier now dealing with those Devouts traipsing about in sandals and self-actualizes processing around in ermines. #RandolphHarris 18 of 28
With the certain advent of that Final Event, the question o be posed is not whether we read the right books, but whether we did the good deeds; not whether we said the right things, but whether we made the right choices. Tell me now, where are those celebrity professors who taught you when they were at the height of their careers and you were starting out? They are dead and gone. You occupy their chairs of learning now, and now you are spending their stipends. Doctors they once were; now they are only dodoes, and you can hardly remember their names. How soon the glory of the Worlds set, wrote John in his first letter to an early group of Christians (2.17)! Would that the professors’ lives had matched their doctrinal teachings! Yet they fell short. If they had it to do over again, I suppose they would have studied longer and read till their eyes turned red. However, that would have done the little good. That is what Paul had in mind when he wrote to the Romans (1.21). How many of the professors have perished because they followed the unreliable wisdom of the World! Because they gave scant attention to the service of God. They had their choices, though. They picked greatness rather than humility, and as a result logicked themselves right out of their own holy syllogisms. However, when the sun finally sets, there will be other, happier people. The truly great? Those who did not make a lot of themselves; they gathered honours as their due, but they did not display their trophies in the window. The truly prudent? If it is what would keep them on the path to God, those who gave the World its due; they would not mind sweeping up after elephants, as St. Paul put it so Earthily to the Philippians (3.8). #RandolphHarris 19 of 28
The truly educated? Those who engaged God’s will and disengaged their own in one and the same transaction. Does no death mean that the body comes to exist by itself, separated from the soul, and that the soul exists by herself, separated from the body? What is death but that? For the Hebrew, a human is a unity, and that unity is the body as a complex of parts, drawing their life and activity from a breath-soul, which has no existence apart from the body. What is our essential nature? Are we a dualism of body and soul, as Socrates and Plato believed, or a psychophysical unity, as H. Wheeler Robinson suggests is the Old Testament view? Take a little survey of Christian laypeople, and you will surely find most people agreeing with Plato: we are made up of two realities, body and soul. Or so most of us have been taught since childhood. One book of Christian doctrine for children explains: Maybe you have been to a funeral. You have seen the dead body. That is buried in the ground. However, the inside part of you, the part that thinks and feels, that is the part that lives forever. This is the part of us that would go to hell. Christians talk and sing a lot about souls. It has seemed natural to appear to our possession of a soul as “proof” that we are alive. The belief that we possess a soul has been the foundation of our dignity and out view of the sacredness of human life. For many, talk about the soul has been a way of thinking about our “divine image.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 28
Not surprisingly, anyone who seems to question one of our most treasured beliefs will face strong challenges, and quite properly be put under close scrutiny. That has happened in the past, of course, with other Christian beliefs. We all remember the sustained action to the views of Copernicus and Galileo, which displaced our Earth from the center of the Universe. How much more of a reaction, then, might we expect to anyone seeming to question our possession of a soul as the hallmark of our being made “in the image of God”? If, as the Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner suggests, “the telescope of Galileo did more to interpret Psalm 96 verse 10 than the pen of the theologian,” we need to pause and ask in what way today might the discoveries of the neuropsychologists and evolutionary psychologists do more to interpret biblical references to the soul than the comments of philosophical theologians? The distinguished Nobel laureate Francis Crick wrote, “In spite of differences among religions, there is broad agreement on at least one point: People have soul, in the literal and not merely the metaphorical sense.” Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, begs to differ: “In the Christian tradition, like the Jewish and Muslim, the soul is not a substantial entity which exists without and before the body, and is better off without the body.” Instead, Dr. Ward contends, the Christian tradition proclaims an essential unity of body and soul. Indeed, as Socrates’ discourse on death hints, the idea of an immortal soul separable from the body arises not from the Christian Bible but from Greek thought. #RandolphHarris 21 of 28
In the end, Plato records that Socrates lived his own teaching by drinking the poison hemlock in the serene conviction that his immortal soul would now find release from its bodily prison. For Socrates and Plato, bodily death was a welcome liberation. Indeed, it was actually not dying. This Greek belief of separate body and soul has permeated Christian tradition quite thoroughly. When Origen, a third-century platonic philosopher, became the father of theology, he built into Christian doctrine Plato’s idea of the soul. In the early fifth century, Augustine thought Plato’s to be the most brilliant of all philosophers. And in the sixteenth century, John Calvin, who was heavily influenced by both Plato and Augustine, declared that Plato alone “rightly affirmed” the immortal soul that “lies hidden in humans separate from the body.” It has been one of the tasks of twenty-first century biblical scholarship to disentangle the biblical images of human nature from those of Greek philosophy. Discerning the biblical picture of the person is no simple matter, for the Bible is actually not one book but a library of sixty-six books, written over some fifteen hundred years, in three languages, and under varying historical circumstances. Not surprisingly, then, the meanings of the same words within the Hebrew Old Testament and within the Greek New Testament may shift. Fresh scholarship has modified earlier views. Today we recognize that the long-standing and pervasive view that presented a dichotomy between Hebrew thought (affirming some form of monism) and Greek thought (affirming some dualism) is a caricature. #RandolphHarris 22 of 28
Greek thought was more caried on the nature of the soul than a reading focused solely on Plato would suggest. There was no single concept of the soul among the Greeks, and the body-soul relationship was described variously among philosophers and physicians in the Hellenistic period. It was a belief cluster, not a single view. Recognizing these varied views within Hellenistic Judaism is not seen by biblical scholars as being directly relevant to understanding the cultural narrative within which anthropology is described in the New Testament. It is increasingly recognized that it was Israel’s Scriptures that were the most potent influence on New Testament writers. Thus readings of New Testament anthropology must take Old Testament monism as their point of departure. One mistake is to interpret the everyday language of the Christian Bible and The Book of Mormon and The Doctrine and Covenants as modern, scientific statements. When the writer of Ecclesiastes (1.5) noted, “The sun rises and the sun goes down,” the church of Galileo’s day understood this to be a scriptural proclamation of a stationary Earth encircled by the sun. Because the writers of Genesis (1.16) described the moon as a “light to rule the night,” the church also could not accept Galileo’s conclusion that the moon shone by reflected light; when Galileo invited them to look through his telescope and see the shadows of the craters for themselves, they declined and dismissed his observations as delusions of the devil. It is similarly possible to misinterpret the Bible’s human images. It is important to remember the Bible is written for all people all times. #RandolphHarris 23 of 28
As such, the Bible does not intend to offer a precise psychology, and certainly not one in the language of the early twenty-first century. Moreover, the Christian Holy Bible(s) is a book for living, not a book of science. It is not biographical. It is about the acts of God in the lives of people throughout history. Bearing these cautions in mind, what general understand of human nature emerge from the library of Scriptures? Let us consider some conclusions reached by scholars who have devoted their lives to exploring the whole of Scripture, in more depth during our next few lectures. Predestination presupposes election in the order of reason; and election presupposes love. The reason of this is that predestination is a part of providence. Now providence, as also prudence, is the plan existing in the intellect directing the orderings of some things towards an end. However, nothing is direct towards an end unless the will for that end already exists. Whence the predestination of some to eternal salvation presupposes, in the order of reason, that God wills their salvation; and to this belong both election and love:–love, inasmuch as He wills them this particular god of eternal salvation; since to love is to wish well to anyone:—election, inasmuch as He wills this good to some in preference to others; since He reprobates some. Election and love, however, are differently ordered in God, and in ourselves: because in us the will in loving does not cause good, but we are incited to love by the goo which already exits; and therefore we choose someone to love, and so election in us precedes love. #RandolphHarris 24 of 28
In God, however, it is the reverse. For His will, by which in loving He wishes good to someone, is the cause of that good possessed by some in preferences to others. Thus it is clear that love precedes election in the order of reason, and election precedes predestination. Whence all the predestinate are objects of election and love. If the communication of the divine goodness in general be considered, God communicates His goodness without election; inasmuch as there is nothing which does not in some way share in His goodness. However, if we consider the communication of this or that particular good, He does not allow it without election; since He gives certain goods to some humans, which He does not give to others. Thus in the conferring of grace and glory election is implied. When the will of the person choosing is incited to make a choice by the good already pre-existing in the object chosen, the choice must needs be of those things which already exist, as happens in our choice. In God it is otherwise. This, as St. Augustin says (De Verb. Ap. Serm. 11): “Those are chosen by God, who do not exist; yet He does not err in His choice.” God wills all humans to be saved by His antecedent will, which is to will not simply but relatively; and not by His consequent will which is to will simply. I part out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent, there is singing around me. Though my vision is clouded, there is clarity around me. Though I am heavy, there is the flight of Angels around me. #RandolphHarris 25 of 28
It is a mistake to believe that because any art of healing—whether it be a material or a spiritual one—is able to heal a particular kind of sickness once, it is consequently able to heal all similar cases of sickness by its own merits. Forces outside it have something to do with the matter. There are some cases where failure by material methods is preordained by the higher power of destiny. There are others where failure by spiritual methods is also inevitable, because the heart of the sick human being has not been touched. As elsewhere, there are limits to human effort set here by certain laws. O inscribe all the children of Thy covenant of a happy life. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our helps. Blessed by Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, bless us with the threefold blessings written in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee: so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. May our voids and blanks be filled with creations of intense significance, aesthetic, spiritual, and practical. Here with the Lord may we find the roots of much imaginative endeavour. May a space feel like an invitation to bridge it. #RandolphHarris 26 of 28
May we be confident people, who can draw on a sense of competence (“I am grand—I can do it”), may find a void pleasurable and attractive: it can become filled with all kinds of Christian efforts. The gap, the emptiness, the interval, the space, seem inviting to creative Christians. We see faces in the clouds. On a larger scale, people with lonely moors, with isolated lives, who have lost their parents or have empty parents, may God fill their World with vivid people and events. Painters need their empty canvasses. Dr. Barnardo, Albert Schweitzer, and others who are creative people, see what is missing and what is needed, and set about putting it there. Two people who encounter one another may create a relationship where there has been nothing This is he more fascinating because, if the creation is to endure, here has to be an element of truth, which makes the encounter one of exploration and discover. Who can tell how much invention-creation there is in such a relationship and how much discovery-creation? It must vary from person to person. Indeed, who can insist on the difference between invention and discovery in our love and hate of each other? We are so varied in our potential qualities, and so prone to have them called into being by other people’s love and hope, or hate and coldness. Do not the old stories of cruelty and redemption tell us so? #RandolphHarris 27 of 28
Scientific invention is also a matter of filling a blank. This kind of creativity seems to some in two forms: interpolation and extrapolation. Interpolation is closest to the process of “discovering the object”: the scientist has a set of starting-points, which seem connected with a phantasied endpoint or outcome which one wishes to reach. At first tis gap can conceivably be filled wit a shifting multitude of possibly useful concepts. Some of these are eliminated when we cannot get evidence, cannot get the facts to coincide with out phantasies. Eventually, if we work hard enough and are blessed enough, the pieces fall into place and bridge the gap from phantasy to outcome in a way which can be tested further. The process of extrapolation is of a more space-loving kind—discovery rather than invention. “Surely if we sail west we will come to the Indies,” said Christopher Columbus—and landed in America! Starting from the known, the discoverer takes the next step (perhaps the next logical step) and then the next and then the next. All kinds of good things can happen when conceptual activity does not eventuate in the anticipated outcome. Creative processes happen, imaginative play, artistic endeavour, invention, discovery. They all start with the kind of mental processes called phantasy (that is, untested unconfirmed concepts). In this state of mind there are (at least during the “period of hesitation”) no clear concepts, no clear contours. Bits of “self” and of “not self” are available for potential concept-formation. #RandolphHarris 28 of 28
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You Have Witchcraft on Your Lips!
Witchcraft dates back to the beginning of time. Biblical character’s Adam and Eve were the first warlock and witch. Eve was the first to follow the serpent, then Adam, and then their children. Since then, witches have existed and passed down their skills and knowledge for many generations. The supernatural was an important aspect of Victorian society. It pervaded all forms of life and art, science and entertainment. Its language and metaphors encroached upon Victorian culture. However, before the Victorian era was brought into fruition, there was Salem—a town where the occult was alive and well. However, I consider the seventeenth century the birth of the Victorian era for it was more than just about architecture, ornate homes, and opulent wealthy—it was also about the supernatural, and Salem is known for supernatural events. The supernatural was as important as the realm of the natural in Victorian times, as is proven by its relevance in political, cultural, and religious history and in the incipient entertainment industry. Etymologically speaking, the term “supernatural” refers to what is superior or above nature. However, here are several interpretations of the word “supernatural” which are generally accepted by the critics: preternatural, spiritual, or paranormal, and supernatural. In Boston, in midsummer of the year 1688, four previously well-behaved children of a “sober and pious” mason, John Goodwin, began to have “strange fits, beyond those that attended an epilepsy, or catalepsy.” The words are those of Cotton Mather. Mr. Mather was a medical student before he was a minister, and a far more careful observer than he has been given credit for. He spent a great deal of his time with the Goodwin children and he has left us a thorough account of their symptoms in his Memorable Providences: “Sometimes they would be deaf, sometimes dumb, and sometimes blind, and often all this at once. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
“One while their tongues would be drawn down their throats; and another while they would be pulled out upon their chins to a prodigious length. They would have their mouths opened unto such a wideness that their jaws went out of joint, and anon they would clap together again with a force like that of a strong spring-lock. The same would happen to their shoulder blades, and their elbows, and hand-wrists, and several of their joints. They would at times lie in a benumbed condition and be drawn together as those that are tied neck and heels [this was one of the few tortures permitted under seventeenth-century English law; neck and heels were chained together so that the body was bent into an exaggerated and painful foetal posture], and presently be stretched out, yea, drawn backwards to such an extent that it was feared the very skin of their bellies would have cracked [this is the arc de cercle of the nineteenth-century French psychiatrists]. They would make most piteous outcries that they were cut with knives, and struck with blows that they could not bear. Their necks would be broken so that their neck-bone would seem dissolved unto them that felt after it, and yet on the sudden it would become again so stiff that there was no stirring of their heads. Yea, their heads would be twisted almost round, and if main force at any time obstructed a dangerous motion which they seemed to be upon, they would roar exceedingly. Thus they lay some weeks most pitiful spectacles.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Again the symptoms are those of the hysteric: the convulsive movements, the distorted postures, the loss of hearing, speech, sight, and so forth. The fits had started immediately after one of the children had quarreled with an Irish washerwoman, whose mothers, Goodwife Glover, “a scandalous old woman” whose late husband had complained about the neighbourhood “that she was undoubtedly a witch,” had “bestowed very bad language upon the girl.” The neighbour advised the family to try white magic, but the pious father, John Goodwin, refused to traffic with the occult. He consulted first with “skillful physicians,” particularly with Dr. Thomas Oakes, who gave his opinion that “nothing but an hellish witchcraft” could be the cause of the children’s afflictions. Next he turned to the Boston clergy, who held a day of prayer at the Goodwin house, after which one of the four children was permanently cured. And finally he entered a complaint against Goodwife Glover with the magistrates. When they examined her she “gave such a wretched account of herself” that they committed her to jail under indictment of witchcraft. Cotton Mather gives a concise account of her trial: “It was long before she could with any direct answers plead unto her indictment, and when she did plead it was with confession rather than denial of her guilt. Order was given to search the old woman’s house, from whence there were brought into the court several small images, or puppets, or babies, made of rags and stuffed with goat’s hair and other such ingredients. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
“When these were produced the vile woman acknowledged that her finger with her spittle and stocking of those little images. The abused children were than present, and the woman still kept stooping and shrinking as one that was almost pressed to death with a mighty weight upon her. However, one of the images being brought unto her, immediately she started up after an odd manner and took it into her hand. However, no sooner taken it than one of the children fell into sad fits before the whole assembly. This the judges had their just apprehensions at, and carefully causing the repetition of the experiment found again the same event of it. They asked her whether she had any to stand by her [id est, as character witnesses]. She replied, she had, and looking very pertly in the air she added, ‘No, He’s gone.’ And then she confessed that she had one who was her Prince, with whom she maintained I know not what communion. For which cause, the nigh after, she was heard expostulating with a Devil for his thus deserting her, telling Him that because He had served her so basely and falsely, she had confessed all. However, to make all clear the court appointed five or six physicians one evening to examine her very strictly, whether she were not crazed in her intellectuals and had not procured to herself by follow and madness the reputation of a witch. Diverse hours did they spend with her, and in all that while no discourse came from her but what was pertinent and agreeable. Particularly, when they asked her what she would become of her soul, she replied, ‘You ask me a very solemn question, and I cannot tell what to say to it.’ #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
“She owned herself a Roman Catholic and could recite her Pater Noster very readily, but there was one clause or two always too hard for her, whereof she said she could not repeat it if she might have all the World. In the upshot the doctors returned her compos mentis, and sentence of death was passed upon her.” There has never been a more clear-cut case of witchcraft. Image magic is the commonest form of black magic. The impulse behind it survives even when the belief in magic is gone (as any one knows who has torn up the photograph of a person with whom they were angry. When they hang or burn someone in effigy, college students are obeying the same impulse, and burning were the means of executing witches. Nobody is ever shot, or stabbed, or garroted in effigy.) The dolls were studded with goat’s hair because it is the goat who is defied in Satan’s horns and cloven hooves. Spittle was applied to them because spittle was believed to have occult power, a belief that still survives in the idea of spitting on one’s hands before undertaking a particularly arduous task. To determine whether or not the plea should be insanity, the defendant was examined by a committee of physicians, who agreed she was sane. Plainly Goodwife Glover believed that she had made a pact with Satan. When she was asked who would stand by her, she attempted to call on Him, and she was overheard at night, in her cell, berating Him for having abandoned her. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
However, what is most important is that her witchcraft plainly worked, and in no indiscriminate fashion. When she was tormented one of her dolls, one of the Goodwin children “fell into sad fits.” When it is remembered that in a society which believes in witchcraft the violent hysterical symptoms to which the Goodwin children were subject not infrequently terminate in death, it cannot be said that the Boston court acted either harshly or unjustly. Indeed, when one considers the ferocity of seventeenth-century English law, simple hanging seems almost a lenient sentence. Cotton Mather visited Goodwife Glover twice in jail after she had been condemned, and made a serious effort to convert her. Her Prince, he told her, had cheated her, to which she answered, “If it be so, I am sorry for that!” He “set before her the necessity and equity of her breaking her convenient with Hell, and giving herself to the Lord Jesus Christ by an everlasting covenant.” She answered the he “spoke a very reasonable thing, but she could not do it.” He asked if Cotton Mather asked again for her permission to pray, and she replied that should could not give it unless her “spirits” would give her leave—“spirits,” or “angels,” or “saints”; she spoke only in Irish, the language she had also used at trial, and the translator told Mr. Mather that the Irish word would bear any of those translations. He prayed for her anyway, and when he was through she thanked him for it. However, he wrote, “I was no sooner out of her sight than she took a stone, a long and slender stone, and with her finger and spittle fell to tormenting it; though whom or what she meant, I had the mercy never to understand.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
During these visits Mr. Mather also asked her “many” questions about her witchcraft. On one occasion she replied that she “would fain give….a full answer” but her spirits would not give her leave. She told him that she used to go to meetings where her “Prince,” who was the Devil, was present along with four other persons, whom she named, including one “whom it might have been thought natural affection would have advised the concealing of”—presumably her daughter. When she, Goodwife Glover, was on her way to the gallows she announced that the children’s afflictions would not cease at her death, because others had a hand in the witchcraft as well as she. The afflictions did continue, but Mr. Mather kept the names the witch had mentioned to himself, presumably on the grounds that one should not accept the testimony against others of a confessed witch. After all, the Devil was, as Mr. Mather often called him, “the Prince of Lies,” and this woman had been his worshipper. The children’s fits continued more violently than ever, except that the body could be given sporadic relief by striking at the specters you could injure the witch, and on one occasion it was reported “that wound was this way given to an obnoxious woman in the town.” Again Mr. Mather refused to make the name public, “for we should be tender in such relations, least we wrong he reputation of the innocent by stories not enough inquired into.” Eventually Mr. Mather took the eldest Goodwin girl into his own home, partly in an attempt to cure her through prayer and fasting, and “also that I might have a full opportunity to observe the extraordinary circumstances of the children, and that I might be furnished with evidence and argument as a critical eye-witness to confute the sadducism of this debauched age.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Mr. Mather was also the scholar; he recognized that this was a classic case and had already determined on publishing account of it in an attempt to convert materialists to the belief in an invisible World. The girl provided a thorough display of symptoms. Most of them we have noticed before, but there were others as well. Her belly would swell “like a drum, and sometimes with croaking noises in it”; on one such occasion Mr. Mather was praying for “mercy on a daughter vexed with a Devil,” and “there came a big, but low voice from her, saying, “There’s two or three of them’ (or us!).” One of her more grotesque hallucinations was riding on a spectral horse. She would go through the motions of riding, and at the conclusion of one such spell she announced that she had been to a witch meeting, and had learned who was the cause of her affliction. There were three of the, she said. She named them “Roubriao, Mariodam, Balbnabaoth,” and then said, “Hear Me, and make all Spirits subject unto Me: so that every Spirit of the Firmament and of the Ether; upon the Earth and under the Earth: on dry Land and in the Water: of Whirling Air, and rushing Fire: and every Spell and Scourge of God may be obedient unto Me.” Then she announced, “if they were out of the way, I should be well.” However, Mr. Mather made no move to put them “out of the way.” After all, this was a girl though whom Devil were speaking, and so once more he kept the names of the accused to himself. The girl was able to get relief from her afflictions in Mr. Mather’s study. She believed, to his mixed embarrassment and pleasure, that God would not permit her Devils to enter there. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
One of her more curious symptoms was “flying”; “she would be carried hither and thither, though not long enough from the ground, yet so long as to exceed the ordinary power of nature in our opinion of it.” There is probably nothing more to this “flying” than the violence of motion we have seen in the fits throughout. Yet it may not be so simple; levitation was reported on another occasion when the record is less easy to explain, and we shall return to the problem in dealing with that occasion. A persistent symptom was her inability to pray, or to hear prayers said on her behalf, or to read Puritan religious works. “A popish book…she could endure very well,” and she was about to read “whole pages” of “a Quaker’s book,” although she could not read the words “God” or “Christ” but skipped over them. “When we urged her to tell what the word was that she missed, she would day, ‘I must not speak it; they say I must not, you know what it is, it’s G and O and God.’” She could not read the Christian Holy Bible, and if someone else read it, even silently, “she would be cast into very terrible agonies.” Puritan catechisms had the same effect: the Assembly’s Catechism or Mr. Mather’s grandfather John Cotton’s catechism for children, Milk for Babes, “would bring hideous convulsions on the child if she looked into them; though she had once learned the with all the love that could be.” It is also interesting to note that Cotton Mather was also a leader in the fight for inoculation against smallpox, incurring popular disapproval. He was introduced to the idea by Onesimus, an enslaved West African man in his household. #RandolphHrris 9 of 21
When Mr. Cotton Mather inoculated his own son, who almost died from the vaccine, the whole community was wrathful, and a bomb was thrown through his chamber window. Satan seemed on the side of his enemies; various members of his family became ill, and some died. Worst of all, his son Increase was arrested for rioting. Also, Cotton Mather was not against the institution of slavery, and he enslaved a number of people in his household. Many Puritans, including members of his own congregation, actively participated in slave trafficking and were involved in the selling of Native Americans overseas and the importation of Africans. He defended the practice as being biblically rooted and famously asserted that the souls of African slaves were washed white with baptism and they become “the Free-men of the Lord,” while still enslaved. However, Mr. Mather also produce a pamphlet called The Negro Christianized in 1706 (a term that may be highly offensive, but was considered politically correct in the eighteenth century), and her urged slave-owners to teach their “servants” Christianity, accepting them as spiritual brethren, and to treat them justly and kindly. Nonetheless, American historians have made themselves merry over some of the symptoms of being bewitched. Suggesting that a Puritan catechism was enough to give anybody convulsions. However, such suggestions only demonstrate the incapacity of these historians to understand a culture whose central concerns were religious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The bewitched girl we have been speaking about had been piously raised in a religious society and believed herself affected by devils and witches; her inability to speak the name of God or to read the religious books in her society believed in must have been a terrifying ordeal to her; her spelling God’s name and reading Quaker and Catholic books were clearly substitutes. Drs. Breuer and Freud report an exactly parallel case in their Studies in Hysteria: “A very distressed young girl, while anxiously watching at a sick bed, fell into a dreamy state, had terrifying hallucinations, and her right arm, which was at the time hanging over the back of the chair, became numb. This resulted in a paralysis, contracture, and anesthesia of that arm. She wanted to pray, but could find no words [id est, in her native language, German], but finally succeeded in uttering an English children’s prayer. Later, on developing a very grace and most complicated hysteria, she spoke, wrote, and understood only English, whereas her native tongue was incomprehensible to her for a year and a half.” Anyone who has had the common and terrifying dream in which one cannot speak or move will know something of how the elder Goodwin girl felt when she found she could not pray or read the Bible—but only something of it, since the dream last only for a moment and the girl’s symptoms lasted for months. It seems, in fact, to have been prayer that cured her—not her own, but that of Cotton Mather and other well-meaning members of the community who occasionally joined him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Then, according to Thomas Hutchinson, who published his History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay in 1750: “The children returned to their ordinary behaviour, lived to adult age, made profession of religion, and the affliction they had been under they publicly declared to be one motive to it. One of them I knew many years after. She had the character of a very sober virtuous woman, and never made any acknowledgement of fraud in this transaction.” I have been very interested in Victorian architecture since I was a child, and the more I study it and its occult connection, the more I seem to notice some interesting things. There is another large Victorian Mansion in Oakland, California, it is 25 percent the size of the Winchester mansion, 19 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, threes stories, and has a basement. It has been undergoing restoration by several people over the years, but the owners do not seem to occupy it for more than a decade before they relist it. Many people have never lived in Victorian, so even if there is no mention of them being haunted, some still feel like the eyes have walls and they are constantly being watched, which can be disturbing at night, especially the larger the house is. People often have dreams they are possessed by their house and that their bodies are levitating in their sleep, but they are actively in a dream about their traveling through their house in their physical bodies, as if they are possessed by the house. And other than seeing shadow people, they see black orbs traveling up and down the walls and just mark it up to being exhausted and after a few days it stops. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
While owning a Victorian is a dream, people who live in them sometimes get freaked out when their teeth become loose and they spit up blood, only for it to stop days later and everything to be back to normal. People have also seen creatures in these homes that they cannot identify, but can feel a frightening vibe as they watch them move, and are too scared themselves to move, fall asleep and have no idea what happened, only to see them again night after night. And it seems Victorian homes which have undergone the least renovations and are more authentic to the period tend to have more of a soul and more paranormal activity. Victorian homes are important no only because the represent the birth of America, but also because they were built by Africans and financed by the works of their labour, in many cases, and are parts of our history. Not all Victorians are built by slave labour and resources, but it is far more common in the South and on the East Coast. It is very important to preserve these pieces of history because they cannot be replaced, and there is certainly something magical about these homes that are over 100 years old and have seen generations of families, tragedy, joy, birth, death, and withstood so much. They have outlived many people, and you can truly feel these homes have a soul, a history, and that they are alive. Some people who buy a Victorian and start to renovate them have been documented to have changes in personality and seem like different people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
They do not tell others what they are going through, but usually will list their home, and it is assumed because they were having financial difficulty with the renovations as they tell people, “We are just in the market for something different.” I guess if your sinks kept backing up with black tar, and windows started rattling all night, long it might be a good idea to relocate. Others who have renovated Victorian houses live in fear because they can feel a presence and notice strange things in the homes, and they begin to suffer from neurosis and have to be hospitalized. However, some people love these homes, know what to expect, are not afraid of the dark and are mentally strong enough to deal with unusual occurrences. They may find the spirits more palatable than dealing with people. Nonetheless, Thomas Hutchinson was a typical eighteenth-century rationalist, who thought all witchcraft was a matter of fraud, so his testimony to the woman’s later character is particularly valuable. In an early draft of his account of this case he tells us that she was one of his tenants, but unfortunately he does not ell us whether she was the child who had been under the care of Cotton Mather. The Glover case was classic. While it was still going on Joshua Moody wrote to Increase Mather: “It was an example in all parts of it, not to be paralleled.” Cotton Mather took the occasion to preach to his congregation a “Discourse on Witchcraft,” in which a central concern was to demonstrate that prayer, faith, and a good life rather than charms were the proper “preservatives” against witchcraft. More important, how was his use of the case as ammunition in the war of the pious against the philosophical materialism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Books, and the reading of them, were raised to new heights in Victorian culture and in the home in particular. The Christian Bible, above all, was a prominent book in many Victorian homes. Works on travel and self-improvement were popular, along with novels by Washington Irving, Henry James, and Charles Dickens. People actually ready essays, most notably of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Books were expensive until machine-made paper made them affordable to middle-class readers. Not all houses had the luxury of devoting a separate room for a library, so books were displayed in bookcases in the parlor. However, an effort was made to create a home library, partly as a symbol of a family’s intellectual curiosity. Libraries had always exited in the homes of the wealthy and traditionally tended to be the domain of the man of the house, as reflected by the décor. Wood paneling, dark coloured wallpaper or other wall treatment advertised the serious purpose of the room. Built-in bookcases, or freestanding ones, some with glass doors, a desk, and comfortable furniture for reading were basic elements of the library or study. It was also a place where the gentlemen retired to after dinner for their treasured smoke and nightcap. Many people who have stayed in the Winchester mansion have grew into a sort of subdued accompaniment to all the fantastic and horrible speculations which chase one another through their brains. Silence grows more silent, and darkness darker. Until there is nothing but the sound of a rising wind, which has succeeded the thunderstorm that travels over the mountains quite out of hearing. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In the middle of this great mansion, I began to feel myself alone with nature, and Heaven knows what beside. My courage was ebbing. Just in time to hear with tolerable nerve and firmness the lumpy, flabby, naked feet deliberately descending the stairs again. I took a candle, no without a tremor. As I crossed the floor I tried to extemporize a prayer, but stopped short to listen, and never finished it. The steps continued. I confess I hesitated for some seconds at the door before I took heart of grace and opened it. When I peeped out the lobby was perfectly empty—there was no monster standing on the staircase; and as he detested sound ceased, I was reassured enough to venture forward nearly to the banisters. Horror of horrors! within a stair or two beneath the spot where I stood the unearthly tread smote the floor. My eye caught something in motion; it was about the size of Goliath’s foot—it was grey, heavy, and flapped with a dead weight from one step to another. As I am alive, it was the most monstrous great rat I ever beheld or imagined. Shakespeare says—“Some men there are cannot abide a gaping pig, and some that are made if they behold a cat.” I went well-nigh out of my wits when I beheld this rat; for, laugh at me as you may, it fixed upon me, I thought, perfectly human expression of malic; and, as it shuffled about and looked up into my face almost from between my feet, I saw, I could swear it—I felt in then, and know it now, the infernal gaze and the accursed countenance of my old friend in the haunting portrait, transfused into the visage of a bloated vermin before me. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
I bounced into my room again with feeling of loathing and horror I cannot describe, and locked and bolted my door as if a lion had been at the other side. Damn him or it; curse the portrait and its original! I felt in my soul that the rat—yes, the rat, the RAT I had just seen, was that evil being in masquerade, and rambling through the house upon some infernal night lark. Next morning I was early trudging through the miry fields of San Jose; and, among other transactions, posted a peremptory note recalling Lewis on my way home. On my return, however, I found a note from my absent “chum,” announcing his intent to return the next day. I was doubly rejoiced at this, because I had succeeded in getting rooms; and because the change of scene and return of my comrade were rendered specially pleasant by the last night’s half ridiculous half horrible adventure. I spelt extemporaneously in my new quarters in Oakland that night, and the next morning returned for breakfast to the haunted mansion, where I was certain Lewis would alert me immediately on his arrival. Hebe was in a corner of the room, packing our cracked delft tea and dinner-services in a basket. She soon suspended operations. I was lying in the attitude of sleep, in that lumbering old bed. I hate to think of it. I was really wide awake, though I had put out my candle, and was lying quietly as if I had been asleep; and although accidentally restless, my thoughts were running in a cheerful and agreeable channel. I think it must have been two o’clock at least when I thought I heard a sound in that—that odious dark recess at the far end of the bedroom. It was as if someone was drawing a piece of cord slowly along the floor lifting up, and dropping it softy down again in coils. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
I sat up once or twice in my bed, but could see nothing, so I concluded it must be mice in the wainscot. I felt no emotion graver than curiosity, and after a few minutes ceased to observe it. While laying in this state, strange to say; without at first a suspicion of anything supernatural, on sudden I saw an old man, rather stout and square, in a sort of roan-red dressing-gown, and with a black cap on his head, moving stiffly and slowly in a diagonal direction, from the recess, across the floor of the bedroom, passing my bed at the foot, and entering the lumber-closet at the left. He had something under his arm; his head hung a little at one side; and, merciful God! when I saw his face. That awful countenance, which living or dying I never can forget, disclosed what he was. Without turning to the right or left, he passed beside me, and entered the closet by the bed’s head. While this fearful and indescribable type of death and guilt was passing, I felt that I had no more power to speak or stir than if I had been myself a corpse. For hours after it had disappeared, I was too terrified and weak to move. As soon as daylight came, I took courage and examined the room, and especially the course which the frightful intruder had seemed to take, but there was not a vestige to indicate anybody’s having passed there; no sign of any disturbing agency visible among the lumber that strewed the floor of the closet. I now began to recover a little. I was fagged and exhausted, and at last, overpowered by a feverish sleep. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
I came down late; and was out of spirits. I did not care to recall the infernal vision. In fact, I was trying to persuade myself that the whole thing was an illusion, and I did not like to revive in their intensity the hated impressions of the past night—or, to risk the constancy of my scepticism, by recounting the tale of my sufferings. It required some nerve, I can tell you, to go to my haunted chamber next night, and lie down quietly in the same bed. I did so with a degree of trepidation, which, I am not ashamed to say, a very little matter would have sufficed to stimulate to downright panic. This night, however, passed off quietly enough, as also the next; and so too did two or three more. I grew more confident, and began to fancy that I believed in the theories of spectral illusions, with which I had at first vainly tried to impose upon my convictions. The apparition had been, indeed, altogether anomalous. It has crossed the room without any recognition of my presence: I had not disturned it, and it has no mission to me. What, then, was the imaginable use of its crossing the room in a visible shape at all? Of course it might have been in the closet instead of going there, as easily as it introduced itself into the recess without entering the chamber in a shape discernible by the senses. Besides, how the deuce had I seen it? It was a dark night; I had no candle; there was no fire; and yet I saw it as distinctly, in colouring and outline, as ever I beheld human form! A cataleptic dream would explain it all; and I was determined that a dream it should be. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive. I so hoped to win myself over at last to a comfortable scepticism about the ghost. He had not appeared a second time—that certainly was a comfort; and what, after all, did I care for him, and his queer old toggery and strange looks? Not a fig! I was nothing the worse for having seen hi, and a good story the better. So I tumbled into bed, put out my candle, and cheered by a loud drunken quarrel in the fields, went fast asleep. From this deep slumber I awoke with a start. I knew I had had a horrible dream; but what it was I could not remember. My heart was thumping furiously; I felt bewildered and feverish; I sat up in the bed and looked bout the room. A broad flood of moonlight came in through the window; everything was as I had last seen it. In my uncomfortable half-sleep, for hour long, I cannot conjecture. I found myself at last muttering, “dead as a door-nail, so there was the end”; and something like another voice within me, seemed to say, very faintly, but sharply, “dead! dead! dead!” and may the Lord have mercy on your soul!” and instantaneously I was wide awake, and staring right before me the pillow. I saw the same accursed figure standing full front, and gazing at me with its stony and fiendish countenance, not two yards from beside. I was grateful for the clear daylight and resumed to bustle out the doors. For about three seconds only I saw it plainly; then it grew indistinct; but for a long time, there was something like a column of dark vapour where it had been standing, between me and the wall; and I felt sure that he was still there. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
After a good while, this appearance went too. I took my clothes downstairs to the halls, and dressed there, with the door half open; then went out into the street, and walked about town till morning, when I came back, in the miserable state of nervousness and exhaustion. For many nights after this last experience, I did not go to my room at all. I used to sit up for a while in the drawing-room; and then steal down softly to the hall-door, to let myself out, and sit in the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton until morning. For more than a week I never slept in bed. I had absolutely no regular sleep. I was quite resolved that I should get into another house; but I could not bring myself to tell anyone the reason, and I somehow put it off from day to day, although my life was, during every hour of this procrastination, rendered as miserable as that of a felon with the constables on his track. I was growing absolutely ill from this wretched mode of life. One afternoon I determined to enjoy an hour’s sleep upon the maid’s bed. I hated mine; so that I have never, except in a stealthy visit every day to unmake it, lest Stella should discover the secret of my night absence, entered the ill-omened chamber. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. On this Sabbath day please renew the New Moon unto us for well-being and for blessing, for joy and gladness, for salvation and comfort, for sustenance and abundance, for life and peace, for the pardon of sin and forgiveness of iniquity. Choosing They people America from among all nation, Thou hast made Thy Holy Sabbath known unto them and prescribed statues regarding the observance of the New Moon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who sanctifiest the Sabbath, America, and the New Moon. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
This rare view from Mrs. Winchester’s Gardens shows the estate sometime before the 1906 earthquake – notice the nine-story tower, and the lack of a door-to-nowhere. Why do you think Sarah added the door-to-nowhere?
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
The Source of those Accusations Was a Committee of Demons Who Had Infested Her!
The infinite power of God to create is far beyond what we can grasp or understand. If the Almighty devoted so much of His Word to prophecy, it certainly benefits every believer to study it. The study of the prophetic scriptures and their fulfillment attests to the authority of the Word of God. Every soul has cost an infinite price, and how terrible is the sin of turning one soul away from Christ, so that for Him the Saviour’s love and humiliation and agony shall have been in vain. Contrary to popular opinion, New England’s record in regard to witchcraft is surprisingly good, as Governor Thomas Hutchinson pointed out in 1750: “more having been put to death in a single country in England from the first settlement until the present time.” Through most of the seventeenth century the record is really astonishing. While Europe hanged and burned literally thousands, executions in New England were few and far between. (Witches were burned on the Continent and in Scotland, where witchcraft was a heresy, but hanged in England and in New England, where it was a felony. Burning a witch seems not to have been motivated by the wish to inflict a particularly painful death; Scottish witches, for instance, were first garroted by the executioner, who then proceeded to burn the corpse and scatter its ashes. Most probably, burning was an attempt to prevent the resurrection of the body.) There are some fascinating accounts in New England that deal with cases of witchcraft before 1692, and we shall look at a few of these for they will illuminate some interesting aspects of the Salem witch trials. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
The first is that of Mrs. Anne Hibbins. Her husband, who died in 1654, had been a man of importance: Boston merchant, a Colonial Agent, and for several years one of the Assistants. Tradition has it that she was a sister of Governor Bellingham. She was apparently quarrelsome—quarrelsome enough so that her church censured her for it—and one quarrel was her undoing. She seems to have come upon two of her neighbours talking, to have told them she knew they were talking about her, and then to have reconstructed their conversation with enough fidelity to convince the she was possessed of “preternatural” knowledge (something Mrs. Sarah Winchester used to also have the ability to do, and a reason she dismissed so many staff members for gossiping). Nonetheless, Mrs. Hibbins was brought to trail in 1655, and the jury brought her in guilty. However, the presiding magistrates refused to accept the verdict, apparently believing her innocent, and their refusal automatically threw the case into the General Court. There again she was found guilty; the governor pronounced the required sentence of death; and in 1656 she was executed. We have seen that some of the magistrates were not satisfied of her guilt, and apparently the same were true of some of the clergy. To masses of people, death was a dread mystery; beyond was uncertainty and gloom. These people were seeking for truth, and to learn them the Spirit of Inspiration was imparted. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
A surviving letter tells us that the Reverend John Norton “once said at his own table” before the Reverend John Wilson and others that Mistress Hibbins “was hanged for a witch only for having more with than her neighbours. It was his very expression; she having, as he explained it, unhappily guessed that two of her persecutors, whom she saw talking in the street, were talking of her—which cost her her life, not withstanding all he could do to the contrary, as he himself told us.” The Hibbins case shows how slender and how circumstantial were the grounds necessary to bring an accusation of witchcraft against anyone with a reputation for malice. It also shows that the popular elements in society (the jury, and the people’s representatives in the General Court) were far more ready to believe in witchcraft than the leaders of society (the magistrates and ministers.) This latter conclusion is reinforced by the fact that before 1692 there were far more acquittals than convictions in New England; there were more people willing to charge their neighbours with witchcraft than magistrates willing to convict them. A case which took place in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1662 is known in rather more detail than that of Mrs. Hibbins. Anne Cole, “a person esteemed pious,” was taken with “strange fits.” As with the Salem girls, the fits were both violent and public. Extremely violent bodily motions she many times had, even to the hazard of her life in the apprehensions of those that saw them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
And very often great disturbances was given in the public worship of God by her and two other women who had also strange fits. Once in especial, on a day of prayer kept on that account, the motion and noised of the afflicted was so terrible that a godly person fainted under the appearance of it. In some of her fits strange voices came from her, voices that were clearly not her own. Such voices are now known to be a consequence of multiple personality, which is the extreme form of the hysterical fugue. However, the seventeenth-century observers of Anne Cole judged them to be the voices of demons who had entered into her, and that judgment was sensible enough in view of the fact that the voices seemed to be plotting ways in which Anne Cole might be further afflicted. Eventually, seeming to realize that they were being overheard, one of the voices announced, “‘Let us confound her language, [that] she may tell no more tales.’” For some time nothing came from her but “unintelligible mutterings”; then the conversation resumed in a Dutch accent, and this time names were mentioned, names of the witches who were responsible for these afflictions. When Anne Cole was out of her fits, she “knew nothing of those things that were spoken by her” during them, but she was understandably distressed to find she had been speaking things which, to the best of her knowledge, had never been in her mind; it was a “matter of great affliction to her.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
It must have been afflicting to the local magistrates as well; they now had accusations of witchcraft against several persons, but the source of these accusations was not Anne Cole; it was a committee of demons who had infested her. The magistrates investigated further, and imprisoned some (and perhaps all) of the accused on suspicion of witchcraft One of these, a “lewd, ignorant, considerably aged woman” named Rebecca Greensmith sent for the two clergymen who has taken down in writing the demonic conversation issuing from the mouth of Anne Cole. She had the transcript read to er, and then “forthwith and freely confessed those things to be true,” confirming the statement of the voiced “that she (and other persons named in the discourse) had familiarity with the Devil.” She confessed to a number of other things as well, including “that the Devil has frequent use of her body with much seeming (but indeed horrible, hellish) delight to her.” Reports of copulation with demons (including the unpleasantness of the experience) are common in the literature of Continental witchcraft, but this is one of the few known cases in New England. What is involved is apparently an erotic fit in which the woman actually goes through the motions of copulation and achieves a climax; similar fits have been observed in mental patients in the twenty-first century. Thus it appears that in the case of Anne Cole the confessor as well as the afflicted person was an hysteric. This pattern we shall see again at Salem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Rebecca Greensmith was hanged in 1663. So was her husband Nathaniel, although we do not know the grounds for his conviction; according to Increase Mather he did not confess. “Most” of the other persons accused by the demonic voices “made their escape into another part of the country.” What happened to the others we do not know, but they were apparently not executed. And since at least one of those who made her escape had at first been imprisoned in suspicion of witchcraft (Judith Varlet, a relative of Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New York), it can be assumed that the authorities were reluctant to press the matter further. The evidence they had was, after all, highly suspect, coming from demonic voices on the one hand and a confessed witch on the other. (Confessors are a group of women with the power to make anyone they touch love them. This love, however, is more aptly described as a soul-destroying obsession whose objective is pleasing the Confessor in any way possible. Confessors were created by warlocks to travel Medieval lands and act as law enforcers. The Confessors could possess anyone and make them tell the truth in great detail. There were also a few male Confessors, but they became megalomanics and plunged the entire World into a dark age. As a result, after all the male Confessors were defeated and wiped out, the warlocks and female Confessors took up the tradition of killing all male Confessors shortly after birth.) In any event, after the “execution of some and escape of others” Anne Cole’s fits ceased, and did not return. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Twenty years later, in 1682, the Reverend John Whiting reported that “she yet remains maintaining her integrity.” This together with what the voices said, suggests that Anne Cole’s fits probably were caused by her fear of witchcraft and cured by the removal of the fear. A few other cases are remarkable for a number of reasons, one of them being the exemplary thoroughness with which the symptoms of the affiliated persons are described, which makes it possible to say without question that these were pathological cases of hysteria. The first took place in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1671-1671 and was recorded by the Reverend Samuel Willard, then minister of Groton (during the Salem trials he was a member of the Boston Clergy). On 30 October 1671, Elizabeth Knapp began to behave strangely: “In the evening, a little before she went to bed, sitting by the fire she cried out, ‘Oh! My legs!’ and clapped her hands on them; immediately, ‘Oh! My breast!’ and removed her hands thither; and forthwith, ‘Oh! I am strangled’ and put her hands on her throat.” The similarity to Janet’s twentieth-century description of the onset of a typical hysterical fit is unmistakable; it starts, he writes “with a pain or a strange sensation situated at such or such a point of the body…[It] often begins in the lower part of the abdomen [and] seems to ascend and to spread to other organs. For instance, it very often spreads to the epigastrium, to the breast, then to the throat. There it assumes rather an interesting form, which was for a very long time considered as quite characteristic of hysteria. The patient has the sensation of too big an object, as it were, a ball, rising in her throat and choking her.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The chocking sensation we shall find over and over again; it is the bolus hystericus and is related to the “lump in the throat” felt by normal people in moments of extreme stress. The normal person, like the hysteric, tries to relieve it by swallowing; this is why the comic-strip artist has one’s characters say “Gulp” when they are in trouble. The choking sensations in the throat was followed by “fits in which she was violent in bodily motions, leapings, strainings and strange agitations, scarce to be held in bound by the strength of three or four; violent also in roarings and screamings.” The fits continued until 15 January 1692, the date of Willard’s writings. Several of the details he recorded are worth noting. On 15 November, “her tongue was for many hours together drawn into a semicircle up to the roof of her mouth, and not to be removed, for some tried with the fingers to do it.” On 17 December her tongue was drawn “out of her mouth most frightfully, to an extraordinary length and greatness.” Devils appeared to her, and witches; “Oh,” she cried to one of them, “you are a rouge.” On 29 November she had a particularly grotesque hallucination, when she believed a witch in the shape of a dog with a woman’s head was strangling her. The hallucinations and the woman’s sufferings were terrifyingly convincing; Willard noted that when she thought the witch was strangling her, “she did often times seem to our apprehension as of she would forthwith be strangled.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Elizabeth Knapp’s case is strikingly similar to that of Ler—one of the best-known cases of J.-M. Charcot, the nineteenth-century psychologist. Her fits, he wrote, “are characterized in the first stage by epileptiform and tetaniform convulsions; after this come great gesticulations of a voluntary character, in which the patient, assuming the most frightful postures, reminds one of the attitudes which history assigns to the demoniacs…At this stage of the attack, se is a prey to delirium, and raves evidently of the events which seem to have determined her first seizures. She hurls furious invectives against imaginary individuals, crying out, “villains! robbers! brigands! fire! fire! O, the dogs! I’m bitten!”—Reminiscences, doubtless, of the emotions experienced in her youth.” When the convulsive portion of Ler—’s attack was over other symptoms usually followed, including “hallucination of vision: the patient beholds horrible animals, skeletons, and specters” and “lastly, a more or less marked permanent contracture of the tongue.” Charcot drew this contracture of the tongue; it is quite appalling. Willard was not exaggerating in calling it frightful. Elizabeth Knapp displayed still other symptoms are identifiably hysterical, including loss of speech on some occasions, and on others speaking in voices other than her own; once “she barked like a dog, and bleated like a calf.” Willard noted that her fits did not seem to do her any permanent physical damage: “She hath no ways in body or strength by all these fits, though so dreadful, but gathered flesh exceedingly, and hath her natural strength when her fits are off, for the most part.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This is typical; as Janet remarks, the “hysteric patient, after howling for several hours, feels rather comfortable; she experiences, as it were, a relaxation, and declares she is out of her fits has often raised the question of whether they are genuine. Willard thought they must be, if only for their violence: “such a strength is beyond the force of dissimulation.” (It should be noted that hysterics are not always well in the intervals between their fits. Some, for instance, lose their appetites and starve themselves. It is probably such cases who are referred to in the statue of James I against witchcraft as being “wasted, consumed, pined.) On 1 November, Elizabeth Knapp named one of her neighbour as the probable cause of her afflictions. The accused woman was sent for, and entered the house while the afflicted girl was in a fit. Her eyes were closed, as they usually were in her fits, yet she could distinguish this neighbour’s touch from all others, “though no voice was uttered.” That would have been quite enough to convict the neighbour in many witchcraft cases. However, fortunately she was permitted to pray with the afflicted girl, and at the conclusions Miss Knapp “confessed that she believed Satan had deluded her.” Willian was happy that “God was pleased to vindicate the case and justify the innocent,” and reported that Miss Knapp never again complained of any “apparition or disturbance from this neighbour.” Instead, she turned to accusing the Devil, who had, she said, been offering her a covenant for several years, a covenant she had frequently been tempted to sign. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The dark shadow that Satan has cast over the World grew deeper and deeper. About a month later Miss Knapp accused another person of witchcraft, this time during a period of hallucinations. Her father brought the woman to the house, and Willard, who had been asked to be present, noted that her fit became particularly violent when this woman entered. However, Willard, wrote, “we made nothing of it” since her fits had been as violent on other occasions. Instead they inquired carefully into the mater and found “two evident and clear mistakes” in the accusation. This was enough to exonerate the second accused woman. Satan had implanted this principle. Wherever it was held, people had no barrier against sin. Elizabeth Knapp was still having fits when Willard wrote about her, and all he could be certain of was that “she is an object of pity.” He did not think she was bewitched, but he did believe she was possessed (that is, that Devils has entered into her). This remained his opinion (and that of most others) when the case was remembered in 1692. He also believed that the girl’s terrible afflictions provided an occasion for the community to examine its collective conscience. Therefore he admonished his congregation in a sermon, “Let us all examine by this Providence [id est, this event] what sins they have been, that have given Satan so much footing in this poor place.” Satan was seeking to shut out from humans a knowledge of God, to turn their attention from the temple of God, and to establish His own kingdom. His strife for supremacy had seemed to be almost wholly successful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
They robbed God of His glory, and defrauded the World by a counterfeit of the gospel. They had refused to surrender themselves to God for the salvation of the World, and they became agents of Satan for its destruction. They were doing the work Satan designed them to do, taking a course to misrepresent the character of God, and cause the World to look upon Him as a tyrant. The convulsive fits which played so prominent a part in most witchcraft cases, and continued to be one of the most common symptoms of hysteria through the earl years of the twentieth century, have no become relatively rare in Western civilization. D.W. Abse reports fits occurred in only six out of one hundred and sixty-one cases of hysteria treated at a British military hospital during World War II, but that they were the most common symptom among Indian Army hysterics treated at Delhi during the same period. There are a number of possible explanations for this curious fact. Hysterics are notoriously suggestible, so the change may be ascribable to nothing more than the refusal of our culture to give the hysterical fit the respectful and awed attention it used to command. In any case, it seems clear that abnormal behaviour varies with time and place just as normal behaviour does. However, since this particular variation occurred so recently, after the classic studies of hysteria had been completed, it is possible to identify the seventeenth-century Massachusetts fits for what they were. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Mr. William Wirt Winchester, while we were attending lectures, purchased three or four old houses in California, one of which was unoccupied. He resided in the country, and he proposed that he wanted his wife and myself to take up our abode in the untenanted house, so long as it should continue unlet; a move which we would accomplish the double end of settling us nearer alike to our lecture-rooms and to our amusements, and of relieving us from the weekly charge of rent for our lodgings. Our furniture was very scant—our whole equipage remarkably modest and primitive; and in short, our arrangements pretty nearly as simple as those of a bivouac. Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s new plan was, therefore, executed almost as soon as conceived. The front drawing-room was our sitting-room. I had the bedroom over it, and Mrs. Winchester had the back bedroom on the same floor, which nothing could have induced me to occupy. The house to begin with was an incomplete, three-story farm house with a basement. It was very old. Dated back to the sixteenth century, I believe. It had nothing modern about it. The agent who looked into the property titles for Mrs. Winchester told her it was originally sold, along with much other forfeited property in 1702; and it had belonged to John Conduit, whose wife was the niece of Sir Isaac Newton, a father of modern science, although keenly interested in the occult. How old it was then, I cannot say; but, at all events, in had seen years and changes enough to have contracted all the mysterious and saddened air, at once exciting and depressing, which belongs to most old mansions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
There had been very little done in the way of modernizing details and, perhaps, it was better so; for there was something queer and by-gone in the very walls and ceilings—in the shape of doors and windows—in the odd diagonal site of the chimney-pieces—in the beams and ponderous cornices—not to mention the singular solidity of all the woodwork, from the bannisters to the window-frames, which hopelessly defined disguise, and would have emphatically proclaimed their antiquity through any conceivable amount of modern finery and varnish. An effort had, indeed, been made, to the extent of papering the drawing-rooms; but somehow, the paper looked raw and out of keeping. This woman said, old Judge Sir James Hales (who, having earned the reputation of a particularly ‘hanging judge’, ended by hanging himself, as the corner’s jury found, under an impulse of ‘temporary insanity’, with a child’s skipping-rope, over the massive old bannisters) resided there, entertaining good company, with fine venison and rare old port. In those halcyon days, the drawing-rooms were hung with gilded leather, and, I dare say, cut a good figure, for they were really spacious rooms. The bedrooms were wainscoted, but the front one was not gloomy; and in it the cosiness of antiquity quite overcame its somber associations. However, the back bedrooms, with its two queerly-placed melancholy windows, staring vacantly at the foot of the bed, and with the shadowy recess to be found in most old houses in Dublin, like a large ghostly closet, which, from congeniality of temperament, had amalgamated with the bedchamber, and dissolved the partition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
At the night-time, this “alcove”—as our “maid” was wont to call it—had, in my eyes, a specially sinister and suggestive character. Mrs. Winchester’s distant and solitary candle glimmered vainly into its darkness. There it was always overlooking her—always itself impenetrable. However, this was only part of the effect. The whole room was, I cannot tell, how repulsive to me. There was, I supposed, in its proportions and features, a latent discord—a certain mysterious and indiscernible relation, which jarred indistinctly upon some secret sense of the fitting and the safe, and raised indefinable suspicious and apprehensions of the imagination. On the whole, as I began saying, nothing could have induced me to pass a night alone in it. We have not been very long in occupation of our respective chambers, when I began to complain of uneasy nights and disturbed sleep. I was, I suppose, the more impatient under this annoyance, as I was usually a sound sleeper, and by no means prone to nightmares. It was not, however, my destiny, instead of enjoying my customary repose, every night to “sup full of horrors.” After a preliminary course of disagreeable and frightful dreams, my troubles took a definite form, and the same vision, without an appreciable variation in a single detail, visited me at least (on average) every second night of the week. Now, this dream, nightmare, or infernal illusion—which you please—of which I was the miserable port, was on this wise: I saw, or thought I saw, with the most abominable distinctness although at the time in profound darkness, every article of furniture and accidental arrangement of the chamber in which I lay. This, as you know, is incidental to ordinary nightmare. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Well, while in this clairvoyant condition, which seemed but the lighting up of the theatre in which was to be exhibited the monotonous tableau of horror, which made my nights insupportable, my attention invariably became, I know not why, fixed upon the windows opposite the foot of my bed; and, uniformly with the same effect, a sense of dreadful anticipation always took slow but sure possession of me. I became somehow conscious of a sort of horrid but undefined preparation going forward in some unknown quarter, and by some unknown agency, for my torment; and, after an interval, which always seemed to me of the same length, a picture suddenly flew up the window, where it remained fixed, as if by an electrical attraction, and my discipline of horror then commenced, to last perhaps for hours. The picture this mysteriously glued to the window-panes, was the portrait of an old man, in crimson flowered silk dressing-gown, the folds of which I could now describe, with countenance embodying a strange mixture of intellect, sensuality, and power, but withal sinister and full of malignant omen. His nose was hooked, like the beak of a vulture; his eyes large, grey, and prominent and lighted up with a more than mortal cruelty and coldness. The features were surmounted by a crimson velvet cap, the hair that peeped from under which was white with age, while the eyebrows retained their original blackness. Well I remember every line, hue, and shadow of that stony countenance, and well I may! The gaze of this hellish visage was fixed upon me, and mine returned it with the inexplicable fascination of nightmare, for what appeared to me to be hours of agony. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
At last—the cock he crew, away then flew, the fiend who had enslaved me through the awful watches of the night and, harassed and nervous, I rose to the duties of the day. I had—I cannot say exactly why, but it may have been from the exquisite anguish and profound impressions of unearthly horror, with which this strange phantasmagoria was associated—an insurmountable antipathy to describing the exact nature of my nightly troubles to Mrs. Winchester. Generally, however, I told her I was haunted by abominable dreams; and, true to the imputed materialism of medicine, we put our heads together to dispel my horrors, not by exorcism, but by a tonic Vin Mariani. However, the evil spirit, who enthralled my senses in the shape of that portrait, may have been just as near me, just as energetic, just as malignant, though I saw him not. Everybody knows how contagious is fear of all sort, but more especially that particular kind of fear under which poor Mrs. Winchester was at that moment labouring. I would not have heard, nor I believe would she have recapitulated, just at that moment, for half the World, the details of the hideous vision which had so unmanned her. “I was sitting in my room,” said Mrs. Winchester “by my fireplace, the door locked when I heard a step on the flight of stairs descending from the attics. It was two o’ clock, and the streets were as silent as a churchyard—the sounds were, therefore, perfectly distinct. There was slow, heavy tread, characterized by the emphasis and deliberation of age, descending by the narrow staircase from above; and, what made the sound more singular, it was plain that the feet which produced it were perfectly bare measuring a descent with something between a pound and a flop, very ugly to hear. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“I knew quite well that you and my attendant had gone away many hours before, and that nobody but myself has any business in the house. It was quite plain also that the person who was coming down stairs had no intention whatever of concealing his movements; but, on the contrary, appeared disposed to make even more noise, and proceed more deliberately, than was at all necessary. When the step reached the foot of the stairs outside my room, it seemed to stop; and I expected every moment to see my door open spontaneously, and give admission to soul killed by the Winchester rifle. I was, however, relieved in a few second by hearing the descent renewed, just in the same manner, upon the stair case leading down to the drawing-rooms, and thence, after another pause, down the next flight, and so on to the hall, whence I heard no more. Now, by the time the sound had ceased, I was wound up, as they say, to a very unpleasant pitch of excitement. I listened, but there was not a stir. I screw up my courage to a decisive experiment—opened my door, and in a stentorian voice bawled over the banisters, ‘Who’s there?’ There was no answer but the ringing of my own voice through the empty old house—no renewal of the movement; nothing short, to give my unpleasant sensations a definite direction. There is, I think, something most disagreeably disenchanting in the sound of one’s own voice under such circumstances, exerted in solitude, and in vain. It redoubled my sense of isolation, and my misgivings increased on perceiving that the door, which I certainly thought I had left open, was closed behind me. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“In a vague alarm, lest my retreat should be cut off, I got again into my room as quickly as I could, where I remained in a state of imaginary blockade, and very uncomfortable indeed, till morning. Next night brought no return of my barefooted fellow-lodger; but the night following, being in my bed, and in the dark—somewhere, I supposed, about the same hour as before, I distinctly heard the old fellow again descending from the garrets. This time I jumped out of bed, clutched the poker as I passed the expiring fire, and in a moment was upon the lobby. The sound had ceased by this time—the dark and chill were discouraging; and, guess my horror, when I saw, or thought I saw, a monster, whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not say, standing, with its back to the wall, on the lobby, facing me, with a pair of great greenish eyes shinning dimly out. Now, I must be frank, and confess that the cupboard which displayed our plates and cups stood just there, though at that moment I did not recollect it. At the same time I must never could satisfy myself that I was made the dupe of my own fancy in this matter; for this apparition, after one or two shiftings of shape, as if in the act of incipient transformation, began, as it seemed on second thoughts, to advance upon me in its original form. From an instinct of terror rather than of courage, I hurled the poker, with all my force, at its head; and to the music of a horrid crash made my way into my room, and double-locked the door. Then, in a minute more, I heard the horrid bare feet walk down the stairs, till the sound ceased in the halls, as on the former occasion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“In a vague alarm, lest my retreat should be cut off, I got again into my room as quickly as I could, where I remained in a state of imaginary blockade, and very uncomfortable indeed, till morning. Next night brought no return of my barefooted fellow-lodger; but the night following, being in my bed, and in the dark—somewhere, I supposed, about the same hour as before, I distinctly heard the old fellow again descending from the garrets. This time I jumped out of bed, clutched the poker as I passed the expiring fire, and in a moment was upon the lobby. The sound had ceased by this time—the dark and chill were discouraging; and, guess my horror, when I saw, or thought I saw, a monster, whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not say, standing, with its back to the wall, on the lobby, facing me, with a pair of great greenish eyes shinning dimly out. Now, I must be frank, and confess that the cupboard which displayed our plates and cups stood just there, though at that moment I did not recollect it. At the same time I must never could satisfy myself that I was made the dupe of my own fancy in this matter; for this apparition, after one or two shiftings of shape, as if in the act of incipient transformation, began, as it seemed on second thoughts, to advance upon me in its original form. From an instinct of terror rather than of courage, I hurled the poker, with all my force, at its head; and to the music of a horrid crash made my way into my room, and double-locked the door. Then, in a minute more, I heard the horrid bare feet walk down the stairs, till the sound ceased in the halls, as on the former occasion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“If the apparition of the night before was an ocular delusion of my fancy sporting with the dark outlines of our cupboard, and if tis horrid eyes were nothing but a pair of inverted teacups, I had, at all events, the satisfaction of having launched the poker with admirable effect, and in true ‘fancy’ phrase, ‘knocked its two daylights into one,’ as the commingled fragments of my tea-service testified. I did my best to gather comfort and courage from these evidences; but it would not do. And then what could I say of those horrid bare feet, and the regular tramp, tramp, tramp, which measured the distance of the entire staircase through the solitude of my haunted dwelling, and at an hour when no good influence was stirring? Confound it!—the whole affair was abominable. I was out of spirits, and dreaded the approach of night. It came, ushered ominously in with a thunderstorm and dull torrents of depressing rain. Earlier than usual the streets grew silent; and by twelve o’clock nothing but the comfortless patterning of the rain was to be heard. I made myself as snug as I could. I lighted two candles instead of one. I forswore bed, and held myself in readiness for a sally, candle in hand; for, coute qui coute, I was resolved to see the being, if visible at all, who troubled the nightly stillness of my mansion. I was fidgety and nervous and, tried in vain to interest myself with my books. I walked up and down my room, whistling in turn martial and hilarious music, and listening ever and anon for the dreaded noise.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Do not Grieve. Anything you lose comes around in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk now drinks cranberry juice. God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed. As roses, up from ground. Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse being saddled. It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open. There is the light gold of wheat in the sun, and the gold of bread made from wheat. I have neither, I am only talking about them as a town in the desert looks up to stars on a clear night. The Son of God, looking upon the World, beheld suffering and misery. With pity He saw how humans had become victims of satanic cruelty. He looked with compassion upon those who were being corrupted, murdered, and lost. They had chosen a ruler who chained them to his carriage as captives. God’s glory pervades the Universe; His ministering Angels inquire of one another: Where is the place of His glory? In response they give praise: Praised be the glory of the Lord from His Heavenly abode. From His Heavenly abode may He turn in mercy and bestow grace unto the people who, reciting the Shema evening and morning, twice daily, proclaim in love the unity of His name, saying: Hear, O America: the Lord our God, the Lord is One. He is our God; He is our Father, our sovereign and our Deliverer. In His mercy He will make known in presence of all the living that He will be your God. “I am the Lord your God.” As it is written in holy Scripture: The Lord shall reign forever; Thy God, O America, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
Ghostly tales are bountiful at Sarah Winchester’s Mystery House. What have you experienced? Photos are encouraged!
The Winchester mansion is 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
“Whoever shadows my every move will not lose me in the dark.” At least that is what Christ says, or what the Evangelist John heard Him say (8.12). He tells us to walk on, through the darkness, with Christ as our only torch. That way, when we mayn’t have gained a step, but we won’t have lost one either. And on into the day we must pursue with dogged tread the life of Jesus Christ. Is this the secret to Mrs. Winchester’s 7-11 staircase?
They Shared the Feelings and Belief of the Best Hearts and Wisest Heads of the Seventeenth Century!
As far as aggression is biologically given in human genes, it is not spontaneous, but a defense against threats to human vital interests, that of one’s growth and one’s species’ survival. This defensive aggression was relatively small under certain primitive conditions—when no human was much of a threat to another human. Humans have gone through an extraordinary development since then. It is legitimate to imagine that humans will complete the full circle and construct a society in which no one is threatened: not the child by the parent; not the parent by the superior; no social class by another; no nation by a superpower. To achieve this aim is tremendously difficult for economic, political, cultural, and psychological reasons—and the added difficulty that the nations of the World worship idols—and different idols—and thus do not understand each other, even though they understand each other’s languages. To ignore these difficulties is folly; but if the political and psychological roadblocks are removed, the empirical study of all data shows that a real possibility exists to build such a World in the foreseeable future. The malignant forms of aggression, on the other hand—sadism and necrophilia—are not innate; hence, they can be substantially reduced when the socioeconomic conditions are replaced by conditions that are favourable to the full development of human’s genuine needs and capacities: to development of human self-activity and human’s creative power as its own ends. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple humans, and all factors that make humans into psychic cripples turn the also into a sadist or a destroyer. Witchcraft and sorcery are taboo subject matter. However, witchcraft actually did exist and was widely practiced in seventeenth-century New England, as it was in Europe at that time (and still is, for that matter, among the unlearned majority of humankind). It worked then as it works now in witchcraft societies like those of the West Indies, through psychogenic rather than occult means, commonly producing hysterical symptoms as a result of the victim’s fear, and sometimes, when fear was succeeded by a profound sense of hopelessness, even producing death. The behaviour of the afflicted person was not fraudulent but pathological. They were hysterics, and in the clinical rather than the popular sense of that term. These people were not merely overexcited; they were mentally ill. Furthermore, they were ill long before any clergyman got to them. The general populace did reach that state of public excitement inaccurately called “mass hysteria,” but this was due to the popular fear of witchcraft rather than to the preachings of the clergy. The public excitement continued well after the leadership, both clerical and secular, had called a halt to the witchcraft proceedings. In fact the clergy were, from beginning to end, the chief opponents to the events at Salem, Massachusetts USA. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In particular, Cotton Mather was anything but the wild-eyed fanatic of tradition. Throughout most of the proceedings, Mr. Mather was a model of restraint and caution, and at one point he went further than any of his colleagues dared go in proposing a method to protect the innocent. The executions at Salem were by no means unique. Belief in witchcraft was quite as common among seventeenth century Anglicans, Quakers, Lutherans, and Catholics as it was among Puritans. Executions for witchcraft reached their height in Western civilization during the seventeenth century and continued in Europe until the end of the following century, more than a hundred years after the outbreak at Salem. Many writers have taken exception to one point or another in the traditional interpretation. The point raised most often has been that witchcraft trials were not at all unusual in the seventeenth century; that they were in fact typical of Western civilization at the time. The Salem outbreak was not due to Puritanism; it is not assignable to any particular temper on the part of our New England ancestors; it is no sign of exceptional bigotry or abnormal superstition. Our forefathers believed in witchcraft, not because they were Puritans, not because they were Colonials, but because they were New Englanders,–but because they were men of their time. They shared the feelings and beliefs of the best hearts and wisest head of the seventeenth century. What more can be asked of them? #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
It is hard to satisfy modern writers on witchcraft, who insist on censuring the sixteenth and seventeenth century on a basis of modern rationalism. If some of these who now sit in judgement on the witch-prosecutors had been witch judges, it is quite certain that no defendant would have escaped. The common scholar as well as the common human has continued to believe that there was something peculiarly puritanical about the Salem trials. Most significantly, a few persons have recognized that image magic was actually employed in Massachusetts, and at least two have wondered whether there might not have been something behind the charges of witchcraft after all. The belief in the supernatural has even led some people to believe that perhaps Adolph Hitler, the most powerful man in Europe, who was admired by many Germans (and not few other people), had special talents and gifts. There are many reports mentioning the magnetic qualities of Hitler’s eyes. People often said that they saw a particular glitter in his eyes that gave them the appearance of great intensity, otherworldliness, and devotion that allowed him to whip up the audience’s emotions, and open the floodgates of his hate. Well-educated and intelligent people were fascinated by him and his extremely wide range of subjects on which Hitler talked with such self-assurance. It was these qualities that entranced a nation and that is why people felt that he may have had some supernatural powers, much like the women in Salem. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
David R. Proper, formerly librarian of Essex Institute, tells us that English professor George Lyman Kitteridge of Harvard University suspected that there might have been witchcraft practiced at Salem. Early in the year 1692 several girls of Salem Village (now Danvers), Massachusetts, began to sicken and display alarming symptoms. The most disturbing and most frequent of these symptoms was convulsive fits: fits so grotesque and so violent that eyewitnesses agreed the girls could not possibly be acting. “Their motions in the fits,” wrote Reverend Deodat Lawson, “are so preternatural, both as to the manner, which is so strange as a well person could not screw their body into; and as to the violence also it is preternatural, being much beyond the ordinary force of the same person when they are in their right mind.” The Reverend John Hale of Beverly confirmed Lawson’s description. “Their arms, necks, and back,” he wrote, “were turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect.” There were other symptoms almost equally alarming: temporary loss of hearing, speech, and sight; loss of memory, so that some girls could not recall what had happened to them in their fits; a choking sensation in the throat; loss of appetite. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Later there were terrifying hallucinations; they saw spectors who tormented them in a variety of ingenious and cruel ways. They felt themselves pinched and bitten, and often there were actual marks upon their skin. Dr. William Griggs of Salem Village—produced a diagnosis. “The evil hand,” he announced, “is upon them”; the girls were victims of malefic witchcraft. The diagnosis was in no way unusual. The overwhelming majority of seventeenth-century physicians, like other learned men, believed in witchcraft and considered it the cause of some of the diseases. Sir Thomas Brown shared the same opinion, “That these swooning fits were natural, and nothing else but what they call the mother, but only heightened to a great excess by the subtlety of the Devil, co-operating with the malice of these which we term witches, at whose instance he doth these villainies.” “The mother” was the common abbreviation for “the suffocation of the mother,” one of the seventeenth-century English terms for hysteria; it referred to the choking sensation in the throat that was one of the commoner systems. Thus, Sir Thomas Browne was entirely correct in his identification of the illness, and it is quite possible that Dr. Griggs, too, was right in whatever identification he made of the Salem symptoms. What is more surprising is that Dr. Griggs was probably also correct in his identification of the cause. It does seem to have been witchcraft that was responsible for the girls’ afflictions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Witchcraft is not easy to define, because it is not, like the major formal religions, a coherent body of belief. However, in the New World civilization since prehistoric times there has been a loosely grouped body of magical lore—charms, spells, and so forth—having to do primarily with fertility and infertility, and with healthy and sickness, as well as a series of more marginal concerns, including the foretelling of the future. If tenuous, such lore has obvious connections with pre-Christian fertility worship, whose tutelary deity was a fertility god. Probably the commonest of such gods has been the deified sun, but the next most common was the deified herd animal, the cow, or, more often (because of his reputation for lechery) the goat. Half human and half bestial, with horns and cloven hooves, he appeared as Dionysus or Bacchus, the chief fertility god of the classical World, and was also to be found in the pantheons of northern Europe. Apparently the early Christians thought him the most abominable of all the pagan deities; they gave his attributes, his horns and cloven hooves, to the Devil, adding to these the wings of the fallen Angel. That he was once an extraordinarily powerful god cannot be doubted; there are instances of his survival in pre-Christian form as late as the twentieth century. A traveler in southern Ireland during the nineteen thirties reported seeing villagers dance in a ring around a goat those horns and hooves had been painted gold. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
They informed him that on the coming Sunday they would roast and eat the goat, because “they had done it always.” I myself have seen one survival of the horned god: the Austrian Krampus. He has now degenerated into a bogeyman for children. Black and furry, with horns and a contorted face, he is the companion of St, Nicholas, and attends to bad children while St. Nicholas attends the good. The horned god’s power may also be seen in the fact that medieval and renaissance artists frequently forgot to give him his Christian attribute, the fallen Angel’s wins, but never forgot his horns, the attribute that made him a fertility god. This is true not only of provincial works of art but also of those created for the centers of Western civilization. In the dome of the baptistery at Florence for example, is a mosaic “Last Judgment,” and at the center of its Hell sits Devil who is wingless but conspicuously horned. The same is trye of the Devil in Giotto’s “Last Judgment” in the Arena Chapel in Padua. If the tutelary deity of witchcraft was deified herd animal, this does not mean that everyone who has used a charm was a formal worshipper of Satan. Nevertheless, not much more than two centuries ago everyone who used a charm believed one was making an appeal to dangerous occult forces, and at possible peril to one’s soul. However, the degree of peril was relative, and proportionate to the degree of witchcraft which like murder, comes in three degrees. The first is the practice of white magic—charms or spells used for benevolent purposes. Carrying a rabbit’s foot (the rabbit, like the goa, is notorious for its fertility) is white magic. So is nailing a horseshoe over the door (the open end must be upward, so the shape will suggest the horns of the herd animal). #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Since the intention was innocent, the practice of white magic was seldom a cause for official concern. It was, of course, an appeal to occult forces that were specifically non-Christian, and as such it could, and sometimes did, draw a stern verbal rebuke from the clergy. However, that was all. The second degree of witchcraft is black magic—magic used maliciously—and in the seventeenth century black magic was very serious indeed; it was an appeal to the Prince of Evil in order to accomplish evil. The third degree is pact, where the witch is no longer merely invoking the Devil’s assistance through one’s charms and spells, but actually believes one has made a contract to serve him. The penalties for witchcraft were relatively light in the early years of Christian history. In the seventh century Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his Liber Poentientialis, considered the penance appropriate to a person who has been imitating “a stage or a bull; that is, making oneself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin of a herd animal, and putting on the heads of beasts.” To “those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal” he assigned “penance for three years because this is devilish.” At this time paganism was still so widespread and Christianity so new that, according to the Venerable Bede, King Redwald of East Anglia “had in the same temple an altar to sacrifice to Christ and another to offer victims to demons.” Elements of paganism remained strong throughout the Middle Ages, inside the church as well as out. In 1282 the priest of Inverkeithing led a fertility dance around the churchyard. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
And Giraldus Cambrensis (ca. 1146-ca. 1220) reported, “though I say it with tears,” that there were priests who celebrate “masses over images of wax, to curse someone.” The remedy for such an appalling situation, Giraldus thought was to ordain fewer priests and more care in their selection. His advice, of course, was not followed, and members of the clergy continued to practice black arts as late as the eighteenth century. Toward the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance both church and state began to take witchcraft more seriously. The crucial century was the fifteenth, which saw a number of important trials, including those of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, and the Duchess of Gloucester. At the end of this century, in 1490, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) was published. The authors were James Sprenger and Henry Kramer, two German Dominicans, and their book published with the Papal Bull by which Innocent VIII gave them jurisdiction as Inquisitors for the Germanic countries. Malleus gave a thorough definition of witchcraft with rules on how to investigate, try, and judge cases of witchcraft. It remained an important work for more than two hundred years; Increase Mather knew of it and referred to it. The publication of Malleus Maleficarum gives us a convenient date for opening of that general war against the Devil which occupied all Christendom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The full horror of that warfare will never be known in all of its detail. Even the statistics of convicted witches who were executed vary widely from one authority to another. However, it is clear that the battle reached its height during the first half of the seventeenth century, when, for example, approximately nine hundred witches were burned in the single city of Bamberg, and approximately five thousand in the single province of Alsace. It was Boyle who proposed that English miners be interviewed as to whether they “meet with any subterraneous demons; and if they do, in what shape and manner they appear; what they portend, and what they do. Newton, the greatest scientist of his age, spent more of his time on the occult than he did in the study of physics. He explicated, for example, apocalyptic passages in the Bible, and interpreted the measurements of Solomon’s temple, hoping in both cases that a mystic reading of the scriptures would lead him to the inmost secrets of the Universe. We should remember also that the seventeenth century firmly believed in a dualistic Universe: in a material or visible World, and a spiritual or invisible Worlds as well. Heaven was still a concrete reality, as were the Angels who inhabited it; so was Hell and its Devil. As John Locke argued in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “If this notion of immaterial spirit may have, perhaps, some difficulties in it not easily to be explained, we have therefore no more reason to deny or doubt the existence of such spirits, than we have to deny or doubt the existence of body; because the notion of body is cumbered with some difficulties very hard, and perhaps impossible to be explained or understood by us.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Like other learned men of his time, Locke not only believed in a World of spirits, but that the spirits can appear in this material World: “that Spirits can assume to themselves bodies of different bulk, figure, and conformations of parts.” To be sure, Locke warned that “universal certainty” concerning the World of spirits was beyond us; we could know it, he thought, only as it impinges on our senses. However, that, of course, is precisely what was thought to happen in witchcraft. Thomas Hobbes was a skeptic, but his skepticism was rather different in character from that of the nineteenth or twentieth century. “As for witches,” he wrote in his Leviathan, “I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can; their trade being nearer to a new religion than to a craft or science.” (The last clause is remarkably perceptive, although it was, of course, survivals of old religion rather than anything new that were to be found in witchcraft.) If you had been sticking pins in your neighbour’s image or casting spells on his cow, you would not have wanted Thomas Hobbes to be your judge. He would not have believed in your occult powers, but he would have hanged you anyway, for your heresy and malice. We must bear in mind that in a society which believes in witchcraft, it works. If you believe in witchcraft and you discover that someone has been melting your wax image over a slow fire or muttering charms over your nail-parings, the probability is that you will get extremely sick. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
To be sure, your symptoms will be psychosomatic rather than organic. However, the fact that they are obviously not organic will make them only more terrible, since they will seem the result of malefic and demonic power. So it was in seventeenth-century Europe, and so it was in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The hideous convulsive fits were thought to be the result of witches and demons wrenching the bodies of their victims into tortuous postures. The loss of hearing, speech, sight, appetite, and memory were deprivations caused by Satan himself. The contradiction of the throat—the globus hystericus—was seen as an attempt by demons to make the victim swallow occult poisons. And when she swallowed rapidly and her belly welled (what s actually involved here is a kind of accelerated ulcer formation), it was thought the demons had succeeded. When blisters appeared upon the skin (many skin diseases are functional rather than organic), they were thought to have been raised by brimstone out of Hell. Many of these symptoms, including the skin lesions, would pass fairly rapidly. Cotton Mather, who was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a former medical student, and a thorough and careful observer, remarked more than once on the surprising rapidity with which “witch-wounds” healed. However, other symptoms would persist. And a new fit would bring a repetition of the old afflictions, or new ones equally alarming. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The cause of these hysterical symptoms, of course, was not witchcraft itself but the victim’s fear of it, and that is why so many innocent persons were executed. It is impossible now, and was in many instances impossible then, to tell how many of the persons executed for witchcraft were actually guilty of practicing it. It is surely no exaggeration to say that the majority, even the vast majority, were innocent victims of hysterical fears. However, we should again be wary of converting a statistical truth into a general principle. While it is clearly true that the majority of persons executed for witchcraft were innocent, it is equally true that some of them, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, were guilty. For those who look back on it, the Victorian age seems to be invested with a peculiar quality of difference—heightened by tis relative proximity in time—that is reflected in its ghost. It was an age shaped, perhaps more than any other previous period, by the forces of transition. In 1884, Mrs. Winchester left New Haven, Connecticut, and the graves of her husband and only child, moved to San Jose, California, and began the obsession that was to last for the rest of her life. She purchased an unfinished eight-room farmhouse outside the small agricultural town, and for the next 38 years, the sound of construction on Mrs. Winchester’s mansion never stopped. With the shadow of change falling across virtually every area of life and thought, the receding past became a focus for anxiety, and in literature the ghost story offered a way of anchoring the past to an unsettled present by operating in a continuum of life and death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Mrs. Winchester hired carpenters to work around the clock building and rebuilding room after room, as the spirits—or her mood—directed. The house was furnished with the finest materials and was a showcase of Victorian elegance and taste. Mrs. Winchester passed away peacefully in her sleep on September 5, 1922, and work on the still uncompleted mansion stopped. Why did Mrs. Winchester build the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansion? Was she following the advice of psychics who told her to provide a home for the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifles? Was she told she would live forever, so long as construction never stopped? We may never know Mrs. Winchester’s real motivations, since she took the secret with her to her grace. So we leave to you to decide for yourself the mystery of the Winchester Mystery House. In the ghost story, obligations do not cease with death, and the past is never a closed book. What has been can be again, though often terribly transformed. For a progressive age (progressing to what?), the idea of a vindictive past held an especial potential for terror. In personal terms, ghosts were obvious, though still potent, images of the lost past—past sins, past promises, past attachments, past regrets—and could be used to confront, and exorcize, the demons of guilt and fear. We know that we are to be shown a climatic interaction between the living and the dead, and usually expect to be unsettled by the experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Mrs. Winchester’s mansion was said to be a very grand place. Driving up to the mansion, it was like one left all signs of a town, or even a village, and were then inside the gates of a large Victorian park—not like the parks here in the north, but with rocks, and the noise of running water, and beautiful thorn-trees, and old oaks, all white and peeled with age. The road went up about two miles, and then one would see a great and stately house, with many trees close around it, so close that in some places their branches dragged against the walls when the wind blew. The great oval drive was without a weed and two palm trees, in plain view a 7 story tower, along with two statues of a Greek goddesses, at the many-windowed front; at both sides of which a wing projected, which were each the ends of other side fronts; for the house was grander than most expected. There was also a little old-fashioned flower-garden. When people rode up to the great front entrance of Winchester mansion in their carriage, and went into the hall they thought they should be lost—it was so large, and vast, and grand. There was a chandelier all of bronze, hanging down from the middle of the ceiling; and many have never seen one before, and looked at it all in amaze. Then, at once end of the hall, was a great fireplace, as large as the sides of the houses in many countries, with massy andirons and Greek goddesses to hold the wood; and by it were heavy French provincial sofas. At the opposite end of the hall, to the left as you went in—on the western side—was an organ built into the wall, and so large that it filled up the best part of that end. Beyond it, on the same side, was a door; and opposite, on each side of the fireplace, were also doors leading to the east front; but those I never went through as long as I stayed in the house, so I cannot tell you what lay beyond. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Mrs. Winchester held very tight to me, as if she were scared and lost in that great place, and for myself, I was not much better. The west drawing-room was very cheerful-looking, with a warm fire in it, and plenty of good, comfortable future about it. So we went out of that great drawing-room, and into another sitting-room, and out of that, and then up a great flight of stairs, and along a broad gallery—which was something like a library, having books all down one side, and windows and writing-tables all down the other—till we came to the room I would be staying in, which I was not sorry to hear was just over the kitchens; for I began to think I should be lost in that wilderness of a house. The great old house was a famous place for Mrs. Winchester. She made expeditions all over it, with me at her heels; all except the east wing, which was never opened, and whither we never thought of going. However, in the western and northern part was many a pleasant room; full of things that were curiosities to guests. The windows were darkened by the sweeping boughs of the trees, and ivy which had overgrown them: but, in the green gloom, we could manage to see old China jars and carved ivory boxes, and great heavy books, and, above all, the old pictures. They were all portraits of some of the Winchester family, though Mrs. Winchester could not tell us the names of every one. We had gone through most of the 180 rooms, when we came to the old state drawing-room over the all, and there was a picture of Mrs. Winchester. She was such a beauty! She had a dress on, the like of which I had never seen before. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Mrs. Winchester said there were some places about the house she was half frightened at. As winter drew closer and day grew shorter, I was sometimes almost certain that I heard noises as if someone was playing on the great organ in the hall. I did not hear it ever evening; but certainly, I did very often; usually when I was sitting with Mrs. Winchester. Even after she went to bed, I used to hear it booming and swelling in the distance. The first night I went down to my supper, I asked Mrs. Winchester who had been playing music, and the butler said very short that I was a gowk to take the wind soughing among the trees for music: but I saw Mrs. Winchester look at him very fearfully, and the kitchen-maid, said something beneath her breath, and went quite white. I saw they did not like my question. They had heard the very strange noise, and had heard it many a time, but most of all on winter nights, and before storms; and folks did say it was the old lord playing on the great organ in the hall, just as he used to do when he was alive. The days grew shorter and shorter; and the old lord, if it was he, played more and more stormily and sadly on the great organ. The doors in the east wing were always locked, and Mrs. Winchester always had the keys. I wondered what was hidden there. One fearful night, just after the New Year had come in, when the rain was thick and deep, and it was still falling—fast enough to blind anyone who might be out and abroad—there was a great and violent noise heard, and the old lord’s vice above all, cursing and swearing awfully—and the cries of a little child—and a fierce woman—the sound of a blow—and a dead stillness—and moans and wailings dying away. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Suddenly Mrs. Winchester went towards the door, and I durst not be left, though my heart almost stopped beating for fear. In the hall the screams were louder than ever; they sounded to come from the east wing—near and nearer—close on the other side of the locked-up doors—close behind them. Then I noticed that the great bonze chandelier seemed all alight, though the hall was dim, and that a fire was blazing in the vast in the vast hearth-place, though it gave no heat; and I shuddered up with terror. The east door shook, and Mrs. Winchester cried, “I must go! My little girl is there; I hear her; she is coming! I must go!” As if torn open in a violent passion, all at once the east door gave way with a thundering crash and there came into that broad mysterious light, the figure of a tall man, with red hair and gleaming eyes. He drove before him, with many a restless gesture of abhorrence, a stern and beautiful woman, with a little baby in her arms. “It’s the lady! the lady from the garden; and my little girl is with her. They are drawing me to them I feel them—I feel them I must go!” cried Mrs. Winchester. Again she almost convulsed by her effort to go towards them; but I held her tighter and tighter, till I feared I should do her a hurt; but rather that then let her go towards those terrible phantoms. They passed along toward the great hall-door, where the winds howled and ravened for their prey. And Mrs. Winchester was torn by a power stronger than mine and writhed in my arms, and sobbed (for by this time the poor darling was growing faint). #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“They want me to go with them—they are drawing me to them. Oh, my little girl!” said Mrs. Winchester. But just then I saw—we saw—another phantom shape itself, and grow clear out of the blue and misty light that filled the hall; we had not seen her till now, for it was another lady who stood by the man, with a look of relentless grief and triumphant scorn. That figure was very beautiful to look upon, with a soft white hat drawn down over the proud brows and a red and curling lip. It was dressed in a gown of blue stain. I had seen the figure before. It was the likeness of Mrs. Winchester in her youth; and the phantom moved on, regardless of Mrs. Winchester’s wild entreaty. But at that moment the dim lights, and the fire that gave no heat, went out of themselves, and Mrs. Winchester lay at my feet stricken down by the palsy—death stricken. Yes! She was carried to her bed that night never to rise again. She lay with her face to the wall muttering low but muttering alway; “Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age! What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” In recognition to Mrs. Winchester’s contribution to San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, the Winchester Mansion was designated California Register of Historic Place in 1974. The mansion was also designated a San Jose Historic Landmark in 1996. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Winchester Mystery House
Ever-changing and evolving, Mrs. Winchester’s Llanada Villa once stood seven-stories tall before the 1906 earthquake forced the top three floors to be removed. How do you think it felt to stand in the tower and look across the land that would eventually become a technology hub?
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 