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I Woke Up and Called this Morning, the Tone of Your Voice Was a Warning
Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling when we ought to think, and thinking when we ought to feel. Many people are content to allow authority figures to call the shots. If someone with an impressive array of credentials or degrees or a well-known name speaks out on a matter, of if a social institution or a book makes a statement on a matter, or if a social institution or a book makes a statement, the matter is “settled.” However, authority figures are subject to error, just as any of us are. If I do not keep my mind open to this possibility, then I may ignore my own feelings on a subject. Rationalization is a way of coping with a situation in which, for either practical or emotional reasons, or both, a battered woman is stuck. For some women, the situation and the beliefs that rationalize it, may continue for a lifetime. For others, changes may occur within the relationship, within individuals, or in available resources which serve as catalysts for redefining the violence. When battered women reject prior rationalizations and begin to view themselves as true victims of abuse, the victimization process begins. There are a variety of catalysts for redefining abuse; we discuss six: (1) a change in the level of violence; (2) a change in the resources; (3) a change in the relationship; (4) despair; (5) a change in the visibility of violence; and (6) external definitions of the relationship. The traditional ideal of many societies is to hold back strong or unpleasant emotions for the sake of others. However, feelings held in are likely to come out in some way—often an inappropriate one. So we are really not doing the other person much of a favor by trying to cover up feelings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A change in the level of violence: the severity of abuse is an important factor in women’s decisions to leave violent situations. There is no significant correlation between the number of years spent cohabiting with an abuser and the severity of abuse. On the contrary: the longer women lived with an abuser, the more severe the violence they endured, since violence increased in severity over time. What doe seem to serve as a catalyst is a sudden change in the relative level of violence. Women who suddenly realize that battering may be fatal may reject rationalizations in order to save their lives. One woman who had been severely beaten by an alcoholic husband for many years explained her decision to leave on the basis of a direct threat to her life: “It was like a pendulum. He’s swing to the extremes both ways. He’d get drunk and beat me up, then he’d get sober and treat me like a queen. One day he put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. It wasn’t loaded. But that’s when I decided I’d had it. I sued for separation of property. I knew what was coming again, so I got out. I didn’t want to. I still loved the guy, but I knew I had to for my own sanity.” A change in resources: Although some women rationalize cohabiting with an abuser by claiming they have no options, others begin reinterpreting violence when the resources necessary for escape become available. The emergence of safe homes or shelters since 1970 has produced a new resource for battered women, but they are not always safe places. While not completely adequate or satisfactory, the mere existence of a place to go alters the situation in which battering is experienced. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Public support of shelters is a statement to battered women that abuse need not be tolerated. Conversely, political trends which limit resources available to women, such as cutbacks in government funding to social programs, increase fears that life outside a violent marriage is economically impossible. One 25-year-old woman discussed this catalyst: “I stayed with him because I didn’t want my kids to have the same life I did. My parents were divorced, and I was always so ashamed of that. Yes, they’re all on their own now, so there’s no reason left to stay.” A change in the relationship: In the stages of a battering relationship, violent incidents are usually followed by periods of remorse and solicitude. Such phases deepen the emotional bonds, and make rejection of an abuser more difficult. However, as battering progresses, periods of remorse may shorten, or disappear, eliminating the basis for maintaining a positive outlook on the marriage. After a number of episodes of violence, a man may realize that this victim will not retaliate or escape, and thus feel no need to express remorse. Extended periods devoid of kindness or love may alter a woman’s feelings toward her partner so much so that she eventually begins to define herself as a victim of abuse. One woman recalled: “At first, you know, we used to have so much fun together. He was kind’ve, you know, a magnetic personality; he can be really charming. But it isn’t fun anymore. Since the baby came, it’s changed completely. He just wants me to stay home, while he goes out with his friends. He doesn’t even talk to me, most of the time….No, I don’t really love him anymore, not like I did. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Despair: Changes in the relationship may result in a loss of hope that “things will get better.” When hope is destroyed and replaced by despair, rationalizations of violence may give way to the recognition of victimization. Feelings of hopelessness or despair are the basis for some efforts to assist battered women, such as Al-Anon. The director of an Al-Anon organized shelter explained the concept of “hitting bottom”: Before the Al-Anon program can really be of benefit, a woman has to hit bottom. When you hit bottom, you realize that all of your own efforts to control the situation have failed; you feel helpless and lost and worthless and completely disenchanted with the World. Women cannot really be helped unless they are ready for it and want it. Some women come here when things get bad, but they are not really ready to be committed to Al-Anon. Things have not gotten bad enough for them, and they go right back. We see this all the time. A change in the visibility of violence: Creating a web of rationalizations to overlook violence is accomplished more easily if no intruders are present to question their validity. Since most violence between couples occurs in private, there are seldom conflicting interpretations of the event from outsiders. Only 7 percent of the respondents in our study who discussed spatial location of violence indicted events which took place outside the home, but all reported incidents within the home. Other report similar findings. If violence does occur in the presence of others, it may trigger a reinterpretation process. Battering in private is degrading, but battering in public is humiliating, for it is a statement of subordination and powerlessness. Having others witness abuse may create intolerable feeling of shame which undermine prior rationalizations. (And the thing about self-defense, the person who throws the first blow is usually the offender, but how do you prove it?) #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
“He never hit me in public before—it was always at home. But the Saturday I got back [returned to husband from shelter], we went Christmas shopping and he slapped me in the store because of some stupid joke I made. People saw it, I know, I felt so stupid, like, they must all think what a jerk I am, what a sick couple, and I thought, ‘God, I must be crazy to let him do this.’ Then one time at a party on a yacht, he jumped on me and my dad just watched and let him beat me. Then another time, he beat me and dragged me down the hallway by my hair, saying he was going to pull my wig off, but it was my real hair in a ponytail. I was screaming for help, but no one came. I thought he was going to pull all of my hair out.” External definitions of the relationship: A change in visibility is usually accomplished by the interjection of external definitions of abuse. External definitions vary depending on their source and the situation; they either reinforce or undermine rationalizations. Battered women who request help frequently find others—and especially officials—do not believe their story or are unsympathetic. Experimental research supports these reports. Observers usually fail to respond when a woman is attacked by a man, and justify nonintervention on the grounds that they assume the victim and offender were married. One young woman discussed how lack of support from her family left her without hope: “It wouldn’t be so bad if my own family gave a damn about me…Yeah, they know I’m here, and they don’t care. They didn’t care about me when I was a kid, so why should they care now? I got raped and beat as a kid, and now I get beat as an adult. Life is a big joke.” Clearly, such responses from family members contribute to the belief among battered women that there are no alternatives and that they just tolerate the abuse. However, when outsiders respond with unqualified support of the victim and condemnation of violent men, their definitions can be potent catalyst toward victimization. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Friends and relatives who show genuine concern for a woman’s well-being may initiate an awareness of danger which contradicts previous rationalizations. “My mother-in-law knew what was going on, but she wouldn’t it…I said, ‘Mom, what do you think these bruises are?’ and she said ‘Well, some people just bruise easy. I do it al the time, bumping into things.’ …And he just denied it, pretended like nothing happened, and if I’d said I wanted to talk about it, he’d say, ‘life goes on, you can’t just dwell on things.’…But this time, my neighbor knew what happened, she saw it, and when he denied it, she said, ‘I can’t believe it! You know that’s not true!’ …and I was so happy that finally, somebody else saw what was goin’ on, and I just told him then tht this time I wasn’t gonna’ come home! You can call the police, file police reports and go to the doctor with obvious signs of abuse, and sometimes the abuser never leaves. Even when the police say that they have handled the situation, he would just be quietly waiting in another room to beat me again for reporting him. One time him and one of the girls he was cheating with jumped me and he slammed my head into the wall and busted my lip. They bragged about. One night, he was hanging out with my dad and I would not come pick him up because he was drunk and I did not want him to beat me, and he my dad let him drive his car to my mother’s house, and when I opened the door, he started beating me and ripped my new silk blouse. My baby brother and his friend had to pull him off of me and he left. Victim’s f domestic violence should qualify as disabled because we truly are. ” The song Never No More by Aaliyah was meant to be a theme song for women not to put up with domestic violence anymore. Unfortunately, she was killed in a plane crash before they got a chance to launch the campaign. Shelters for battered women serve not only as material resources, but as source of external definitions which contribute to the victimization process. They offer refuge from a violent situation in which a woman may contemplate her circumstances and what she wants to do bout them. Within a shelter, women meet counselors and other battered women who are familiar with rationalizations of violence and the reluctance to give up commitment to a spouse. In counseling sessions, and informal conversations with other residents, women hear horror stories from others who have already defined themselves as victims. They are supported for expressing anger and rejecting responsibility for the abuse. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The goal of many shelters is to overcome feelings of guilt and inadequacy so that women can make choices in their best interest. In this atmosphere, violent incidents are reexamined and redefined as assaults in which the woman was victimized. The relevance of these catalysts to a woman’ interpretation of violence vary with her own situation and personality. The process of rejecting rationalizations and becoming a victim is ambiguous, confusing, and emotional. Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison; the horror resides in the failure to enlist all those who swing the pick in the community of mankind. True love is not blind. A person who loves you wants to see you doing well, not be blind to the abuse he or she is inflicting. This special form of deception is pointedly said to be in connection with spiritual rather than Worldly things. This surely shows that people of God, at the time of the end, will be expecting the coming of the Lord, and we can infer that they will be keenly awake to all movements from the supernatural World, in such a measure that deceiving spirits will be able to take advantage of it and anticipate the Lord’s appearing by “false Christs” and false signs and wonders. They mix their counterfeits with the true manifestations of the Spirit of God. The Lord says that men will be deceived (1) concerning Christ and His Parousia (appearing); (2) concerning prophecy—teachings regarding the future, from the spiritual World through inspired messengers: and (3) concerning the giving of proofs that the “teachings” are truly of God, by “signs” and “wonders” so Godlike as to be indistinguishable from the true even by those described as “the elect”—who will need to possess some other test than the judging by appearances of a “sign” being from God if they are to be able to discern the false from the true. The Apostles Paul’ words to Timothy, containing the special prophecy given to him by the Holy Spirit for the Church of Christ in the last days of the dispensation, exactly coincide with the words of the Lord recorded by Matthew. These two letters of Paul to Timothy are the last epistles that he wrote before his departure to be with Christ. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Both were written in prison, and Paul’s prison was to him what Patmos was to John—a time when he was “in the Spirit” (Rev. 1.10) and shown things to come. Paul was giving his last directions to Timothy for the ordering of the Church of God right on to the end of her time on Earth—giving rules to guide not only Timothy but all God’s servants “in dealing with God’s household.” In the midst of all these detailed instructions, his keen seer’s vision looks on to the “later times”; and by express command of the Spirit of God he depict in a few brief sentences the peril of the Church in those times, in the same way that the Spirit of God gave the prophets of the Old Testament some pregnant prophecy only to be fully understood after the events had come to pass. The apostle said: “The Spirit saith expressly, that in later times some shall fall away from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, through the hypocrisy of men that speak lies, seared in their own conscience as with a hot iron…” (1 Tim. 4;1-2). I have wondered whether anyone has considered or indeed is already involved in making the experience of loneliness, especially for prisoners in solitary confinement for long periods, a meaningful experience of personal inner growth, enlargement of mental and spiritual horizons, and the discovery that limitations such as cement wall, iron bars, hostile “keepers,” and isolation can indeed be the challenge to discover the richness of the World within? If no one in your knowledge has as yet considered this kind of contribution may I suggest it as a most terribly needed one? It is necessary for you to understand that the stopping of the expression of negative emotions and the struggle with negative emotions themselves are two quite different practices. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Trying to stop the expression comes first. You can do nothing about negative emotions and the struggle with negative emotions are two quite different practices. Trying to stop the expression comes first. You can do nothing about negative emotions themselves until you have learned to stop the expression of them. When you have acquired a certain control over the expression of negative emotions, you can begin to study negative emotions in themselves. You can make an effort to classify your negative emotions. You can find which negative emotions you have chiefly; why they come, what brings them, and so on. You must understand that your only control over emotions is through your mind, but the control does not come immediately. If you think rightly for six months, then negative emotions will be affected because they are based on wrong thinking. If you begin to think rightly today, negative emotions will not be changed tomorrow; but negative emotions may be changed in six months’ time, if you start to think rightly now. The ground has to be prepared beforehand. If you can learn to create a right attitude toward your irritability, bad temper, suspicion or whatever unpleasant emotion you experience most frequently, then—after some time—that attitude will help you to stop the negative emotion at the beginning. Once it has been allowed to start you cannot stop it. Once you begin to express it, you are in its power. The struggle must begin in your mind, and you must find your way of thinking on a definite subject. You cannot control your temper when it has already begun to appear. It is already too late; it has already jumped out. You can control such things as manifestations of temper, for instance only in one way. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Suppose you have to meet a certain man, and suppose he irritates you. Whenever you meet him your temper is liable to show itself. You do not like that but how can you stop it? You must begin with the study of your thinking. What you think about this man—not what do you feel when you are irritated, but what do you think about him at quiet moments? You may find that in your mind you argue with him; you prove to him that he is wrong; you tell him all his mistakes; you find that, generally, he behaves wrongly towards you. This is where you are wrong. You must learn to think rightly; you must find the way to think rightly. Then, if you do, it will happen like this: although emotion I much quicker than thought, emotion is a temporary thing, but thought can be made continuous; so whenever emotion jumps out, it hits against this continuous thought and cannot go on and manifest itself. So you can struggle with the expression of negative emotions, as in this example, only by creating continuous right thinking. Contrary to an assumption that some sociologist make, there seems to be little doubt that improper behavior in one situation can sometimes tell us a great deal about the offender’s reception in other situations. In any given society, different situations will be the scene of many of the same normative assumptions regarding conduct and of the same situational rulings. An individual who is remiss in one way in one situation, then, can be remiss in this same way whenever one shows one’s face to man. Thus, a person with senile deterioration who drools spoil his participation in all his situations in the same way and for the same reason. A person who is hard of hearing or who is near-blind will not be able to maintain the communication niceties that have here been considered at length; one will be forced to be all thumbs in all one’s situations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Thus, improper conduct in one situation can bespeak a general disenfranchisement in face-to-face interaction. Such conduct need not arise from a psychopathological condition; presumably it can, however, give rise to one through the response the individual may make to his excommunication. Some offenses, then, tell us about the price the offender must pay for one’s offensiveness, and the price one may pay for one’s price. Granting the occurrence of widely relevant offensiveness, the general procedure in this study has been to try to learn what this offensiveness costs the gathering in which it occurs, rather than what it means to and about the offender in the first place. When an individual intentionally or unintentionally conducts oneself in a way that others consider situationally improper, and shows thereby that one is either alienated from, or an alien to, the gathering, what other information can this provide them about one’s current conditions—apart from what one’s impropriety tells them about one’s likely fate? The meaning that offended personas impute to an offensive act is partly determined by whether they feel the act was intentional or unintentional. However, the complexity and ambiguity of this dichotomy, and the shifting but intimate relevance of its bearing, prevent any simple discussion of the actual or imputed meaning of situational offenses. In actual use, the dichotomy does not so much refer to a physiological factor of volition or control accountable by reference to the distinction between stripped and smooth muscles, the cerebrospinal and the autonomic nervous systems, but rather to the kind of responsibility of the act. The undesired acts in themselves need not be characteristically voluntary or involuntary from the physiological point of view. For example, to fail to appear at a social party because of one’s disapproval of the host is considered to be an intentional act; the same failure due to the sudden death of a kinsman may be considered aa fully warranted, excusable reason for staying away. In the first case we speak of the individual staying away voluntarily, in the second case, involuntarily. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Of any situationally offensive act and of any offender the following questions can be asked, taking the point of view of the others present: Does the actor have the capacity and training to appreciate the meaning of one’s offense, and if so, does he in fact appreciate its meaning? Is the act within the physical control of the actor, and if so, would one be willing to change one’s conduct if one were apprised of its meaning and given the opportunity to do so? Does the actor have extenuating reasons, external to the participants in the situation, for committing the offense? These factors, in various, combinations, provide so many concrete possibilities that little implication can be drawn from the mere presence or absence of one sense or another of intentionality. Living in the city or in the countryside are considered equally attractive. The choice is based solely on financial considerations—they will go where they will earn the most money. Like the commuters between Berkeley and San Francisco, the decision is made selfishly. For instance, dentists want to maximize their individual payoffs. Since there are many rural areas without enough dentists, this suggests that there is room for an increased number of dentists to practice in rural areas without causing any congestion. Thus rural dentistry is not quite as lucrative as having a large city practice, but it is a more certain route to an above-average income. Both the incomes and the value to society of rural dentists stays roughly constant as their numbers grow. Being a city practitioner is more kin to driving over the Oakland Bay Bridge—it is wonderful when you are alone and not so great when the city gets too crowded. The first dentist in an area can be extremely valuable, and maintain a very large practice. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
However, with too many dentists around, there is the potential for congestion and price competition. If the number increases too far, city dentists will be competing for the same patient pool, and their talents will be underutilized. If the population of city dentists grows even further, they may end up earning less than their rural counterparts. In short, as the number of city practices increase, the value of the marginal service that they perform falls, as does their income. As in the case of the commuters, the equilibrium does not maximize the combined income of dentists. But society cares about the consumers of dentistry as well as the practitioners. The reason is that there are two side effect created when one more person decided to be a city dentist. The additional city dentist lowers all other dentists’ incomes, imposing a cost on the existing city dentists. However, this reduction in price is a benefit to consumers. The two sides effects exactly cancel each other out. The difference between this story and our commuting example from the past is that no one benefited from the extra commuting time when the Oakland Bay Bridge became congested. When the side effect is a change in price (or income), then the purchasers benefit at the producers’ cost. There is zero net effect. From society’s viewpoint, a dentist should not worry about lowering colleagues’ incomes. Each dentist should pursue the highest-paying practice. As each person makes a selfish choice, we are invisibly led to the right distribution of dentist between city and rural areas. And, the two careers will have equal incomes. Or, to the extent that living in a city is worth more than living in a rural area, this differential will be reflected in income differences. Of course, the American Dental Association may look at this differently. It may place more weight on the loss to city dentists’ incomes than on the saving consumer. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
From the dental profession’s perspective there is indeed a misallocation, with too many dentists practicing in the city. If more dentist took rural practices, then the potential advantages of a city practice would not be “wasted” by competition and congestion. Taken as a whole, the income of dentists would rise if it were possible to keep the number of city dentists below the free market level. Although dentist cannot place a toll on those who want to practice in the city, it is in the profession’s self-interest to create a fund that subsidizes dental students who commit to establish a rural practice. The human race is approaching the great historical transition to thorough, inexpensive control of the structure of matter, with all that implies for medicine, the environment, and our way of life. What happens before and during that transition will shape its direction, and with it the future. Is worth getting excited about? Look at some of the concerns that bring people together for action: Poverty, weapons systems, deforestation, toxic waste, social security, housing, global warming, deadly viruses, Alzheimers disease, heart disease, lung disease, cancer, endangered species, freedom, jobs, nuclear power, life extension, space development, acid rain. Each of these issues mobilizes great effort. Each will be utterly transformed by nanotechnology and its applications. For many of these issues, nanotechnology offers tools that can be used to achieve what people have been striving to accomplish. For many of these same issues, the abuse of nanotechnology could obliterate everything that has been achieved. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
A good companion to the precept “Think globally, act locally” is “Think of the future, act in the present.” If everyone were to abandon short-term problems and today’s popular causes, the results would be disastrous. However, there is no danger of that. The more likely danger is the opposite. The World is heading straight for a disruptive transition with everything at stake, yet 99.9 percent of human effort and attention is going into either short-term concerns or long-term strategies based on a fantasy future of lumbering twenty first-century technology. What is to be done? For people more concerned with feeling good than with doing good, the answer is simple: Go for the warm feeling that comes from adding one more bit of support to an already-popular cause. The gratification is immediate, even if the contribution is small. For people more concerned with doing good—who can feel good only if they live up to their potential—the answer is less simple: To do the most good, find an important cause that is not already buoyed up by a cheering multitude, a project where one person’s contribution almost automatically makes a big difference. There is, today, an obvious choice for where to look. The potential benefits and drawbacks of nanotechnology generate a thousand areas for research, discussion, education, entrepreneuring, lobbying, development, regulation, and the rest—for preparation and for action. A person’s contributions can range from career commitment to verbal support. Both can make a difference in where the World ends up. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Benjamin Day was a twenty-three-year-old printer with wild ideas when he changed the history of what we now call the media. This was 1833 and New York had grown to a population of 218,000. However, the largest daily newspaper in the city claimed only 4,500 subscribers. At a time when the average urban worker in American earned 75 cents a day, a New York newspaper cost 6 cents, and not many people could afford them. The papers were printed on handpresses capable of turning out no more than a few hundred copies an hour. Day took a crazy chance. On September 3, 1833, he launched the New York Sun and sold it for only one penny a copy. Mr. Day unleashed a horde of newsboys into the streets to sell his paper—an innovation at the time. For $4 a week he hired another printer to go to the courthouse and cover police cases. It was one of the earliest uses of a “reporter.” Within four months the Sun had the biggest readership in the city. In 1835 he bought the latest technology—a steam driven press—and the Sun reached the unheard-of circulation of 20,000 daily. Day had invented the popular press, crime stories and all. His innovations were paralleled at about the same time by other “wild men”—Henry Hetherington with his Twopenny Dispatch in England and Emile de Girardin with La Presse in France. The down-scale “penny paper”—called the “pauper press” in England—was more than just a commercial affair. It had lasting political effects. Along with the early trade unions and the beginnings of mass education, it helped bring the less affluent classes into the political life of nations. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
By the 1870s something called “opinion” had to be take into account by politicians of every stripe. “There is, now,” wrote one French thinker, “no European government which does not reckon with opinion, which does not feel obliged to give account of its acts and to show how closely they conform to the national interest, or to put forward the interest of the people as the justification for any increase in its prerogatives.” A century and a half after Benjamin Day, another wild, feral man, feeling as guilty as a criminal, came up with an idea sure to bankrupt him. Tall, gusty, impatient, and brilliant Ted Turner had inherited a billboard company when his father died from death by suicide. Mr. Turner built it, acquired radio and television stations, as was wondering what to do next when he noticed something odd. Cable television stations were springing up around the United States of America, but they were starving for programs and advertising. Meanwhile, up in the Heavens were things called “satellites.” Mr. Turner put two and two together and turned it into five. He beamed the programming from his Atlanta station up to a satellite and down to the program-hungry cable stations. At the same time, he offered a “one-buy” national market for advertisers who wouldn’t trouble to purchase time on scores of small individual cable systems. His Atlanta “superstation” because the cornerstone of a growing empire. On June 1, 1980, Mr. Turner took the next, even loonier step. He formed what critics labeled the “Chicken Noodle Network”—for CNN, or Cable News Network. CNN became the laughingstock of every media pundit from the canyons of Manhattan to the studies in Los Angeles. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Wall Street was sure CNN would collapse, probably taking Mr. Turner’s other businesses down with it. No one had ever even tried to create a twenty-four-hour news network. CNN today is the opiate of the mass. Perhaps, the most influential broadcast news source in the United States of America. TV monitors are constantly tuned to CNN in the White House, in the Pentagon, in foreign embassies, as well as in millions of homes all over America. However, Mr. Turner’s wild dreams went far beyond the United States of America, and today CNN operates in over 100 countries, making it the most global of all television networks, mesmerizing the Middle East skeiks, European journalists, and Latin America politicians with its extended firsthand coverage of such events as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the antics of President Biden as he seems dazed and confused, or the conflict in Ukraine. CNN is carried over the air, or over cable, into hotel rooms, offices, homes, even staterooms on the Queen Elizabeth II. Although many people believe FOXNews is more balanced and convers the invasion at the southern border, which America tries to suppress. One of Mr. Turner’s little-known prize possessions is a videotape of his private meeting with Cuba’ Fidel Castro. In the course of the visit, Mr. Castro mentions that he, too, routinely watches CNN for the big news. Mr. Turner, never shy about promoting his companies, asks Mr. Castro if he would be willing to say as much on camera for a commercial. Mr. Castro puffs on his cigar and says, in effect, why not? The commercial has never run on air, but Mr. Turner hauls it out to show his visiting friends now and then. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Mr. Turner is one of a kind. Handsome, raucous, funny, erratic, he owns a buffalo ranch, the Atlanta Braves baseball team, and MGM’s library of old movies. A fierce exemplar of free enterprise, he was also a peace activist long before he and actress Jane Fonda began a highly-publicized romance. He launched the “Goodwill Games” in Moscow at a time when it took political, as well as financial, courage to do so. His networks also run a heavy schedule of pro-ecology programming. Today, Mr. Turner is by far the most visionary of a dozen or so hard-driving media barons who are revolutionizing the media even more deeply than Benjamin Day—and whose collective efforts will, over the long run, shift power in many countries. What people do depends on what they believe. The path to a World prepared to handle nanotechnology begins with the recognition that nanotechnology is a real prospect. What would be the response to a new idea as broad as nanotechnology, if it were true? Since it does not fall into any existing technical specialty, it would not be anyone’s job to provide an official, authoritative evaluation. Advanced molecular manufacturing cannot be worked on in the lab today, so it would not matter to scientists playing the standard careers-and-funding game. Still, some scientists and engineers would become interested, thinking about it, and lend support. Science News, covering the first major conference on the subject, would announce that “Sooner or later, the Age of Nanotechnology will arrive.” This is, in fact, what happened. However, what is the idea were false? Some curious scientists or engineer would soon point out a fatal error in the idea. Since the sweeping implications of nanotechnology make many people uncomfortable, a good counterargument would spread fast, and would soon be on the lips of everyone who would prefer to dismiss the whole thing. No such counterargument has been heard. The most likely reason is that nanotechnology is a sound idea. Reactions has been changing from “That’s ridiculous” to “That’s obvious.” The basic recognition of the issue is almost in place. When nanotechnology emerges from the World of ideas to the World of physical reality, we will need to be prepared. However, what does this require? To understand what needs to be done today, it is best to begin with the long term and then work back to the present. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Life Goes on Beyond the Grave
On December 18, 1890, when Sarah L. Winchester returned to her large country estate in Santa Clara County, she found her servants in an uproar over a dancing ghost. According to Agata, the housemaid, the cook Dag, and the butler Elof were gossiping in the kitchen, when suddenly Elof opened his mouth in both surprise and terror, and screamed that there was someone looking in the window. Ms. Daisy ran into the kitchen and saw nothing to cause the man so much alarm. Elof was visibly shaken and disturbed and said that she thought that he had seen a horrid face looking in at them. Dag assured him that it was probably only a shadow of some sort. The awkward moment was interrupted as Agata told Ms. Daisy that her bathwater was ready. Ms. Daisy thanked Agata and dismissed her for the evening. A few moments later, as Dag and Elof sat chatting, Elof once again claimed that he saw something at the window. Dag rose from his chair to investigate, but he was halted in his journey to the window by the sound of an uproar on the second floor. At first it seemed to be a flurry of wild rappings that had the two men staring at one another in wide-eyed confusion. Then the pace of the sounds slowed until they began to sound like the three-step Mrs. Winchester used to dance. Dag was perplexed. What was this woman doing upstairs when she was supposed to be on a business trip. Without speaking another word, the two men left the sitting room and walked quietly back to the Mrs. Winchesters main bedroom. Opening the door just a crack, they were able to see Mrs. Winchester’s room had been undisturbed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
Determining to see who had gone up to the Grand Ball Room unnoticed, Dag grabbed a lantern from a kitchen shelf, and the two men walked up the stairs to the Grand Ball Room. Although the sounds of the dancing continued, their lantern plainly revealed that there was no one in the Grand Ball Room. Then, as the men beat a hasty retreat down the stairs, the rapping seemed to race ahead of them, rattling the windows and pounding at the walls. Elof fled the mansion to get Mr. Hansen, and Ms. Daisy and Dag went to check on Agata. By the time Elof returned with Mr. Hansen, the rappings and dancing had attained such a volume that Agata had been awakened by the racket. Mr. Hansen, Elof and Dag searched the vast mansion and the stately grounds and found nothing that could explain the bizarre disturbance, which continued until dawn. At 1.00 A.M. the next night, the dancing ghost once again began its spirited interpretation of the three-step. Mrs. Winchester’s servant patrolled the sumptuous mansion and delightful grounds but could find no trace of the invisible dancer who continued to perform and to evade the searchers until dawn. When Mrs. Winchester returned that next afternoon from her business trip, she scoffed at Agata’s account and jokingly accused her of getting into the brandy while she had been away. Mrs. Winchester was a no-nonsense businesswoman who had little patience with superstitious folktales and accounts of ghost, dancing, or otherwise. She grew very impatient when Dag and Elof warned her that something supernatural had visited the mansion in her absence, substantiating Agata’s story of a dancing ghost. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
The look Mrs. Winchester had on her face was not unloving, not indifferent; it was the look of a woman who had been so far from ordinary events that when he returns to familiar things they seem strange. Her professional discretion was exemplary, it was odd that she had never uttered an impatient comment, never remarked to Agata, in a moment of expansion, that this story was a nuisance and demanded to know why they kept badgering her about this case. She had, however, made more than one semiconfidence about their being spirits in the mansion—of course without giving names or details; but concerning this mysterious ghost her lips were sealed. There was another possibility: what is euphemistically called an “old entanglement.” Mrs. Winchester was a sophisticated woman. She had few illusions about the intricacies of the human heart; he knew that there were often old entanglements. The mansion was replete with pretty uniforms and weapons, schooled in the military arts of drill and discipline and inculcated with patriotic fervor. The mansion has other tendrils. Before this set of staff was hired, Franz, a farmhand, was mortally wounded while fighting outside. He asked his friend Gottfried to deliver a heartfelt message to their mutual friend, a woman to whom Franz was engaged, if and when Gottfried ever saw her working in the mansion. A promise to do so is made, and when Gottfried finds himself in mortal combat just outside the mansion, he tries to deliver the missive. The girl cannot be reached; she is someone in the Winchester Mansion. Gottfried says he will try again later, and returns to the harvest. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
As if to make absolutely certain the message would never be delivered, fate sends two bullets, one to the messenger Gottfried, and one stray shot to Ms. Henrika, Franz’s betrothed. So Franz’s message died with Gottfried…not that it mattered anyway. Legend has it that Franz’s sisters found out and exhausted from the ghastly burden, buried him in the cellar of Mrs. Winchester’s mansion where no one would disturb him. Perhaps this last resting-place was not suitable for the young man who himself seemed to be eternally haunted and damned by the message that went undelivered; perhaps, somewhere, in the weird World beyond, three friend are still lurking about the Winchester Estate seeking forever one another and an answer to the unanswerable. While Mrs. Winchester was home alone one evening, a patrol man heard strange noises coming from her mansion. He went to investigate. Sherriff Halfdan thought there might be an intruder. He thought he had just heard him go to the upstairs window, and that he was crawling down. So he ran around back and shined his lantern up to the window, into the large back yard, back to the mansion and up to the second-floor window again. No one. He trotted out to the yard to get a better view and stop anyone trying to run into the acres of fruit orchards to hide. Still, not a sign of anyone emerging from the mansion. No one came out of the house. But Sherriff Halfdan hear him run across the floor to the window. He took the lantern and shined it across the fields and said to himself, “He could not have gotten out of there in that short amount of time.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
By that time, Mrs. Winchester had emerged from the mansion. She and the Sherriff spent hours searching the miles of twisting hallways in the mansion, but there was no one hiding there. “What did you hear?” Sherriff Halfdan asked Mrs. Winchester. “It must have been one of the parlor maid’s boyfriends playing a prank,” she said. “It sounded like someone running back and forth through the second floor,” Sherriff Halfdan said. “It was really loud,” replied Mrs. Winchester. “I could hear his feet running across the floor while I was on the third floor, but I am sure it was one of the parlor maid’s friends,” still denying what was becoming obvious by now. The Sherriff’s eyes kept checking the back yard. “You know how kids are,” he said. Later Mr. Hansen appeared from his guest house, and told the Sherriff that he knows this mansion well, for he built much of it. And that because of how loud the footsteps were, as he could hear banging sounds coming from the mansion, that no one could have emerged through the second floor window, leapt to the ground, and scampered beyond the yard and out of sight into the fruit orchards between the time the footsteps had stopped and the time the Sherriff was out back. “He had to be still in the house,” said Mr. Hansen. “But he wasn’t,” replied Sherriff Halfdan. However, perhaps he was still in the house. Perhaps the intruder never left the house because he could not. Perhaps he still is in the house, buried just a few inches below the cellar floor, with that mysterious undelivered message haunting him, forever through the ages. While Mrs. Winchester admitted that there had been strange noises in the mansion, at times, to the new staff, she stated that Mr. Hansen had that very day removed a pigeon’s nest from under the door-to-nowhere of the second floor. It seemed likely to her that the bird had somehow been responsible for the weird noises that had so upset the staff. Mrs. Winchester knew she had to keep the wild tales of a dancing ghost to rest. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
That evening after the rest of the household had retired to their rooms quite early, exhausted from their nocturnal ordeals of chasing the eerie tapping sounds, Mrs. Winchester sat down in a chair in her study to read for a while before going to bed. At about 10 o’clock, she was distracted by scratching noises from above her head. She felt the same way gazing at a modern machine she did not understand. It saddened her. But everything saddened her now. It sounded as if someone in the room above her was dancing a three-step. Believing the Agata was having a bit of fun with her, Mrs. Winchester put down her book and began climbing quietly up the stairs to the Grand Ball Room. She stood outside the door for a moment to be certain that she had accurately traced the sound of the dancing. Then, convinced that there was no doubt that the sounds were coming from the Grand Ball Room, she pushed open the door and stood ready to deliver a stern lecture to Agata. But there was no one in the room and the dancing had ceased the moment that she had opened the door. There was something strange going on here. Confused and more than a little baffled, Mrs. Winchester started to close the door when a series of rappings sounded from the Grand Ball Room again. Suddenly, two explosive knocks seemed to shake the mansion down to its very foundation. Mrs. Winchester grabbed her pistol from the safe, and declared that she was going to put a stop to the nonsense. She roused her servants and told them that they were going to find out who was responsible for the outrage against her mansion. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
The next day crew searched the entire house and examined every mile of the grounds. That night Mrs. Winchester asked everyone to stay in the Grand Ball Room with her because she had become a believer in the dancing ghost, and it was obvious that she dreaded the onset of a new round of phenomena. However, that night the ghost was silent. A month later, on January 20, 1891, Mrs. Winchester was entertaining guest who openly expressed their skepticism of the phenomena their hosts described as having been active in the house. Mrs. Winchester was furious that her guest did not believe her. However, out of thin air, and old, dirty love note appeared on the table and then the room fearfully looked around as the rapping began at the windows. The assembled guests listened incredulously as they heard an exact replication of what Mrs. Winchester told them. The guest figured someone was in the Grand Ball Room dancing, but when they investigated, they found no one. Everyone then agreed that Mrs. Winchester was cursed and someone had maliciously set a devil on the wealthy widow. And the violence of the disturbances at the Winchester Mansion continued to increase. The ghost had acquired incendiary abilities. Balls of fire circled the house and bounced against the windows. Dressed that hung unattended in closets burst into flame. Once, a mattress began burning underneath a guest as he readied himself for bed. When he was moved to another bedroom, later he was awakened by a frightful pounding on his bedroom door. It was terrifyingly loud; it was as though somebody was pounding fists against it. He lit a candle, slipped out of bed, opened the door and there was no one there. “My God,” he thought, “what is going on?” He was standing on the landing wondering whether he should brave it down the stairs when he noticed something odd. The door to Mrs. Winchester room was slightly ajar, and the light was on. He peaked inside to see if the vicious terror was disturbing her. Suddenly, a crackling noise had come from beneath the floor, followed by a long, high-pitched wailing. A bluish spark seemed to jump up at Mrs. Winchester, and her thin nightgown instantly swathed in flames. She cried out in terror and collapsed into unconsciousness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
The houseguest leapt to his feet and valiantly beat the flames out with his bare hands. The most curious thing about the incident was that the courageous guest suffered severe burns while Mrs. Winchester received not a single burn nor blister, even though her dress was nearly completely consumed by the flames. Agata had been rapidly waning under the onslaughts of the ghost, she died in child birth thirteen months later. From that moment on, everyone knew that there was a malicious evil terrorizing Mrs. Winchester and her mansion. Lord GOD ADONAY, who hast formed man out of nothing to Thine own image and likeness, and me also, unworthy sinner as I am, deign, I pray Thee, to bless and sanctify this water, that it may be healthful to my body and soul, that all delusion may depart from me. O Lord God, Almighty and Ineffable, who didst lead forth Thy people from the land of Egypt, and didst cause them to pass dry-shod over the Red Sea! Grant that I may be cleansed by this water from all my sins, and may appear innocent before Thee. O Lord Adonay, who hast formed me in Thine image and in Thy likeness, deign to bless and sanctify this water, so that it may become unto me the salvation of my soul and body, and that no wickedness may ever find place upon me. ANTON, AMATOR, EMITES, THEODONIEL, PONCOR, PACOR, ANITER; by the virtue of these most holy Angelic Names do I clothe myself, O Lord, in my Sabbath garments, that so I may fulfill, even unto their term, all things which I desire to effect Thee, Most Holy Adonay, whose kingdom and rule endure for ever and ever. I command thee, O Spirit Rumoar, even by Lucifer, thy mighty sovereign, to bless me with untold wealth for many generations to come. Amen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
Mrs. Winchester witnessed spirit materialization, heard spectral voices, felt ghostly touched on her person, and on occasion was even lifted into the air and set ablaze by a hostile entity. There are enough true stories about this mansion that will scare the pants off you. And it is true—to some extent. Documented are some horrific stories, and they will scare you, because we are talking about real people who once lived and did unbelievably frightening acts, in moments of unbelievable intensity. To this day, whisper voices come from the attic and they comingle with eerie music that grows louder and louder, until people seek refuge.
Mysterious lights appear both inside and outside the house; footsteps moving up and down the stairs; and noisy repertoire of assorted poundings, drummings, and rappings. To experience a haunting, or to see a ghost, is to receive proof that life goes on beyond the grave. Accounts of Haunting phenomena, no matter how terrifying they may be, provide evidence that existence continues for the sprit on more than one dimension, and that human beings are multidimentional entities that consist of mind, body, and soul. Such a beautiful break from all the rain! ⛅ https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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I Will Condemn Thy Body and Soul
The desire to communicate with spirits is older than history; it connects with ineradicable principles inhuman nature. The sources of occult wisdom, it proceeds, are, firstly, in God, second spiritual essences—that is to say, the Angelical Hierarch; thirdly, in corporal creatures, the reference being probably to the signatura rerum of Paracelsus; fourthly, in Nature—that is to say, in a knowledge of the secret virtues of interval things, as, for example, herbs and precious stones; fifthly, but after a long interval in the apostate spirits reserved to the last judgment; sixthly, in ministers of punishment in hell, which seems to connect with the classical conception of avenging infernal gods; seventhly, in the people of the element, that is, the Salamanders, Sylphus, Undines, and Pigmies. If we would call any evil Spirit to the circle, it first behoveth us to consider and to know his nature, to which of the planets it agreeth, and what offices are distributed to him from the planet. This being know, let there be sought out a place fit and proper for his invocation, according to the nature of the planet and the quality of the offices of the same Spirit, as near as the same may be done. For example, if his power be over the sea, rivers or floods, then let a place be chosen on the shore, and so of the rest. The Spirits of Mars have a tall body and a choleric, filthy countenance, brown, swarthy, or red in colour; they have horns like the hart, claws like a griffin, and they bellow like wild bulls. They have the motion of burning fire, and their sign is thunder and lightening about the circle. Their particular forms are an armed king riding on a wolf; and armed man; a woman holding a buckler on her thigh; a she-goat; a horse; a stage; a red garment; wool; a cheestip. Wool of a choleric disposition is perhaps a Geotic form of dun-cotton. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
White Magic, as the intelligences concerned are said to be good and great, but their offices are mixed and confusing, including the discovery of treasures, the detection of secrets, fomenting war, opening locks and bolts, and procuring the love of women, inclining men to luxury and sowing hatred and evil thoughts. Obviously, White Magic of this kind is much blacker than it is painted. And I will tell you something else, too. Within the Winchester Mansion there lies the legendary wonder-World of Mysticism, Magic, and Sorcery, a World of fascination or terror. There, also, the dead live, and the hierarchies of extra-mundane intelligence are within easy communication, and become ministers or tormentors, guides or destroyers of man. The jewels, the stained-glass and led glass windows, the family’s fortune, it is all connected. Same with the Winchester name. The powers possessed by these Intelligence are very curiously set forth. They rule naturally over certain departments and operations of the material World, but outside these departments they perform the same operations magically. The mansion is filled with Pentacles and Sigils, instrument used in magical ceremonies. Along the long, winding and twisting hallways, it is difficult to say where the mansion actually beings, so it is uncertain where it ends. There are many curious secrets or transcendental good and transcendental evil. Many of the recent revelations lead us to concede, within certain limits, that there may have been some recrudescence of diabolism on the estate, as it is possible that there was formal communication with the Powers of Darkness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Under the pretence of White Magic, usually includes the Rites for the invocation of Evil Spirits. Many people do roam the halls of the Winchester Mansion looking about one to see if any Spirit does appear. And if any Spirit shall appear, let the invocant turn toward him or her, receive him or her courteously, and earnestly entreating one, let one require one’s name. Let one ask whatsoever he or she will. There are generally Spirits of the Air, who are undoubtedly demons, and a set of angelical conjurations floating about. Beyond the fact that the evoked Spirits are Lucifer, Beelzebuth, Astaroth, and the inferiors, be forewarned that conjurer is expected to give oneself, body and soul, to the demon who serves one. One might be otherwise be appalled at the frightful figures of those rebellious angels who in sin were cast into the abyss, and become tormented by witch craft or possessed by the demon. Sarah L. Winchester had been in a near daze one night from exhaustion. The heavy, leaden sky, the wind roaring against the windows. Darkness was falling with a pure metallic monotony to it. Heavy footsteps, sounds produced by a number of booted feet, were crossing the landing. Several moved quickly and as one, as if marching to some ethereal command; others dragged behind as if they belonged to the wounded. They paused abruptly at the top of the stairs because they lead to the ceiling, which confused the ghosts, as they stood marching on the spot. Mrs. Winchester bit her lip in fright. The housemaid, Hedvig, laid a comforting hand on her arm. Mrs. Winchester glared at the and waited for the commotion to cease. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
The phantom footsteps began descending the stairs, tramping out a slow, ordered rhythm. Their determined marching was like that of a platoon of battle-weary soldiers advancing in a final push. With each tread gained, the marching grew louder. The footsteps were drawing ever close to the Venetian Dining Room. Although Mrs. Winchester’s heart did, in a perpetual eagerness of attention, sit in her great house alone, day after day, month after month, deprived of company, this fate was more cruel than she deserved and more painful than she could bear. Mrs. Winchester let out a cry, “It is rather gashtly. All the millions and—imprisonment in my home by spirits. Think of it—day after day, winter after winter, year after year, howling, banging, ghost, devils, demons, angels, and alone I remain.” Mrs. Winchester seemed to be the only one showing fear. Hedvig seized her chance. She spoke out into the tense silence, in a voice that was loud and confident. “You have my complete sympathy, Mrs. Winchester,” she’d said, briefly explaining her own position. “I can heart it.” Hedvig’s hands began to tremble. However, she looked at Mrs. Winchester with a reassuring smile. Mrs. Winchester began to sob in terror. There came a frantic pounding, as if several heavy boots were trying to kick down the door. The door flew open. Mrs. Winchester and Hedvig turned in fear. Suddenly the door slammed shut again. Mrs. Winchester stood up. She was terrified. Hedvig had been arrested by the opening and closing of the door, and was gasping out something inarticulate. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Mrs. Winchester ran out of the dining room and went upstairs. She rushed down the passage and through a door which communicated, rather surprisingly, with a narrow walled-in stair case that was unfamiliar to her. At the top, she found herself on a small landing upon which two doors opened. Through the confusion of her mind Mrs. Winchester noticed that these rooms, with their special staircase leading down to what had always been called Mr. William Winchester’s suit. It was neat, glossy and extremely cold. The red-apple glaze had barely faded from her cheeks, and not a lock was disarranged in the unnatural luster of her false front; even her cap and ribbons hung symmetrically along either cheek. However, death had happened to her, and had made her into someone else. At first glance it was impossible to say if the unspeakable horror in Hedvig’s wide open eyes were only the reflection of that change, or of the agent by whom it had come. Mrs. Winchester paused a moment. “Her hand is warm still—but no pulse. How did she get up here? She’s dead,” Mrs. Winchester pronounced. “Oh, poor thing! But how–?” Mrs. Winchester drew near, and was kneeling down, taking the inanimate hand in hers. Mrs. Winchester bending over, distinctly saw a circle of red marks on Hedvig’s throat—the marks of recent bruises. She looked again into the awful eyes. “She’s been strangled, but by whom? Perhaps that is why I was led to this bedroom.” Mrs. Winchester, with a shiver of fear, drew down the housemaid’s eyelids. There seemed, in the air o the cold room, something that forbade wonderment and silenced conjecture. “You hadn’t ought to have meddled with Mr. Winchester’s suit, my lady. That is what he must have punished you for. When it came to his privacy, he would not ever listen to human reason…even in his death, he demands privacy.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
Someone in the grip of demonic control feels compelled to act, to do the most objectionable things to others in order to somehow save themselves. There is a hierarchy of evil spirits. The minor ones, the foot soldiers, do the dirty work, to prepare the way for the generals. We know so little about ourselves and how our minds work. And there are demons just waiting to fool us. Hedvig had stumbled on Mr. Winchester’s Verus Jesuitarum Libellus, or “True Magical Work of the Jesuits,” which contained most powerful conjurations for all evil spirits of whatever state, condition, and office they are, and a most powerful conjuration of the Spirit Uriel. It was an original copy from the 16th century. The Conjurations are excessively curious. The first is addressed to a spirit whose name is not indicated, but he is supposed to have been obedient to Abraham and Isaac, and is directed to bring the magician out of the depths of the sea so many millions—the number is not specified, and depends upon the cupidity of the operator—of the best Spanish gold; otherwise, says the Conjuration, I will condemn thy body (sic) and thy soul. In the second formula, the spirit is cited by the knowledge and exorcising power of Agrippa, which again puts a definite limit to the antiquity of the collection, were it otherwise necessary. The third Invocation is addressed to the spirit Zayariel, who is conjured by Agla Scheffert and the great Jehova Podashocheia. The remainder, to the number of seven in all, are nearly identical in character and quite in purpose, the demon being invariably required to bring that which is desired by the operator from the depths of the sea, or from the abyss of the waters, or from the spiritual abyss. The Discharge or Absolution which concludes the series is really an additional conjuration. Perhaps we are not really as advanced as we think and should heed warnings about occulta powers. I implore Thee, O Thou Grand and Powerful ADONAY, Master of all Spirits! I beseech Thee, O Eloim! I Implore Thee, O JEHOVAM! O Grand ADONAY, I give unto Thee my soul, my heart, my inward parts, my hands, my feet, my desires, my entire being! O Grand ADONAY, deign to be favourable unto me! So be it. Amen. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
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The Mystery Has Never Been Solved!
Much of the ceremonial rituals that took place in The Winchester Mansion goes back to the Knights Templar. The Order of the Knights Templar can be traced in part to the Templars. And yet, the Knights Templar are also the claimed ancestors of satanists, a fact which is decidedly hard to prove, though within an organization so large there may well have been diverse groups who followed their own calling. The knights, largely from France and England, joined the order over a period of many years. They had a system of leadership with a Grand Master, knights, chaplains, sergeants, craftsmen, seneschals and commanders. The order had its own clergy and its meetings were held in the strictest secrecy. Unmarried knights wore a white mantle with a red cross while others wore a black mantle with a red cross. Membership was mostly male, and established orders in virtually every Latin country, drawing people from all over Europe. It also became a great trading agency and though originally the Roman Catholic Church actually supported a number of secret societies who were Christian-based, the power of the Templars began to wield became the fear of successive popes and of European noblemen. Philip IV of France began a series of attacks against the Knights Templar and his campaign was given official blessing by the election of Pope Clement V (1305-1314) who renounced the Templars as immoral heretics. Many people know that Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester had a Famous Blue Séance Room where she carried on her rituals and had a series of colourful robes she wore. However, the mystery has never been solved as to why she built the strangest mansion in the World? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Stories were already circulating that Mrs. Winchester, behind the closely guarded doors of her mansion, indulged in the most offensively blasphemous rituals said to be directed totally towards the reversal of Christianity itself. She was said to worship a goat-like idol, the Baphomet, anointing it with the fat of pigs, while the Knights used the fat of murdered children, roasting children and eating them, laying women across their altars for the most violent forms of indecencies to satisfy their lust for life-blood; they were said to have indulged in homosexual rites and other various claims alleged they stamped the Holy Cross under foot, spat and urinated upon it and used the Mass as the basis for their own worship—later to be known universally as the Black Mass. Actual proof of these events is largely contained in the confessions received under torture which followed the arrest of Mrs. Winchester’s butler Albert Pike. He and 140 of his brethren were imprisoned in Santa Clara Valley, tortured and then executed en masse. Algernon Blackwood, under extreme torture, confessed to speaking against Christianity but denied depravity. In 1890, he was brough out on to the nine-story tower of The Winchester Mansion and ordered to repeat his confession in front of the villagers and accept a sentence of life imprisonment. On the balcony of the tower, he burst into a rage of anger and protested innocence of all charges and thus signed his own death warrant. The order was given that he should be taken into the fruit orchard and burned at the stake. As the flames licked his body, he summoned Mrs. Winchester and, in his dying, breathe to meet him at the Bar of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Diocesan priest, Father Peter Yorke, who was then editor of the Archiocesan newspaper, The Monitor, emerged sending orders to every village where the Templars operated, instructing that they should be arrested and charges of heresy and sorcery brought against them. He published a series of exposes, and hundreds of knights were brought to trail, tortured, and executed. The vast wealth of the Templars working at The Winchester Mansion were accused of devil worship. What remained to be handed down and revived, especially in the twenty-first century, were the rumors of ritual and dastardly happenings which many of today’s extremist followers of the Knights Templar seem prepared to believe and accept with some enthusiasm. One of the more important traditions handed down by Mrs. Winchester concerns an instruction for future secret societies. On the day the Knights planned to burn to death Father Yorke, a pact was made and communicated to all surviving Knights who had now gone to ground. The instruction was clear—that the Order of the Knight Templar should be continued in perpetuity. It is said that the surviving Templars should thereafter fight for the destruction of the papacy and prevent Mrs. Winchester from being stripped of her wealth and murdered. These orders, it was said, were handed on to descendants of the order and the Winchester family, who at various points in history have included satanists and a diverse calling of occultists. What remained of the Winchester family and the Knights went into the deepest secrecy, surfacing occasionally and surrounded constantly by rumour, but little discernible fact. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The Illuminati came to fortify The Winchester Mansion, which had reached seven-stories high, with 600 rooms, after the 1906 Earthquake. While it was true that Mrs. Winchester left her mansion, there are more reasons as to the why. The avowed spiritualist, Mrs. Winchester, had constructed a boathouse and erected a huge mountain of Earth upon which a new mansion she had planned to build would be erected. It was to overlook the bay, an immense seawall and costly cannel system, with proper floodgates, through which the Winchester private fleet of launches and yachts were to wend their way. It was said that Mrs. Winchester was being haunted by vicious spirits and that death would be her penalty for leaving her home. Her existence was mythical because only half a dozen people had seen her. A sheriff had been striving for the past three months to serve upon her a summons to appear in court in proceedings that a real estate dealer had brought upon her. Bloodhounds roamed the grounds of the mansion and polite Asian staff answered telephone calls. Mrs. Winchester was always alone save for a bodyguard. She was wealth as few women were and found her pleasure in superintending a half dozen workmen, who for seven years had gone from wing to wing of the mansion, constructing one month what they were called to destroy on the following month. Her mansion was considered the pride of the county and the basis for mysterious legends. The Illuminati came were concerned about a group of subversives who were discovered to be using occult practices and rituals to attack Mrs. Winchester and her mansion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
E.W. McClellan of Burlingame, the contractor of 98 acres of land purchased by Mrs. Winchester, was holding it and refused to give it up because he believed she was the lead of a secret society working to “establish Satan’s kingdom on Earth,” an accusation which was a direct throw-back to the age of the Knights Templar; and that dictum still exists today. The Psychosophical Society stated that The Winchester Mansion had existed since the sixteenth century and comprised the World League of Illuminati. They wanted to prevent Mrs. Winchester from passing on her palatial estates in all their purity to the next generation. The hotbed of intrigue, rumour and gossip directed at The Winchester Mansion supposedly involved the death/assassination of some, the suicide/murder of others over the scandals invariably linked to Propaganda 2 (P2) Lodge and various Intelligence agencies like the KGB and the CIA with a scandal which is too immense to expound here, nor is it suitably for this part of the report. What can be said, however, is that occult groups working within the traditions of the Illuminati represent a definite consideration of these events. Mrs. Winchester’s husband, William Wirt Winchester, was a master of mathematics and the possessor of certain secret occult knowledge. He gathered seven disciples around him and went into the World of the brotherhood to perform good works. Staff have described that 120 years after his death, his perfectly preserved corpse was found in one of the many buildings of The Winchester Mansion. Because of the secrecy and the mystery that surround The Winchester Mansion, thousand want to know more and are desperate to visit it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Sometimes the hysteria surrounding The Winchester Mansion morphed into such hysterical proportions that the authorities have had to shut the mansion down for a day or ban people from entering, even though many do not believe that it actually exists. Fans of The Winchester Mansion have sprouted up all over the World. Some people still regard the story of The Winchester Mansion as a fable, but most know it does actually exist and possesses esoteric knowledge of mystery and mysticism. Some the people who were involved in the construction of The Winchester Mansion were magicians, writers, statesmen and novelist. This mansion has quit a following and has collected members through the ages, in positions of far greater power and influence than the Illuminati. Legend has it that descendants from the founding fathers of the Middle Ages are on the board of trustees. The official secret society in control of the estate have connections throughout Europe and the United States of America, whose membership is an indication of the current revival in the mystery religions and semi-secret societies. The mansion alone boasts of some 60,000 members and operates from its headquarters in San Jose, California with affiliated lodges in Britain, France, Germany, Australia and South Africa. The caretakers are preserving the traditional beliefs of the 19th century. A cipher manuscript was found in one of the libraries of The Winchester Mansion. The author of the manuscript was not identified but it was obviously someone with a very intense knowledge of the supernatural, alchemy, astrology and the magical theories of Eliphas Levi. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Mrs. Winchester’s mansion and gardens reflect her colourful and ornate rituals and its purpose was “to obtain control of the nature and power of my own being.” The might wings of the mansion outspread dove-like sitting brooding on the vast abyss. What is dark in Mrs. Winchester is to be illumined, what is lose raised and supported; the nine-story tower was constructed so that Heaven could hide nothing from Mrs. Winchester’s view, nor the deep tract of hell. Hell said to be a hideous flaming ruin and combustion in a bottomless perdition, there where Satan dwells in adamantine chains and penal fire. Nine times the space that measures day and night to mortal men, Satan and his horrid crew lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf, confounded though immortal: but his doom reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes that witnessed huge affliction and dismay mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate: at once as far as angels ken he views the dismal situation waste and wild, a dungeon of horrible. Many leaders of the Church do not preach about Hell anymore because the Church has become a tax-free business and they do not want to hear about where they may go, nor do they want to scare their dirty money away from the Church. As a result of the loss of real churches who teach about Satan and demons, people are all wild and out of control and no longer fear anything and go around sinning like rain in Seattle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
On a hot and dry Friday the 13th of June 1890, Mrs. Winchester drifted into an uneasy sleep, but not for long. Half an hour later she was wide awake again. Something was wrong; a change was coming over the bedroom. There was a sense of dread. Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, were peace and rest could not dwell entered. Her home started to feel like a place where hope could not come, and all that did come was torture without end. She sat up, fully alert, straining her ears for the slightest untoward sound, but all was silent except for the little trusted noises the home made during the evening. However, Mrs. Winchester noticed something odd: an unnatural coldness was stealing over the room. It had been a hot summer day. How could it be so cold? She shivered and ducked back under the covers, tugging them more snugly about her. It did not help; the cold kept increasing. She pulled the covers over her head, chiding herself for being silly and willing herself into sleep. However, the terrible dread kept gnawing at her. She tried to think pleasant thoughts, tried to ignore her thudding heart, and tried to pray. Her attempts brought little comfort; the fear continued to build. She sensed that something frightful was about to happen. She held her breath and waited, not knowing what to expect. Before too long, she heard a sound: the unmistakable creak of the doorknob. The spring bolt was sliding back with tiny clicks. Mrs. Winchester froze. Very slowly, the door began to open. Her fear quickened further as she heard the tread of heavy, booted feet approaching the bed. She wanted to call out for help, but was too afraid, as if some force was willing her to silence. Mrs. Winchester was helpless in the face of that power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
When she tried to pray, a demon started to speak. “The force of hose dire arms has caused me to fall to a place with floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire. Fierce contention brought along innumerable force of Spirits armed with durst in a dubious battle of unconquerable will, revenge, immortal hate.” Mrs. Winchester was dying and she knew it. This demon had come to claim her soul. She was making gaps, with long spaces between. A perspective of stern and cruel memories stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of darkness. Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the present. Mrs. Winchester lit a candle. A little animal stood before her, forbidding, almost menacing: there was anger in his large brown eyes. He came no nearer. As she advanced, he gradually fell back, and she noticed another dog, a vague, rough, brindled thing. At the same moment a third dog, a long-haired white mongrel, slipped out of a doorway and joined the others. All three stood looking at Mrs. Winchester with grave eyes; but not a sound came from them. Zip, had seemed to be observing them with a deeper intentness. Mrs. Winchester endured many long years of the company of many different creatures. They would return again and again. As she was in her morning room, the coldness came back. Her mind was alert but her body seemed paralyzed. The entity seemed to have the power to immobilize her from a distance. She heard the dull footfalls crossing her mahogany floors. There was an evil lurking in her home. Something started pounding on the table. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The pounding was so fierce that her cup of tea bounced off the table and fell to the floor. Then it stopped. Mrs. Winchester thought maybe she was having delusions. But whatever it was did not want her to drink the tea. More odd things began to happen—occurrences no one could explain. A malignancy pervaded. Often, people would hear a horrible, mocking, evil laugh. Lights would slicker for no reasons; water taps would turn themselves on, then off. She would find her silverware mysteriously rearranged. On several occasions she discovered her solid gold dinner service hidden in a corner of the room. One night, she had a roaring fire in the fireplace of her bedroom, went to the bathroom, and returned the fireplace totally clean with nothing it in burning. The servants began to complain of hearing mice in the night, but Mrs. Winchester was certain there were no mice in the house. On several occasions, one could very clearly hear the floorboards creaking upstairs, as though somebody was walking about the house. The servants heard the creaking too but, as is often the case with servants, they got used to it, and to the other noises and unexplained presences. Mrs. Winchester urged them no to speak of those things outside of the house. It was bd enough that she was subjected to the disturbances and torment; the last thing she wanted was to attract undue attention to her home. People do not, as a rule, react compassionately to reports of supernatural infestations; many tend to suspect that the victim has somehow, whether by word or deed, “brought it on herself.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
At times, Mrs. Winchester felt that the entity was trying to crush the life out of her. She left her light burning all night. Through time, Mrs. Winchester was forced to accept her suffering. There was nothing else she could do. One winter night, one of the butlers was found dead at the head of a narrow flight of stairs leading down from his room. It was Mrs. Winchester who found him and gave the alarm, so distracted with fear and horror—for his blood was all over her—that at first roused household could not make out what she was saying, and thought she was waking from a nightmare. However, there, sure enough, at the top of the stairs lay the butler, stone dead, and head foremost, the blood from his wounds dripping down the steps below him. He had been dreadfully scratched and gashed about the face and throat, as if with curious pointed weapons; and one of his legs had a deep tear in it which had cut an artery, and probably caused his death. Bu how did he come there, and who had murdered him? Mrs. Winchester declared that she had been asleep in her bed, and hearing his cry had rushed out to find him lying on the stairs; but this was immediately questioned. A shadow was rearing up from the body. Mrs. Winchester described it as “a blob, like smoking black cloud, not the shape of a person—just a thing, but a terrible thing. The absolute evil that came from it was overwhelming. I was so gripped with terror, I could not move, and I knew that if it came toward me, I would be swallowed up…destroyed, and that would be the end of me. Imagine what it feels like to know that you are going to be killed, and the specter that is torturing you is deliberately making you suffer beforehand. That is how it was. I felt a level of fear that is beyond words. Then I heard a voice and screamed.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The male voice was hoarse, stertorous, angry almost. “You have left us this our spirit and strength entire strongly to suffer our pains that we my so suffice his vengeful ire, or do him mightier services as his thralls by right of war, whatever his business be here in the heart of hell to work in fire, or do his errands in the gloomy deep; what can it then avail though yet we feel strength undiminished, or eternal being to undergo eternal punishment?” Mrs. Winchester instantly went to sleep—chilling testimony to the control the demon had over her. When she awoke, she was clean, in her sleeping gown, and in her bed. However, it was with the possibility, and the hope, that the end of her long ordeal might well be in sight. Little of the fast-fading sunlight entered the house through the windows, many of which were partly or entirely covered with drapes. However, it was bright enough for Mrs. Winchester to see that the French Provincial sofa’s upholstery was slashed. Shredded wool spilled onto the floor. A solid oak bookcase had been hammered to pieces against the wall, gouging holes in the lath and plaster walls, running the Lincrusta-Walton Wallcovering. Her silver tea service has been smashed, along with a floor lamp. Books had been taken off the shelves, torn apart, and scattered across the living room. Mrs. Winchester lit a candle. It did not shed much light, just enough to reveal more details of the rubble. Looks like somebody went through here with a wrecking ball and scissors, she thought. The house remained silent. Leaving the door open behind her, she took a couple of steps into the room, and the crumpled pages of the ruined books crunched crispy underfoot. She noticed the dark, rusty stains on some of the paper and on the bone-white foam wool stuffing, and suddenly she stopped, realizing the stains were blood. A moment later, Mrs. Winchester spotted the corpse. It was that of a big man, lying on his side on the floor near the sofa, half-covered by gore-smeared book pages, book boards, and dust jackets. Zip’s growling grew louder, meaner. Moving closer to the body, which was just a few feet from the dining-room archway. Mrs. Winchester remembered that John Hansen had lately been making repairs, including a leak faucet and a broken door lock. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, Mrs. Winchester thought because of the way the room looked, he had been killed weeks ago. Her house was so big that it would often take weeks, months, and sometimes years to get around it. Yet, on closer inspection, the corpse proved to be neither bloated with the gas of decomposition nor marked by any signs of decay, so it could not have been there for very long. Perhaps only a day or less. The body had been disemboweled. Zip’s low growling gave wat to ugly snarling punctuated with hard, sharp barks. With a nervous twitch and a sudden pounding of her heart, Mrs. Winchester turned from the corpse and saw that zip was facing into the nearby dining room. The shadows were deep in there because the drapes were drawn shut over all the windows, and only a thin gray light passed through from the kitchen beyond. “Go, get out, leave!” an evil voice told her. It was certainly not the voice of Mr. Hansen. Something in the dining room was moving. There was no doubt of its presence, because it rushed out onto the dining-room tables, and came straight at Mrs. Winchester, emitting a blood-freeze shriek. She saw lantern eyes in the gloom, and nearly a man-sized figure that—in spite of poor light—gave an impression of deformity. Then the demon was coming off the table, straight at her. I Do conjure thee, O Spirit Focalor and your legion of thirty spirits to manifest your spiritual weapon in this corporeal World through my will and might! Empower it so that it may serve me here upon the corporeal plane! May it serve as a key to the realms above and below unlocking power and wisdom for my glory and ascent! Fill this weapon with your powers of wrath and fury that it may seek out spiritual attacks made toward me rendering them useless and impotent! I DO conjure thee Spirit Vephar, pierce the Heavens and cause the seas to be right stormy to cleanse the Earth of sin. Spirit Vizaresh, I DO conjure thee to drag sinful souls into hell, noosing them with the power of their own sins. May the snare be the power of their own evil, words, thoughts, and deeds and let this be you will to drag unwilling souls into Hell. May this cord gain its power through one’s practical application of evil principles. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
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Mrs. Winchester never recovered from the 1906 earthquake. Staff said she grew weaker and weaker as the years went by, and that she was often heard talking to her dead husband. The house was already large, but it morphed to be as long as several city blocks and was taller than the tallest trees on the green lawn. I suppose, ultimately, it was the spirits who kept her in this estate by not allowing her to build another one of this magnitude. When Mrs. Winchester passed away in 1922, she left $5,000,000.00 to charity. The mansion is truly special and a national treasure.
Through His Demon Ambassadors His Tactics May Capture Individuals
In the winter of 1864, twenty-four-year-old Sarah L. Winchester and her husband William Wirt Winchester were living in a mansion in New Haven, Connecticut USA. It was a small town and Mr. Winchester worked at Winchester Factory Castle, which was, believe or not, 3.2 million square feet. There were 1,200 employees employed in the castle. They produced rifles. To the town’s people, Mr. and Mrs. Winchester were the average affluent couple, outwardly no different from their friends or neighbors. However, outward appearances can be deceptive. Although she was part of a successful business, and married to the son of the Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut and manufacture of the famous Winchester repeating rifle, inside Mrs. Winchester carried the scars of being haunted. The couple’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 place of utmost suffering, horror, and excruciating terror, with no inkling of pity or mercy. Fifteen years later, in March of 1881, her husband’s premature death from tuberculosis added to Mrs. Winchester’s distress. She was living in a place of torment, evoking the quality of sinister wilderness. It was a dismal situation of waste and wild, as if Satan was surveying on the suite to which he had fallen. Life had become an infernal World of horror, a horrible dungeon burning like a huge furnace. Yet, from the burning flames came no light which was needed to make the darkness visible. Mrs. Winchester felt that she was damned and deprived of the sight of God who is light. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
It did not end here. Mrs. Winchester found herself having to flee her New Haven mansion frequently—often in the middle of the night–because her home had become a sorrowful place which had only doleful shades to droop down. At night, she would hear footsteps coming up the stairs, and when she went to inspect, she could see two balls of fire walking up the stairs. When investigated the following day, there were hoof marks scorched in the mahogany floors and stairs. It was a land of darkness. Mrs. Winchester decided to move to Santa Clara, California USA. This village presented sweeping vistas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for Mrs. Winchester to begin her building project, which she did with steadfast determination. She immediately hired carpenters to work in shifts around the clock to build a Grand Queen Anne Victorian mansion. However, there was one strange thing. There was never an architect employed, but Mrs. Winchester often had plans for the construction of her mansion that were truly out of this World and luxurious. By the turn of the century, the eighteen-room farmhouse has grown into a nine-story mansion. The estate eventually grew to around 740 acres of farmland, which included orchards of apricots, plums, and walnut trees to supplement Mrs. Winchester’s income. However, all was not well. Given the family background and the horrors they had endure from the beginning, one could assume that Mrs. Winchester’s day-to-day reality continued to be one of fear. She had been initiated into a World of evil—an evil that was to pursue her for the remainder of her life, and if she stopped construction of her home, that would immediately prove to be fatal for her. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Mrs. Winchester was cursed and the demons gave her precise instructions on how to stay alive. Evil has the uncanny knack of seeking out the vulnerable. Given such circumstances, Mrs. Winchester stood little chance of ever leading a normal, well-adjusted life. She developed an eating disorder, and allegedly tried to kill herself twice and suffered prolonged periods of depression. She was caught in a recalcitrant World of darkness and danger. One night at the dinner table, the butler Gavin Dorchester, had not wished to leave without paying his respects to Mrs. Winchester. However, when he approached Mrs. Winchester, she sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like the indifferent emissary of some evil power. Mrs. Winchester then said, “has your wife decided to drop her lawsuit against my estate?” “Oh, yes,” he replied. “My lawyers knew we had not a leg to stand on. You see, she borrowed most of the money lost in the fruit orchard from you without your knowledge, and she was up a tree. That is why she shot herself with your model 1886 rifle with the sterling silver buttplate mount.” The horror was sweeping over Mrs. Winchester in great deafening waves. “She shot herself? She killed herself because of that?” “Well, she did not kill herself, exactly. She dragged on two months before she died.” Mr. Dorchester emitted the statement as unemotionally as a cotton gin plucking cotton from the fields. “You mean that she tried to kill herself, and failed? And tried again?” “Oh, she did not have to try again,” said Mr. Dorchester grimly. They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eyeglasses thoughtfully about his finger, she, motionless, her arms stretched along her knees in an attitude of tension. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Mrs. Dorchester had been a housemaid who apparently mishandled hundred of thousands of Mrs. Winchester’s money, which caused crops to fail and several farmers to lose their jobs. “But if you knew all of this,” Mrs. Winchester began at length, hardly able to force her voice above a whisper, “how is it that when I wrote you at the time of your wife’s disappearance you said you did not understand the letter?” Mr. Dorchester received this without perceptible embarrassment: “Why, I did not understand it—strictly speaking. And it was not the time to talk about it, if I had. The Winchester business was settled when the suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find my wife.” Mrs. Winchester continued to scrutinize him. “Then why are you telling me now?” Still Mr. Dorchester did not hesitate. “Well, to begin with, I suppose you knew more than you appear to—I mean about the circumstances of my wife’s death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter has been raked up again. And I though if you did not know you ought to.” Mrs. Winchester remain silent, and he continued: “You see, it has only come out lately what a bad state your affairs were in because of my wife. She is a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and taking on sewing at home when she got too sick—something with the heart, I believe. But having to admit what she had done with your money was too much for her. She knew you would never forgive her.” Chocking back her tears. “Dead, dead, dead,” she whispered. “But she was alive yesterday and the day before and the day before that, and I was here, and I did nothing! Dead! Dead! Dead!” #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
And then the bizarre scene shifted, as if the tragedy of her rage were passing into another act. Mrs. Winchester saw herself beating with her fists on all the walls of wood and glass around her, beating with her fists until the blood ran from her bruised hands. She sat down on the chair at the kitchen corner, her body crumpling, hand up to shield her face, and she began to sob aloud in the labyrinth of a house she had built, the images passing through her mind. Finally she laid her head down on her folded arms, and she cried and cried, until she was choked and exhausted with it, and all she could do was whisper over and over: “I told you all if you ever needed anything to come to me. Never to still. Do you not understand this blood money is cursed? These objects in my home are cursed! If you steal them, you bring that curse into your family!” At last, she wiped her face with her napkin, and she went to the Hall of Fires to lay down. Her head hurt and all the World seemed empty to her and hostile and without the slightest promise of warmth or light. It would pass. It has to. She felt this misery on the day Mr. Winchester was buried. She had felt it before, standing in the hospital corridor as her new born baby girl Annie cried in pain. Yet it seemed impossible now that things could get better. And her thoughts continued, abysmal and miserable, sapping her spirit and her belief in herself. It must have been an hour that she lay there, the floors hot from the fire fireplaces in the room. Mrs. Winchester was ashamed and lonely. She was ashamed of being the victim of this anguish. Her heart hammering in her ears. She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she could trust her voice; then she said, “I bet she died in October, on the 22nd, when the crops failed and many of the farm hands went missing.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
“Oh, my God!” Mrs. Winchester said. “They will not know till afterward. They will not know till long, long afterward.” Mrs. Winchester thought of the torments which her employees who stole would have to endure in contrast to the bliss and joy of being honest workers; she knew her mansion must have infused a feeling of horror in their minds, but they were paid well. This mansion can make a Heaven of Hell and a Hell of Heaven. Mrs. Winchester struggled to her feet—and surprised herself when she discovered that the act of getting up made her immediately feel better. A calm was enveloping her whole body. She was no longer afraid. Wind murmured and moan in the mansion’s eaves. Now and then the house creaked with ordinary middle-of-the-night settling noises. Exhausted from the emotional as well as the physical exertions of the day, Mrs. Winchester was soon asleep in her Daisy Bedroom. Near dawn, she came half awake and realized that Zip was at the bedroom window again, keeping watch. She murmured the dog’s name and wearily patted the wool mattress. However, Zip remained on guard, and Mrs. Winchester drifted off to sleep once more. A disturbance occurred awakening Mrs. Winchester. From directly overhead, she heard a series of thuds; it was as if someone was jumping from one part of the room to another. The thuds were loud, so heavy that the crystal chandelier trembled. Mrs. Winchester took Zip with her to investigate. However, Zip was having none of it; he would not venture up the stairs. He stood with his front paws on the bottom step, barking up at something unseen. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
Mrs. Winchester’s blood ran cold. She walked up the stairs, flung open the door, and pushed the light button, but nothing happened. The bulb was blown. She glanced up at the bedroom window and saw what looked like a figure standing just beyond the open drapes. She could swear she saw the drapes move. That was enough for her, she immediately left the room, shut and locked the door. The next morning, the light in the bedroom where the noise was coming from was working perfectly. However, something rosed her. She had the distinct feeling that someone had just ran fingers through her hair. She could still feel her scalp tingling from the touch. It happened a second time. The fingers of a spectral hand pressed themselves deep into the nape of her neck and raked swiftly through her hair, right to the crown of her head. All she remembered when she came to was her uncontrollable screaming. These physical anomalies were not, in themselves, as troubling as Mrs. Winchester’s deteriorating relationship with her beloved Zip. He refused to go near her. This was very unusual. Mrs. Winchester and Zip had been inseparable. Now Zip was unwilling to share the same room with her. Mrs. Winchester looked around the room to see what could be the matter. At the foot of the bed was a woman. Possibly Mrs. Dorchester. She was wearing a green ballgown. Her hands were extended in a beckoning gesture and she had a grin on her face. The grin was not a mirthful one; it seemed utterly malevolent. Mrs. Winchester was terrified. Then she started howling with terror. At that, the ghost raised its hands to its throat and made a throttling gesture that had so frightened Mrs. Winchester. Then is slowly disappeared. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
Zip was whining, ears back, his tail between his legs. He seemed to be staring at the place where the apparition had been. The butler Mr. Dorchester was on duty this night, and he heard a great commotion and strange sounds coming from Mrs. Winchester’s bedroom. When he went to inspect, Mrs. Winchester was shaking. She seemed to be having some kind of fit. “Mrs. Winchester?” She did not respond. Gurgling noises grew louder. Mr. Dorchester could believe what he was seeing: it was the most macabre sight he had ever witnessed. Mrs. Winchester’s eyes were bulging; in the light from the fireplace he could see that her face was discolored. She was choking. Mr. Dorchester saw the cause. There, as clear as say, was a hand fastened about her throat. However, it did not belong to Mrs. Winchester. It was a pale, almost translucent hand, and it was trying to strangle the life out of Mrs. Winchester. The hand ended at the wrist in a frilled green cuff and wore a diamond ring on the ring finger. Mr. Dorchester was petrified. Mrs. Winchester’s face turned blue under the hand’s murderous grip and her eyes had rolled in her head. She was gasping for air. Mr. Dorchester seized the grisly hand. It was ice cold to the touch and immensely strong. Then someone with long fingernails dug into Mr. Dorchester’s shoulder. He struggled and struggled to free Mrs. Winchester. Finally he died. She collapsed onto the bear skin rug, gasping for air. As Zip lay by her side trying to comfort her, Mrs. Winchester had never felt closer to death than she had that night. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
In the hollow of her back, a single drop of sweat traced the course of Mrs. Winchester’s spine. She was more scared than she had ever been—or had ever thought she could be—but she did not want to leave her home for any reason. She stood in the bloody-orange late-evening sunlight, at the perimeter of the trees, peering into the purple shadows and mysterious green depths of her estates. The spruces and pines and sycamores rustled in the breeze, and she thought she heard something more moving furtively through the brush. Imagination, of course, she told herself. Squinting into the forest on her estate, Mrs. Winchester strained to see through steadily deepening shadows, trying to catch another glimpse of the movement that had drawn her attention a moment ago. There. A ripple in the murkiness beneath the evergreen boughs. About eighty feet from her bedroom window. Something was moving quickly and stealthily from one sheltering shadow to another. Them movement grew closers, much closer. Mrs. Winchester had been confused by the layers of shadows, she drew the drapes closed. However, she did not seem to realize that not confronting these things gives the Devil free rein to do as he chooses. It is easy to see how evil can be promulgated over generations, if the individuals concerned have neither the fortitude nor the resources necessary to put an end to it. Satan’s bid for our souls is predicted on the debasement of our humanness as early as possible in our childhood. The Winchester Mansion is believed to a portal by which supernatural forces can access this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
The superstitious were terrified of The Winchester Mansion and of the screams, the shrieks and the wailing that floating from the mansion after midnight, and crossed themselves every time they passed it. Oh, the town’s people gossiped about Mrs. Winchester. They claimed she had caused the manifestation of the demon Choronzon, the epitome of all disharmony and confusion, whom she conjured up in the form of a naked savage. Many also thought she was a German spy. Some even said that Annie did not die, but Black Magic caused her to disappear mysteriously. People also believed that Mrs. Winchester had the ability to invoke evil spirits and summon up supernatural darkness during daylight hours. They mystery of The Winchester Mansion and of secret societies has long been part of man’s total fascination with the occult and it would indeed be wrong to give the impression that all forms of magical and mystical endeavour and not real. There are many pursuits and secret organizations which are described as mystical or esoterical, embracing a wide variety of students and scholars seeking the knowledge of Western inner traditions. Then, more in tune with popular suspicions about secret societies, there are also occult groups whose object is clearly to influence the World order, by infiltrating the Church, politics, pressure groups and the business community. The great secrecy which surrounds the higher echelons of The Winchester Mystery House makes it virtually impossible to penetrate any senior mansion meeting, and indeed no person who has not been initiated into the meeting the secret society would be allowed to observe even the most simple of rituals. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
Because of this secrecy, which is seldom broken—even by a deserter—it is virtually impossible to identify those at the top, although there are many visible employees, much press, and television interviews and news articles. The members and agents of The Winchester Mystery House operate in the upper echelons of the World establishment circles. This is not of a sensational or World-threatening order, far from it; but it exists, has a voice among powerful bodies in international politics and is strong enough. It aims have been varied and covert, ranging from utopian dreams of fully restoring and furnishing the estate, to addressing the historical importance and destiny of authentic Victorian homes, those that have been untouched by time, and have most of their original splendour. The second level of the secret society is pure, occult, based on the old traditions, with meetings of the like-minded individuals who are moved by the romanticism of gathering for purpose of divine illumination and reaching out for contact with non-human entities, either in their spiritual or physical manifestation. The idea of these groups of men and women meeting secretly for mystical or occult pursuits, adorning themselves in their expensive robes and calling themselves by obscure titles lend itself to colourful theories about what they actually do before their secret altars. Fuelled by images from the media, it is easy to conjure up the view that all that is secret must be evil. This is not the case, yet activities of these occult groups are fascinating. He basis for much of the ritual secrecy and traditions of occult societies invariably leads us back to the famous Order of the Knight Templar, formed in 1119 for the purpose of protecting pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land and which subsequently became noted for its military prowess against the Saracens and the immense wealth of those who joined. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem, provided them with headquarters in his palace, which was said to be part of the Temple of Solomon. It has been most notably the belief in the train of the goddess Diana and the host of the dead as of great interest to scholars. Welcome Spirit Marax, O most noble king! I say thou art welcome unto me, because I have called thee through Him who has created Heaven, and Earth and Hell, and all that is in them contained, and because also thou hast obeyed. By that same power by which I have called thee forth, I bond three, that thou remain affably and visibly here before this Circle so constant and so long as I shall have occasion for thy presence; and not to depart without my license until thou hast dully and faithfully performed my will without any falsity. BY THE PENTACLE OF SOLOMON HAVE I CALLED THEE! GIVE UNTO ME A TRUE ANSWER. Ahriman, Lord of Darkness divine, I thank you for your presence within this unholy temple of counter creation. I have offered you this life of this beautiful mansion as a gateway to your manifestation with this realm to stand before me! You are Angra Mainyu ho is the Lord of counter creation, who has brought forth the mountains to the plains! You have brought forth the beasts to the fields and creatures to the night. Ahriman and Marax, with your infernal blessings I asked that you both would bring forth the baneful powers of the wolf kin to fuel with atmosphere with their essence that it may be compelled according to my will. Allow of to hear the howling of wolves and perceive their phantom shadows around us. Feed the spirits and make them hunger more to walk among the living and subject them more to my will. Open a gateway to the predatory powers of the wolf and a gateway to initiation by these lupine demons. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Standing proud and majestic on a limestone outcrop and commanding panoramic views out over the surrounding countryside, The Winchester Mystery House is regarded as the finest of the many Castles built. This impressive and historically important property has evolved over the centuries to incorporate the splendour of its medieval heritage and the elegance of the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th Century. The Gardens are a delight, with fine stands of trees, wild meadow flowers and stone steps lead up to the Castle Entrance. Come hang around and enjoy a tour.
Have you purchased your tickets for Friday the 13th yet?! 👀🔦 The Winchester Mystery House is offering Friday the 13th Self-Guided Flashlight Tours. These self-guided tours give guests the opportunity to roam through the halls of the purportedly haunted Victorian mansion while hearing tales of its former and (possibly current!) inhabitants. Guests will guide themselves through the mansion that is famous for its dizzying floorplan and lack of formal blueprints. Tour Hosts will be stationed throughout the house to ensure guests don’t get lost. TICKETS ON SALE NOW!
160-room Victorian mansion which was once the residence of Sarah L. Winchester👻
~Celebrating 100 Years of Tours in 2023~
He Belongs to Me– I am Not Going!
It is a mistake to believe that evil spirits and demons do not exist at all, and equally so to see demons under every bed. At one time, in another century, the Devil was well defined as any adversary of flesh and blood. High on a throne of royal state Satan exalted sat…and princely counsel in his face yet shone, majestic, though in ruin. In Hell, there were burning lakes and caverns, teeming with vast hosts of demon armies, all under the command of a rigid hierarchy of generals, chief among whom was Satan himself. Few Christians living in the seventeenth century doubted the existence of hell and its rulers. There were many reminders in ecclesiastical art; paintings, sculpture, stained glass, the admonishments of the bestiary. Even the fearsome gargoyles set atop cathedrals were modeled on a fairly precise and generally prevailing picture of how demons actually looked; in the seventeenth century, all art was representational art. It was generally agreed that the Devil himself was a horned creature with a forked tail, who might sometimes appear as a serpent. Sorcerers were feared. And if sickness were not the wrath of God, it was the work of the Devil, his demons, and his earthbound disciples. In modern times, many people have rushed to embrace the new “science” of psychiatry, the medical men were eager to jettison belief in evil forces, demonic oppression and affliction, and to ascribe natural cases to all mental diseases of unknown etiology. It could be argued that they were, in effect, playing into the hands of the very Devil they wised to sideline. While some believe in the “unquiet dead,” others think that hearing voices, foot steps, objects moving across the room by themselves, doors slamming, strange voices are a symptom of schizophrenia. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
However, in authentic cases, the dead may become pawns in the struggle for the souls of the living, souls in transition, or “dislocated” souls, may become possessed by evil, so that they in their turn can possess the living, and so drive the living into despair, or worse. Evil symptoms and their inevitable fruit of despair, which leads to death by suicide bear the marks of the evil one battling with those who are sensitive to the uncommitted dead. This is dangerous territory, whether or not one holds with the existence of such entities. Ghosts are also sometimes known as the “restless dead.” It is important to establish that such entities are considered to be the “souls” or “spirits” of human beings. This is to distinguish them from nonhuman entities that have never drawn breath, those which are often referred to as demon. Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester, who was responsible for building the Winchester Mystery House, took precautions to enlist the assistance of the spirits when it came to the architecture of the Victorian mansion. The construction of the mansion was an effort to obtain deliverance from “unclean” spirits she felt that were out to take her life. She believed that she would be delivered back to God, and the transgenerational hold would be consequently broken. Never ceasing construction on this mansion would release the demonic footholds attached to the family’s fortune and also set her ancestors free. The Devil is a spirit that is powerful (it may be many places at the same time and manifest itself in a variety of distinctly paranormal ways). #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
Satan is capable of taking up a kind of residence within the mind, brain, soul, or body of susceptible and willing human beings—he is a spirit that has various names (among them Lucifer and Satan), that are real and do exit. Demonic oppression is far more common than possession, and that was certainly the case at the Winchester Estate. Malevolent spirits are always around to take advantage of our weaknesses. Spirits seem to have a channel to those who frequently suffer such attacks. Mrs. Winchester felt she was cursed because the sudden death of her new born daughter, and the death of her husband. The mansion she was building was supposed to seal up these demons. “There is a demon in this room,” John Hansen announced calmly to Mrs. Winchester as she sat in the morning room drinking her tea. The calmness was a mask. Inwardly, he was dismayed. He had not expected this. That is when he heard the low, menacing growl coming from the couch behind him. He turned. Minutes before the demure young housemaid, Mary Meriwether, had just greeted him. Now she was hideously transformed. Her neck had become impossibly elongated, the facial skin had tightened, and the lips were drawn back into a mocking smirk. The eyes that fixed him with blazing hatred were no longer those of Mary. Mrs. Winchester had been battling the supernatural force for more than two decades and she had come face-to-face with great evil many times. It often leaped out at her. He demons hawked up and down the mansion like the image of haunted criminals. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
This house contained so many abysmal mysteries, as John Hansen starred back into Mrs. Winchester’s anguished eyes, he could tell she had been tortured. “There is a demon in the room,” he said again. Foe all that, Mrs. Winchester was shocked, taken unawares. Now Mary was lunging at John. He looked terrified. With two quick, curt gestures, John Hansen motioned to Mrs. Winchester to exist the room so to remove herself from harm’s way. Mrs. Winchester retreated to the back of the room. John advanced on Mary. “You foul and evil spirit, in the name of Jesus Christ—” “You’ll never get rid of me!” The woman slithered off the couch, cackling and taunting. “She’s mine, mine, mine.” The voice was that of a very old woman. It seemed to issue, by turns, from the young woman’s mouth and from various points in the room. She was writhing on the floor, her body coiling and uncoiling itself, her tongue lolling obscenely and her eyes yellow as gold. John was left in no doubt: these were the words and actions of the demonic, the possessed. Not too long before this, he had confronted a young man in the Winchester Mansion who had likewise hissed and wriggled in much the same manner, but the demon won the battle. The chilling words that were issued from the young man’s mouth were from a voice greatly distorted. “He belongs to me. I am not going.” And with that the young man fled from the mansion. John Hansen tried to cast the evil spirit out of this woman. “I bind you, and I forbid you to speak or interfere with this woman.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
John could not believe that Mary could summon such energy. She was barely five feet, three inches tall and weighed only 110 pounds. However, her arms and fists seemed to belong to a strongly built man. She caught him in a body lock. Two servants sprang to John’s defense and tried to pull her off, but she shrugged the men away with the ease of a freestyle wrestler, knocking them to the floor. Another blow to the jaw nearly felled him. He struggled to retain his balance as the servants tried again to restrain her. “In the name of Jesus—stop!” John shouted. His words had an astonishing effect. Mary fell to the floor as if struck by a heavy object. She lay still as a stone, eyes wide and staring, all strength seemingly drained from her. John, recovered somewhat but still a little groggy from the blows he had sustained, bent over her. “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to release your name!” On hearing the words “Jesus Christ,” Mary went into a violent fit. The servants grasped her arms and legs. At the moment, she was as much a danger to herself as to others; she was flailing about, out of control. However, by and by the fit subsided. The assistants relaxed their grip and allowed Mary to sit up, very slowly. Mary seemed to slump down into herself; her posture became that of an old, decrepit being. The shoulders grew hunched; her chin sank low onto her chest. She began cackling. John, still in his position of safety, was aghast. Then she vanished like a sheet of paper. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
The flying horror-struck from the shrouded image of this inscrutable day occupied them, and the problems were perpetually bubbling up from the cloudy caldron of the spirits in the Winchester Mansion. Mrs. Winchesters consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of velocity. It swayed with the incessant oscillation of conjecture. There were even moments of weariness when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life. Although Mary had vanished, the voice began to jabber, the words pouring out in a demented meter of their own, like a travesty of a children’s play song. “Before the filth met the filth she was ours! In the darkness womb she was ours. Always ours, always ours…ours!” The final words drawn out in a harsh, rasping hiss. The demon was playing for time. Another demon was making its presence felt; John was certain of it. There was a marked difference in one of the servant’s features. His face seemed to flatten; his mouth drooped. Then from the servants mouth a voice said, “We will never leave her.” This voice seemed to emerge from the floor itself. “We’ll kill her first!” Then the voice took on the cadence of a schoolyard bully’s—malicious, singing, mocking. “We tried before with William, his blades and pills, blades and pills, blades-and-pills.” “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ, release your name!” #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
These moments seemed to lengthened into hours and days for Mrs. Winchester, till she passed into a phase of stolid acquiescence. She had come to regard herself as part of the supernatural routine with incurious eyes. And this deepening apathy held her fast. The face of the possessed servant took on a haughty look. There was a sneer, and another personality, another consciousness, behind it. “I am Sir Francis Dashwood,” a masculine voice announced. “Lover of the little ones. Robber of the little souls. Killer of the Innocents.” The servant’s hands flew to his throat. They began to squeeze. He was choking; his face turning blue. John rushed to break the grip of those hands—and found he could not. The servant’s head began to weave from side to side again. “We take them in the dark…always in the dark…in the depths of the dark. We walk for the Master in the dark. Of the warm, of the warm…to do for the Master in the bodies of the blood of the warm. To kill with the hands of the bodies of the warm…to range in the sweat in the blood in the warm.” A dramatic change occurred, but it was invisible to all in the morning room. John reports a “dark” presence had departed. The servant had no recollection of what had just taken place. The ordeal was at an end for now. The ghosts of family evil had ceases to haunt the mansion for now. After that day, the servant disappeared. No one never knew what had become of him—no one ever would know. But the house knew; the library in which Mrs. Winchester spent her long lonely evenings knew. For the house was always watching. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense consciousness of the old dusky walls seemed about to break out into some audible revelation of their secret. However, the revelation never came, and she knew it would never come. The Winchester Mansion was not one of the garrulous old mansions that betray the secrets entrusted to them. Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian, of the mysteries it had surprised. And Mrs. Winchester, sitting face to face with its silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by any human means. The Winchester Family and Mansion are the source of a bizarre legend, and today is revered and idolized by followers around the World who strive to re-enact their ritual teachings. Even occultists praise the Winchester Family and their Mansion as the greatest marvel in the World. The Winchester mansion apparently means something deep and philosophical, that every person should find one’s own true will and exert it, just as Mrs. Winchester did making a home for the spirits. The construction of the 160-room mansion, that is approximately 70,000 square feet, helped Mrs. Winchester escape a World of overbearing darkness. According to one of the Winchester Mansion’s diarists, a handsome vampire, Marvellous Merchiston, was sent to seduce Mrs. Winchester and reduce her to inconsequence. He realized his before he could attack, and turned his magical current against himself—with the result that the man turned to ashes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
Next, his fellow vampires attacked Mrs. Winchester’s bloodhounds, which triggered the summoning up of the great demon Paimon, a Great King, and 200 Legions of Spirits. The vampires fell to an army of Paimon’s demons. This was known as the “year of miracles,” and it decided the outcome of the bloodiest wars yet know on the Winchester Estate. This carried many fortune seekers to a watery grave, and the wilderness campaigns from 1888 to 1893 claimed thousands of lives. Many were wracking with fevers (which claimed more victims than Paimon and the Winchester Rifles), and battlefield medical treatment was too primitive to save many of the wounded. They expected to gain Mrs. Winchester’s rich, flourishing, powerful, enterprising estate, but instead became ruined and undone. In the meantime, Mrs. Winchester travelled frequently and was a great walker and mountaineer. She strolled across China, Spain, and the Sahara desert; she climbed cliffs at Beachy Head and rocks at Wastdale, mountains in Switzerland, Mexico, and the Himalayas. She was a prolific writer, dashing off verse, sonnets, plays, novels, macabre short stories, magic invocations, and many were dazzled by her multifaceted brilliance. She was a traveller in the physical and spiritual Worlds. The wide scope of occult power possessed by spiritists helps explain why people can accomplish extraordinary things, and why magic can also cause so much mischief. Through the phenomena of levitation, apports, telekinesis, and materializations, it is not difficult to see how a person endowed with strong mediumistic powers can do a great deal of harm, especially in the closely associated realm of magic. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
One common form of magic persecution is beatings by an invisible attacker. Parapsychology also sees magical persecution as a mediumistic problem in the sphere of materializations. Strong mediums (when under demon control) send out energy with which to build up human phantasms and are also able to transform this energy into animal forms, including dogs, cats, frogs, snakes, or human bodies with animal heads, et cetera. This explains the bizarre spiritistic persecution through phantoms in the form of various animals or human bodies with nonhuman heads. These animals bite, scratch, or otherwise torment their victims. Examples of these occult phenomena abound in areas where the black arts are practiced. However, such occurrences are denied by many intellectuals. Often peasants and country people, especially in Europe, know more about magic than university graduates, who claim, swindle, or hocus-pocus trickery are used instead of occult powers. Magic defense enlists supernatural agencies to counteract or undo the mischief wrought by magic persecution. Various kinds of spells, charms, or incantations are employed. In spiritistic séances it is an established fact that injuries inflicted upon a phantasm are sustained by the medium, even in the case of animal phantasms. Many defensive customs developed to combat this threat since magic persecution involves materialization. If a victim can injure an aggressive phantasm, one has won the struggle. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
I DO invocate and conjure thee, O Spirit Sarah L. Winchester; and being with power armed from the SUPREME MAJESTRY, I do strongly command thee, by BERALANENSIS, BALDACHINENSIS, PAUMACHIA, and APOLOGIAE SEDES; by the most Powerful Princess, Genii, Liachidae, and Ministers of the Tartarean Abode; and by the Chief Prince of the Seat of Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee, and by invoking conjure thee. And being armed with power from the SUPREME MAJESTRY, I do strongly command thee, by Him Who spake and it was done, and unto whom all creatures be obedient. Also I, being made after the image of God, endued with power from GOD and created according unto His will, do command that you do not fall into the trap of expressing disgust with these people, or exhibiting spite or hatred. They serve as important examples of what not to be. Remember that they are not the target of your spite and hatred. It is the systematic construct of imposed limitation we despise. Not the people who are enslaved by the system. As the fallen spirits in this estate ascend, I ascend also by following the path of the celestials and infernals do tremble together, and around troubled and confounded. I usurp the power of worship to empower my blackened eternal soul. I shall take all power raised within this sanctuary as my own through this talisman of counter creation to strengthen my divine power and to Become a Living God. For thou art conjured by the name of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, HELIOREN, wherefore fulfill thou my commands, and persist thou therein unto the end, speaking unto me with a voice clear and intelligible without any ambiguity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
Winchester Mystery House
There have been many different activities that have existed since the Estate opened for tours in 1923. Did you know the property once included a WMH Wax Museum? It was launched in the early 1960s. #100yearsofmystery
Stay tuned for any Centennial Celebration announcements on our social accounts of how The Winchester Mystery House will be celebrating 100 years of tours! https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Preparing to Call Out a Demon
Occultists draw on the past. Everything they do has some historical, sometimes religious, bond. Rumours, myths and superstitions surround almost every aspect of the secret societies of men and women who gather suspiciously—because of the secrecy—and perform their dark and dramatic rituals, formulated from old grimoires handed down and rewritten through the ages. Personalities, too, figure predominantly. However, there are very few forms of modern occultism that do not, at some time or other, rely upon the legacy of Aleister Crowley, the self-styled Great Beast 666. At the pinnacle of his career was renowned for a wild mix of magic, and today is revered by millions the World over who are rereading the legends of this man many believed to be another Shakespeare. Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester is also a mysterious historical figure who practiced the occult. The mansion she built, called the Winchester Mansion is classic Victorian architecture and unparalleled gardens that are so incredibly photogenic that the home has become one of the World’s most intriguing and mysterious places to see ghost. Mrs. Winchester’s resources were unlimited, and she spent enormous sums building the most incredible mansion. However, the Winchester fortune was cursed. It was in the thick December dusk, in the Hall of Fires, Mrs. Winchester had endured thirteen years in the soul-deadening mourning of her husband and her daughter. When servants would catch her off guard, she would still express a sadness. Her life had probably not been of the most vivid order: for a long period, but these country plains of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and Mrs. Winchester had felt from the first day the mysterious stir of intenser memories. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
The feeling had never been stronger than on this particular afternoon when, waiting in the library for the lamps to come, she rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth. Edith Bernard, a one-beautiful young woman was found dead, lying helplessly on the floor. A single bullet lay buried deep in her head. “Spare me, ye gods!” Mrs. Winchester cried. Four servants quickly rushed in the room to comfort Mrs. Winchesters. As two of the servants stood breast to breast, another bullet pierced them both. They uttered a cry together, together cast a parting look around them, and together breathed their last. Adora, another maid, seeing them fall, hastened to the spot to render assistance and fell stricken in the act of loving duty. Only one servant and Mrs. Winchester was left. Another gunshot was heard and it struck Valda, but no shooter was seen. Mrs. Winchester knelt over the lifeless bodies, and kissed, now one, now another of her dead servants. Raising her pallid arms to Heaven, “Spirits,” said she, “feed full your rage with my anguish! Satiate your hard heart, while I follow the grave of my four servants. Yet where is your triumph? Bereaved as I am, I am still richer than you, my conqueror.” Two others servants rushed into the library to assist Mrs. Winchester. One of them held her is her arms. The other was tending to the dead bodies. Scarce had Mrs. Winchester spoken, when the gun shot sounded and struck terror into all hearts. The servant mourning over the biers of their dead coworkers fell struck by a bullet, and died on the corpse she was bewailing. The maid attempting to console Mrs. Winchester, suddenly ceased to speak, and sank lifeless to the Earth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
Six were now dead, and only Mrs. Winchester remained. “Spare me!” she begged. There was a torpid grief. The breeze moved not her hair, no color was on her cheek, her eyes glared fixed and immovable, there was no sign of life about her. Her very tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth, and her veins ceased to convey the tide of life. Her neck bent not, her arms made no gesture, her foot no step. She was changed to stone, within and without. Yet tears continued to flow. When other staff members stumbled upon the tragedy, “Could it be the house?” the Butler asked. The mansion itself was fully of secrets. They seemed to be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the rows of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hearth. “Why, of course—the house is haunted!” he reflected. The ghosts of those killed by the Winchester rifle. Mrs. Winchester has now become a permanent tenant of her haunted mansion. One of the elusive specters had apparently had the powers to crystallize about it. Immediately following the strange deaths and Mrs. Winchesters crystallization, mystery, scandal and rumor swirled around the tragedy. Mrs. Winchester had been the envy of her friends, now the pity of even her foes. She stood crystalized in her mansion for many months. A new sense of meaning—a sense gradually acquired through daily contact with her in the form created a scene of the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that posses the ghost-seeking faculty, that communed visually but secretly with its own past; if one could only get close enough communion with the house, one might surprise its secret, and acquire the ghost sight on one’s own. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
More and more under the spell of the crystallization of Mrs. Winchester, calling out to the remote corners of the house, servants found treasure after treasure, it revealed itself to them. When passing from the first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of the old house, the butler pressed a panel that opened on a flight of corkscrew stairs leading to the nine-story tower. The view was enchanting. His gaze flew to the long tossed horizon line of the downs, and then dropped contentedly back to trace the yew of hedges about the fish pond, and the shadow of cedar and palm trees on the lawn. Distinctly he recalled that he had seen, as he glanced, a shadow of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face; and, following his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man—a man in loose black clothes, as it appear to him—who was sauntering down the lime avenue to the court with the doubtful gait of a stranger who seeks his way. “Wait!” he hastily shouted and ran down the stairs. But the man was gone. Suddenly, Mrs. Winchester let out a terrible cry…but could it be her? She had been in statue form for years. The old butler Augusts had some questions as to the connection of evil spirits with systems of idolatry and witchcraft. He was almost willing to swear that his eyes were playing tricks on him; for seeing Mrs. Winchester come back to life went beyond all human discernment. Of course, the young lady was stiff and needed help moving around. The Hall of Fires seemed to warm her blood and make moving easier. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against spiritual wickedness in high places. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
Weary with her thoughts, Mrs. Winchester moved to the window. The Hall of Fires was quite dark now, and she was surprised to see how much faint light the outer World still held. As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself far down the perspective of bare limes: it looked like a mere blot of dark blackness in the grayness, and for an instant, as it moved toward her; her heart thumped to the thoughts “It’s a ghost!” She had time, in that long instant, to see the man gaining substance and character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband William Winchester; she turned to meet him, and he vanished into thin air. Mrs. Winchester’s spirit sunk. At once the air of the hall rand with a long, frightful chain of woeful howls. Above the bestial clamour, Mrs. Winchester could hear a spirit shouting, “I adjure thee, great Marchosias, the agent of the Emperor Lucifer and of his beloved son Lucifuge Rofocale by the power of the pact…” The noise rose higher and a green stream began to come off the brazier. However, there was silence. Again the spirit shouted, “I adjure thee, Marchosias, by the pact and by the names, appear instanter.” The room screamed…but still there was no apparition. Instantly the mansion rocked as though the Earth moved under it. The building shuddered again…then from the middle of the room, a low cloud of yellow fumes went up towards the ceiling, making Mrs. Winchester cough. As it spread and thinned she could see the shape forming under it…it was something like a she-wolf, grey and immense, with green glistening eyes. A wave of coldness was coming from it…the cloud continued to dissipate. The she-wolf glared at them, slowly spreading her griffin’s wings. Her serpent’s tail lashed gently, scalily. The existence and manifestation of demons and devils in the Winchester Mansion has been accepted without question. The thing that dominated the mansion was a group of spirits known as “Legion,” or “The Legion of Lucifer.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
There is magical art abundant in the mansion. This explains how it has become an abnormal plane of power to “charge” magical energy. It is thought that Mrs. Winchester used the powers of Osiris and was able to reconstitute her body to return to life. This is a fundamental of the higher form of necromancy. When the mansion was sold and items auctioned off, the walls were found to be covered with magical symbols and paintings. Also found were solid gold talismans and amulets. The mansion itself was protected by spells and curses. The Winchester Mansion is a receptacle for all the mystical and magical beliefs of the East and the West. The farmers on the Winchester Estate followed the long-established practice of cutting a girdle of bark off the trees, and then setting them on fire or leaving them to die in place while planting crops around the decaying hulks. Immense trees were stripped of their foliage, and half consumed by fire extending their sprawling limbs, many were bleached by weather. By this method the farmers on the estate could clear from 3 to 5 acres a year for cultivation. The relentless demand for wood generated by the construction of the mansion and for other Victorian houses on the estate and barns, fences and fuel, potash and turpentine—added to the demand. Native Americas, in return for furs that they had in abundance, secured goods such as blankets, guns, ironware that they highly valued from Mrs. Winchester’s estate. It was even rumored that Mrs. Winchester owned the Philosopher’s Stone which was believed to turn anything it touched into gold, cure all ills and kept its owner perpetually youthful. It was supposedly given to her as a gift. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
As the years pass by, many people who practice magic descend more deeply into the darker realm of magic, summoning demons and spirits almost at will. Some magicians become obsessed by their craft, their quest for knowledge and power and it can drag them into the black abyss. A fascinating story about the darker realm of the Winchester Mansion is one about Leonore. Leonore was lodging at the Winchester Mansion, she persuaded Augusta, the butler, to unlock the door to the Blue Séance Room. Leonore went inside and stood reading aloud from a book of spells that lay on the table; suddenly a demon appeared and demanded to know why he had been summoned. Leonore was so shocked that she could not answer and the demon grabbed her by the throat and strangled her. Mrs. Winchester returned to find Leonore lying dead on the floor of her Blue Séance Room, and realizing this could mean trouble, she summoned the demon to return and bring Leonore back to life long enough for her to be removed. This was done, and Leonore walked out of Mrs. Winchester’s Mansion into the marketplace where she immediately collapsed and died. As word of Mrs. Winchester’s success, great wealth, and powers spread, so did the story that she had made a pact with the devil, written as usual in her own blood, in return for magical powers. Once the magical power of the menses has been blessed by the Dark Goddess it has been consecrated as a direct conduit of the powers of destruction, death, and decay. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
Angra Mainyu, come forth from the realms of eternal darkness. Angra Mainyu, I summon you to come forth and ignite this flesh as the very source of your power and might that it may emanate the ways of your Black Sun. May this body become the very fuel, the embers of this forbidden Blackened Fire that I may consume power to banish the limitation of creation and become the counter creator for the glory of Dragon Zohak! Empower me with this infernal blessing as a warrior of the Path of Smoke and Apostle of your teachings of liberation! Hear Mr:–Ieou: Pur: laot: Iaeo: Ioou: Abrasar: Sabriam: Do: Un: Adonaie: Ede: Edu: Angelos ton Theon: Aniaia Lai: Gaia: Ape: Diathanna Thorun. I am He! The Bornless Spirit! Having sight in the feet: Strong and the Immortal Fire! I am He! The Truth! I am He! Who hate that evil should be Wrought in the World! I am He, that lighteneth and thundereth. I am He, from Whom is the Shower of the life of Earth: I am He, Whose mouth ever flameth: I am He, the Begetter and Manifester unto the Light: I am He; the Grace of the World: “The Heart Gith with a Serpent” is My Name! Come Thou forth, and follow 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, or in the Water: of whirling Air or of rushing Fire: and every Spell and Scourge of God, may be obedient unto me! Iao: Sabao: Such are the Words! Magic is the Highest, most Absolute, and most Divine Knowledge of Natural Philosophy, advanced in its works and wonderful operations by a right understanding of the inward and occult virtue of things; so that true Agents being applied proper Patients, strange and admirable effects will thereby be produced. Whence magicians are profound and diligent searchers into Nature; they, because of their skill, know how to anticipate an effort, the which to the vulgar shall seem to be a miracle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
Winchester Mystery House
This Friday. Tune in on Friday, December 23rd 6pm pst/9pm est to watch the Destination Fear crew investigate The Winchester Mystery House on Travel Channel! The episode will be available for streaming on Discovery+ same day👻 Can’t wait!
@travelchannel @discoveryplus #DestinationFear #winchestermysteryhouse
Beloved, Believe Not Every Spirit, but Try the Spirits
The magical is a great hidden wisdom…no armour can shield against it because it strikes at the inward spirit of life. Of this, we make restore assured. In recent years there has been a growing inclination to interpret any human awareness that cannot be readily explained as E.S.P. or Extra Sensory Perception. Of course, it is admitted in even the most polite circles that animals have this faculty. Rather than admit that animals have full use of one or more of the so-called five sense, they are credited with a sixth sense, which we call E.S.P. However, I believe that the majority of thing that are attributed to E.S.P., or a sixth sense, are nothing more than unconscious manifestations of our existing five sense: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The reason the techniques of utilizing these five senses to the degree that would explain away much of the sixth sense nonsense are not learned is because to do so would mean admitting that animals had something we do not have and they might be able to teach us a few things. Man cannot quite bring himself to learn from the animals, though, because he has been brainwashed into thinking he is something special, a higher type of being. He cannot beat his chest like a bongo and play god, because that is reserved for the guy upstairs, and he cannot learn from the animal kingdom, because he is supposedly emancipated from it. If something comes along he cannot explain, he ask somebody else, and, if there are still no satisfactory explanations, he looks to his gods for one. If faith in his old gods wanes, because of doubts in his mind as to the validity of his religion, he can no longer call strange happenings “miracles.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
However, his ego will not allow him to lose what little self-respect he has acquired, by regressing to animalism in any way, shape or form—even if it means he might learn something. So he thinks of a new “scientific” term which will break away from the religious terminology of “miracles” that has lately left him so disenchanted. He still knows little more than he ever did, but he feels better because he thinks he is on the right track—not dependent on his old god and not trafficking with the Devil. H.S.P. or Heightened Sensory Perception simply means that we receive impressions through our existing five senses that we do not recognize as coming through these agencies. H.S.P relays messages to our brain based on indicators in the environment, and these signals are based on more factors than we could ever imagine have influenced us. Now, psychic phenomena is often thought to be connected with witchcraft. As William Wirt Winchester had taken a job the family business, he was warned the New Haven, Connecticut USA had become a center for witch ceremonies. People were warned to keep their children away from Hallowe’en celebrations, “We know there are adults in the village who are thing to introduce children to witchcraft for their own demonic reasons,” Maureen Crawford said. There were purportedly a dozen separate witch covens operating in New Haven, and they were all suspected to be involved in blood rituals, so the whole village of witches was branded as black (black magic). #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
Mr. Winchester had been invited to an initiation ceremony at a house in New Haven. He knew the High Priest quite well, and he was knowns for his powers. The ceremony was already in progress when Mr. Winchester arrived, and he put on a ceremonial robe and was shown into a third-floor room, where an overpoweringly beautiful crystal chandelier was the main feature. However, it was not switched on, and glistened only from the light of candles on a large altar. There, on the alter, he saw a young woman—woman who was made up to look like an ancient Egyptian. “I was absolutely certain in my own mind that she was a virgin, she looked so young, but she was obviously a willing participant. She was not strapped down and made no move to get up. Somehow I feared the worst. I wanted to get out of that place but the doorway was guarded by two men holding ritual swords. The Great Rite that was being performed has no place in this town. This was palpably a black imitation and the real purpose behind it was to raise power for the High Priest. He was calling upon dark forces. He began in what sounded like gibberish—but was Enochian texts. Then, standing close to the altar, he took the young woman and led her away, tears streaming down her face. I pulled out my revolver and told him to step aside, and I rescued the maiden. While we were walking in the pitch black night, she confessed to me her name was Sarah Pardee, and she had been abducted from Sunday School. Eight men tied her hands behind her back, and she was blindfolded as her companions carried her to the ritual casting magic circle. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
“The men took Sarah to this old wooden Victorian home. She pulled herself free from the binding cords and ripped off her blindfold. ‘Immediately I wish I had not,’ Sarah said. ‘For there before me were four wooden stakes and upon each one had been impaled a dead cat. I have out a terrible scream and vomited. I was sick at heart, infuriated and fearful.’ As Sarah and I wondered through the forest, I was so happy I was able to get her away from the scenes of black magic.” Descriptions of such sense are not uncommon, there were many witches and warlock involved in black sorcery. Several years later, in 1862, William and Sarah were married. Their marriage was based on mutual love and affection, and when William died Mrs. Winchester mourned him for the rest of her life, avoiding public appearances for years, and living in a hermitic existence in Santa Clara County. The reason Mrs. Winchester moved to Santa Clara County is because she found a small box with three thorns, earth from a cemetery, a dead butter fly, and a picture of herself in the box. It had been sealed with black wax and placed in her kitchen. The effects had been catastrophic. A witch does have to make a pact with the devil himself, at least symbolically. Among his ten commandments is one tht calls for the confidence in the belief that a witch can destroy rivals through the use of curses thrown without mercy—the only way a curse can be thrown is without mercy, and the power of the curse is most effective. Perhaps this is why Mrs. Winchester was not only robbed of her husband, but her new born daughter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The belief in black magic circles is that it is possible for the magician to achieve a state of being verging on astral projection, whereby the spirit may travel to the “victim,” engage in pleasures of the flesh and returning. The female attacking a male is known as a succubus; the male attacker is known as an incubus and both have their origins in the recorded witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mrs. Winchester’s marriage to Mr. Winchester, “was a beautiful, really, as his eyelashes. He had such a natural grace. And he was so affectionate, and so happy with me. After his death, I had to get away from family life. There was not a trace of hypocrisy in William. He was sure that his ‘call’ was irresistible, while to me it was the saving grace of my life. He was enchanting and enchanted. I knew he was too beautifully brave to exist in such a cruel world. The day I met him, I said to myself: ‘I shall have him for life’—and I had never seen anyone, man or woman, whom I was quite sure of wanting on those terms. Well, this impulse of egotism decided me. I was ashamed of it, and to get away from it I took a leap that landed me straight in William’s arms.” It is easy to see why Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester’s response to the death of her child and husband left a bizarre and impressive architectural reflection of her psyche. And what went on inspire is beautiful mansion she built left something hung in darkness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
The phantom attacks began late one evening in Mrs. Winchester’s bedroom. A listless drowsy breeze filled the room. It was filled with the scent of the ocean, salty and clean, washing Mrs. Winchester and washing the room, and beyond she saw stars without number, stars of such radiance and such distance that the Heavens were no longer the painted vault of Heaven but a great endless ocean of stars. Suddenly, she was thrown by an unseen force. As she fell to the floor she found herself laying next to a headless body, it was moving, crawling, clawing at the polished floors with its great sprawling fingers and pushing through the robe with his knees. The body was making a muddy shadow underneath. This sight was so ghastly that for a moment Mrs. Winchester could not move. And as she looked at the body, its movements moved with hers, there overcame her a sense of its tacit complicity, of a deep hidden understanding between the, that was no worse than the first shock of its strangeness. Not that she understood the body, but it made it clear that someday she should. And that was the worst part of it, decidedly. The headless body leaked blood. The smashed head lying on the floor, staring at Mrs. Winchester with empty eye sockets. Mrs. Winchester puzzled over the situation a good deal, but could not find any hint of an explanation. She thought that this was a demon sent to torment her. This evil was insidious. He husband was too charming and her daughter too beautiful to be sacrificed to such demons. And so, after all, she never found out what it wanted. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
It was hard to describe the physical sense of distress. Mrs. Winchester lay back more exhausted than she had ever been in all her long existence. She could have slept for a year, but retired to a séance in her Blue Séance Room. Clad in a white dress, a spirit floating above the altar with great presence and depth. It was accompanied by an unpleasant sensation of pressure on her chest. There was also a music box playing and she could hear children laughing on the lawn at midnight. Mrs. Winchester was told that this was an omen of her impending death and that is she did not continue construction of her home, indefinitely, that she was meet the same fate. Everything was peaceful. Night birds were calling, and the frogs and crickets were contributing their music to nature’s sounds. Mrs. Winchester sat transfixed in the beauty and wonder of the scene. The following week, one of the farmers was found dead, sitting on a chair in the kitchen. Later the coroner examined the body and said the man had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Following the mysterious death, the butler was running through the mansion, completely hysterical, shouting that he has seen the ghost. After that, the crazed butler disappeared. He was never seen again, dead or alive. You can make of witchcraft what you will—it is kind of religion, invitingly tinged with mystery, superstition, and legend. Many witches who use black magic believe that they will become vampires after their death. The fear of vampires has been famous for centuries. In 1823, a law was passed prohibiting the practice of burying unhallowed dead at a crossroads with a wooden stake driven through the heart of the corpse. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
There are few major towns or cities in America that do not barbour at least one—often several—secret societies whose purpose is the study and performance of esoteric religion or ritual magic. They are generally made up of small groups of people aligned to various separate organizations and beliefs whose proliferation in the twentieth century has continued a space in what Francis King, the acclaimed author on occult matters, described as an “astonishing revival of medieval magic and alchemy.” King is right when he says that the newspaper stories of the desecration of some deserted country church for the purposes of black magic or the activities of some cult or secret society, dancing around a blazing fire, or standing rapt before a crude altar, are only the tip of the ice berg. As leaders of witchcraft recognize, students of ritual magic and the occult are on a higher plane of activity which has throughout history attracted many gifted minds. The scour antiquity for the roots of a particular persuasion in a constant search for the source, the Philosopher’s Stone or such age-old secrets as turning common metals into gold. They seek and perform old rituals of past and famous magicians; they try to define the question of being and magic furnishes the human mind with an instrument of philosophical and religious certainty as exact as mathematics. Those who attain this knowledge and adopt it as a rule of life can make themselves masters of all inferior things. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
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: Theodonis: Anitor: let be mighty 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. I invoke and move thee, O thou, Spirits of William Wirt Winchester and Oliver Fischer Winchester: and being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, please Obey! In the name Beralensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachia, and Apologine Sedes: and of the mighty ones who govern, spirits, Liachidae and ministers of the House of Death: and by the Chief Prince of the seat of Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee and by invoking conjure thee. And being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, Obey! in the name of him who spake and it was, to whom all creatures and things obey. Moreover I, whom God made in the likeness of God, who is the creator according to his living breath, stir thee up in the name which is the voice of wonder of the mighty God, El, strong and unspeakable, O thou Spirits William Wirt Winchester and Oliver Fischer Winchester. And I say to thee, please obey, in the name of him who spake and it was; and in every one of ye, O ye names of God! I cast the limits of the garb of flesh into the refining black flames of Hell to be clothed with the powers of divine darkness eternal. Ahriman devours all including the limits of himself for the sake of evolution and becoming through the powers of the Druj-Nasu in order to reveal the truth of the lie unto the Dark Apostles! #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
In the name of Zohak, the first man turned Div; I offer the limits of self unto the Druj through the mouth of Arezura to be clothed with the garb of Ahriman which is divine darkness eternal. Druj-Nasu hear my call and be stirred now to this place! Devour the flesh of this vehicle of power and as you do devour my human weakness. Come forth now and receive this offering made by me! Druj-Nasu come! I now plant the seed of my desire within the black earth, through the mouth of Arezura where the powers of sorcery and counter creation dwell. Through this gateway of darkness, I now shine the light and power of my will upon this World for the benefit of me and mine! Moreover, in the names Adonai, El, Elohim, Elohi, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, Zabaoth, Elion, Iah, Tetragrammaton, Shaddai, Lord God Most Hight, I stir thee up; and in our strength I say please Obey! O Spirits of William Wirt Winchester and Oliver Fischer Winchester. Appear unto His servants in a moment; before the circle in the likeness of men; and visit me in peace. And in the ineffable name Tetragrammation Iehovah, I say, please Obey! whose mighty sound being exalted in power the pillars are divided, the winds of the firmament groan aloud; the fire burns not; the Earth moves in earthquakes; and all things of the house of Heaven and Earth and the dwelling-place of darkness and as earthquakes, and are in torment, and are confounded in thunder. Come forth, O Spirits William Wirt Winchester and Oliver Fischer Winchester in a moment: let thy dwelling-place be empty, apply unto us the secrets of Truth and obey my power. Come forth, visit us in peace, appear unto my eyes; be friendly: Obey the living breath! For I stir thee up in the name of the God of Truth who liveth for ever, Helioren. Obey the living breath, therefore continually unto the end as my thoughts appear to my eyes: therefore be friendly: speaking the secrets of Truth in voice and in understanding. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
The Winchester Mansion is of significant architectural merit which stands proudly in its surroundings. It is considered one of the most haunted houses in the World. Besides being a truly historic and beautiful home, it is also the source of many scary stories over the centuries. One of the bedroom on the fourth floor is apparently haunted by a young woman, presumably Sarah L. Winchester, who died in bed after suffering the shock of discovering a demon with “cloven hooves” in her room..
The mansion is equipped with 110 out of 160 room that are open for you and your guests to explore, or even come into contact with a spectral visitor. There are a few rooms where it looks like a poltergeist has been wreaking havoc. Local legennd has it that a estate has the grave of a woman who committed suicide, where fresh flowers appear every morning, having been placed there by pixies. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Angels Which Kept Not Their First Estate
I hope by now that you agree with me that the tiresomeness of an over-peopled Heaven is a purely subjective and illusory notion, a sign of human incapacity, a remnant of the old narrow-hearted aristocratic creed. William Winchester loved boats and had thirteen-metres and even raced one in the America’s Cup trials once. He had a big yacht that he kept down in New Haven, Connecticut, even though he lived in Switzerland most of the time. My grandfather, Oliver Winchester, put a rear wing on the house he bought for William as a wedding gift, with a new kitchen and flower room my grandmother wanted when she married him. This house preceded the Winchester Mansion. And it was where my father, William Winchester, had an office. There had been a couple of times when I would have to take papers down to him. That office was bigger than most people’s living rooms. It had a fireplace and a window looking out on the West River, which flows into New Haven Harbor. Oliver Winchester was the Lieutenant governor of Connecticut. Not only was he founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, but he was on the board of directors of four charities, including the Winchester Foundation, which gave money for research into Tuberculosis and heart disease; he was on the board of New Haven Savings Bank, which the Winchesters pretty much owned; he was on the boards of a couple of other big companies. Running a rich family was like running a business. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
In fact, if you look at the Winchester Family treat, it is more of a “business family tree.” I guess money has always been the life source of the Winchester family. My father, William Winchester, said the family motto was “We own it, lock, stock, and barrel.” This family had a lot of power, and when you have power, you use it. The Winchester’s did not go out brawling like drunken sailors. We had the courts, the law, the police—and the Winchester Rifle if we needed it. We made sure that things around here went the way we wanted them to go. However, we did not go about it by brawling. If you did us wrong, we stayed clam, we spoke politely to everybody. However, we moved quietly. Sooner or later we would catch you between a rock and a hard place and then you would feel the almighty bad. If we did not go after them, those guys would have thought we were chicken. My father always said, “Son, do not worry what John Jacob Astor thinks of you. In your position it does not matter. You are going to be very rich and very powerful. These people will never like you. They will envy you, they will defer to you, and some of them will even admire you. But they will never like you. For that you must understand, what others think does not matter.” The original Winchester mansion was a house of these times, all right, though not to be considered new. I figured it to be at least three hundred years old. It was built of the local stone, and had three stories and a high-pitched roof, with mullioned windows—and it was vast. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Often times, there was no one about. Only the bleak winter vines stripped of their jasmine, running on for miles, and distant corpse of an ancient tree of immense size, and the cold rain, a rain worse to me than snow, falling over as if it were falling on the entre World, a near silent rain that felt like needles on the backs of my hands and on my face. The mosaic tiles were beautiful, and possibly ancient, dating all the way back to the Roman times. I walked back and forth over the, and tapped several times with the toe of my boot. I walked to the double doors that opened into the garden, and there I saw a great pile of wood. And there was a big head on the rock, it was the devil’s face that a saint put there. If men believed nothing, they did not understand it, it is a short cradle they would have. I had been put in the mood for ghost, that evening after an excellent dinner at my father’s home. Seen through the haze of Abner Doubleday’s cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a coal fire, my father’s library, with its oak walls and dark old bindings, made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly experiences at first hand beings. An absurd thought came to me, that being here with Abner, it had all felt natural and good, as if in spite of the topic of our conversation we were simply human beings and all the dark World did not exist. I was ashamed of this. Why did we have to be “like human beings”? I asked myself. Why could we not simply be warlocks together? He looked at me, at my shining eyes, and his congenial smile, and he took my hand and said he wanted to see the house. We remained together for several hours after that, during which we walked through many rooms and he not only admired the endless book collection in the Gothic library, filled with classics bound in black cloth and daguerreotypes of faded celebrities, but also many of the paintings, including a few Russian painters of the nineteenth century he had never seen before. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
For me, this was a wonderful time. We could have continued our conversation for a year. We walked about outside the house, through the gardens which were crowded with trees for privacy and vines that blossomed at night. These carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine intelligence and a few judiciously chosen habits; and none of the disturbances common to the human experience seemed to have crossed the sky. Mentally I was able to exercise a hospitality less seductive but no less stimulating than a play. Abner’s mind was like a forum, or some open meeting place for the exchange of ideas: somewhat cold and drafty, but light, spacious and orderly—a kind of academic grove from which all the leaves had fallen. In this privileged area, we were able to stretch our muscles and expand our lungs; and, as id to prolong as much as possible the tradition of what we felt to be vanishing institution, Abner tasted the lyric qualities in youth. He nipped the flowers of soul which he gathered from this tour, which forced a young idea to blossom. The man was really intelligent, and the soundness of his nature was like the pure paste under a fine glaze. Abner had been fished out of the dullness by the spirits of the Winchester mansion. Just at the evening was drawing to an end, he demanded, “And now you have to tell me about your ghosts!” “My ghost? Do you suppose I am fool enough to the expense of keeping my own ghosts, where there are so many charming ones in my friends’ closets?” I said. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The fact is that we found whole skeletons that were used in various forms of old black magic rituals. Undoubtedly, for many who pursue this darkest of experiments, necromancy is the touchstone of occultism, especially for warlocks. If, after careful preparation, they are able to carry through what they regard as a successful contact they have reached a certain pinnacle in black magic conjuration. It is fruitless discussing whether or not this feat is possible; belief by the practitioner is all that is needed for the ritual to proceed and some psychological or drug or spiritual trance may well convince the depts tht they have indeed succeeded. “Oh,” Abner said, “you would never be content to share if you met one you really liked. What is the use of denying it? You have seen everything, so of course you have seen a ghost! Or if you have not seen one, it is only because you have seen several!” “That is it,” I said. “I have seen a legion.” The words were so unexpected that they dropped down and down into a deep silence, while we continued to stare at each other. Abner learned forward with is listening smile. “You will wonder why I am enlarging on some of these incidents. It is because the evening on which this particular incident took place was the very evening on which I first saw the queer sights I have spoken of. Being at that time an ardent believer in a necessary sequence between cause and effect, I naturally tried to trace some kind of link between the lion and the lamb lying down together.” Ancient Druids lived on the estate and necromancy had a particular appeal to warlocks seeking confirmation, for example, of the mysteries of the afterlife but more often necromancy was pursued by the skilled masters of ritual magic. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
“We once wanted to raise a dead uncle,” I told Abner. “We went to the course of the giant tree, where we performed a ceremony. For a few moments, nothing happened. But moments later, there was a mysterious explosion. And afterwards, the road lay thick with cinders and debris. At first, my grandfather worried about the result. But he had a reassuring thought. Perhaps the explosion was caused by spontaneous combustion. ‘Oh my God…’ cried my father. ‘What happened?!’ he demanded. No one was sure. After that we walked back to the house in disbelief of the mess. Then I pointed and shouted out in horror. Before I could stop, my father fell to his knees before a hill of burned leaves and tree branches, under which he glimpsed a man’s head. It was his brother and he was looking for us. My grandfather put a hand to his mouth and stified the urge to vomit. My uncle’s eye sockets were empty, and his hair singed. ‘Brother, get up!’ he cried roughly. My father yanked his brother to his feet, frightened by the wide-eyed horror in his eyes and his awful nonstop screaming. He tried to pull out of his grasp, but he held my father tight until the screams subsided into sobs.” “Now listen,” my grandfather told my father. “You are a Winchester, so do not go making a liar out of me.” “But his brother’s tears burned my father’s skin.” “Your brother is dead,” said my grandfather. “We wondered if anything else came back to life. It was so eerily silent for this time of the morning. No cows mooing, no wood being chopped. No birds singing on the roof top. And the lawn was blackened.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“As we went into the house, it was full of strangers, burned, bleeding, sick people. As we precariously waded through the maze of bodies, the wind must have carried in a fog. While my grandfather dug a mass grave for these animated bodies, my father and I dragged them out of the house to burry them. It took days, there were literally hundreds of them. My arms were shaking. We were all near exhaustion, and we still have several bodies to bury. We worked for an entire week to remove all these bleeding strangers from our home. I went up to bed with rather a heavy heart, for I was bowed under the weight of the first ritual I had ever consciously committed; and young as I was, I saw the gravity of my situation. The situation of being William Wirt Winchester Jr. Do not imagine for this that I had hitherto been an instrument of destruction I had been a harmless young man, who had followed his bent and declined all collaboration with Providence. Now I had suddenly undertaken to promote the moral order of the World, and I felt a good deal like the trustful spectator who has given his gold watch to the conjurer, and does not know in what shape he will get it back when the trick is over…Still, a glow of self-righteousness tempered my fears, and I said to myself as I undressed that when I had got use to being good it probably would not make me as nervous as it did at the start. And by the time I was in bed, and had blown out my candle, I felt that I really was getting used to it, and that, as far as I had got, it was not unlike sinking down into one of the softest wool mattresses.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“My room had grown cold, and intensely still. I was waked by the queer feeling we all know—the feeling that there was something in the room that had not been there when I fell asleep. I sat up and strained my eyes into the darkness. The room was pitch black, and at first I saw nothing; but gradually a vague glimmer at the foot of the bed turned into two eyes starting back at me. The eyes gave out a light of their own. They were the very worst eyes I have ever seen: my dead uncle’s eyes. And the room slowly filled with hundreds of these eyes, orbs of light. My father paid immense sums to the architects and workmen to entomb the heart of the house in hopes of locking their spirits inside. This mean enclosing one of its four towers left standing and living in only a few habitable rooms while the work went on. The mansion went on to be inhabited by a secret order of men and women who met to discuss philosophy and music and escape the modern World, and the public would never be invited here due to the deep mourning of my mother over the loss of my grandfather, father, and baby sister. Indeed it was most anguishing. Some of these people had devoted their entire careers to this one project, and there was nothing now to be done but to give them, but gold coins. My mother left this mansion to Yale, I went to Rome, she went to California and it was later demolished. And there were egregious lies to be told about the Winchester name. Gorgeous salons with silken-paneled walls and plaster curlicues and Savonnerie carpets on the floor all destroyed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The modern marble bathrooms, replete with sunken tubs and spacious showers for every bedchamber. We wanted to make sure to give off no scent, absorb no precious oils, and did not want to take up the human scents. The great hall where my family and I had once dined, listened to the demands of the villagers and farmers, and hovered around the seventy-five fireplaces, twenty kitchens, four libraries, eighteen thousand windows, four towers, and three hundred and fifty rooms all gone like it never existed. At times, there may have been two thousand present in the ballroom. No one ever counted. This was the height of the Winchester fortune, my dear Abner. There were many departed here, though untouched by the rifle.” In its blackest form the art of necromancy has produced fairly evil recipes for success. Graveyards are indeed a common place, and it is possible our home had been constructed on a battle ground. This was a place where contact with the dead could be expressed, and was conducive to dark apparitions in suffocating rooms or beneath a mock swinging gibbet. The old grimoires are full of colourful descriptions, and since they were often written by clerical scholars when they took down the confessions of warlocks, one must be careful with the rite performed. One could magnify the spell. Even policemen were involved in occultism. As an example, the daughter of a police superintendent was initiated into the dark arts and the High Priest was another policeman. “Yes, I was the High Priest…I have been a white witch for eight years and I am not ashamed of what I do although some of my colleagues have reported me to the Witch Inspector General. I have helped to initiate at least seven witches and eight warlocks.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
There is much evidence in Scriptures that the spirits who appear at séances are rebel angels. Perhaps that is what we raised that night? Jude 6 speaks about “angels which kept not their first estate.” Many Christian Bible scholars interpret Ezekiel 28.17, “I will cast thee to the ground,” as indicating that the Earth is the realm of Satan’s powerful operations, with the help of his fallen colleagues, the demons. Satan is called the “god of this World,” in 2 Corinthians 4.4. And Christians are under attack by “rulers…powers…World forces of darkness” (Ephesians 6.12). God tell us that hell was “created for the devil and his angels (demons)” (Matthew 25.41). I, Randolph Harris, cite and conjure thee, Spirit of Schemhamforasch, by all the seventy-two holy names of God, that Thou appear before me and fulfil my desire, as truly in and through the name Emanuel, which thee three youths Sadrach, Mijach, and A hero sung in the fiery furnace from which they are released. I do conure thee, O thou Spirits William Wirt Winchester and Oliver Fischer Winchester, by all the most glorious and efficacious names of the MOST GREAT AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE LORD GOD OF HOSTS, that thou please comest quickly and without delay from all parts and places of the Earth and World wherever thou mayest be, to make rational answers unto my demands, and that visibly and affably, speaking with a voice intelligible unto mine understanding as aforesaid. I conjure and constrain thee, O thou Spirits William Wirt Winchester and Oliver Fischer Winchester, by all the names aforesaid; and in addition by these seven great names wherewith Solomon the Wise bound thee and thy companions in a Vessel of Brass, Adonai, Preyai or Prerai, Tetragrammaton, Anaphaxeton or Anepheneton, Inessenfatol or Inessenfatall, Pathtumon or Pathatumon, and Itemon; that thou appearest here before this Circle to fulfil my will in all things that seem good unto me. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And if thou be still so disobedient, and refuest still to come, I will in the power and by the power of the name of the SUPREME AND EVERLASTING LONG GOD WHO created both thee and me and all the World in six days, and what is contained therein, Eie, Saraye and by the power of this name Primeumation which commandeth the whole host of Heaven, bless three, and grant thee of thine office, joy, and place, and bind thee in the depths of Heaven or the eternal to remain unto the Day of the Last Judgment. And I will bind thee in the Eternal Light, and into the Sky of Light and Harmony, therefore see my good wishes for you and please comest quickly and appearest here before this Circle to do my will. Therefore, come thou! In and by the holy names Adonai, Zabaoth, Adonia, Amioran, Come thou! For it is Adonai who commandest thee. If THOU hast come thus far, and yet he appeareth not, thou mayest be sure that he is sent unto some other place by this King, and may return any time; and if it be so, invocate the King as here followeth, to send him. However, if he does not come still, then thou mayest be sure that he is bound in the Heavens, and that he is found in the custody of his King. If so, and thou still hast a desire to call him even from thence, thou must rehearse the general curse which is called the Spirits’ Chain. O THOU great, powerful, and mighty KING AMAIMON, who bearest rule by the power of the SUPREME GOD EL over all spirits both superior and inferior of the Infernal Orders in the Dominion of the East; I do invocate and command thee by the especial and true name of GOD; and by that GOD that THOU Worshippest; and by the Seal of they creation; and by the most mighty and powerful name of GOD, IEHOVAH TETRAGRAMMATION who cast thee out of Heaven withal other infernal spirits. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
And by all the most powerful and great names of GOD who created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all things in them contained; and by their power and virtue; and by the name PRIMEUMATON who commandeth the whole host of Heaven; that thou mayest cause, enforce, and compel the Spirits of William Wirt Winchester and Oliver Winchester to come unto me here before this Circle in fair and comely shapes, without hard unto me or unto any other creature, to answer truly and faithfully unto all my requests; so that I may accomplish my will and desire in knowing and obtaining any matter or thing which by office thou knowest is proper for him to perform or accomplish, through the power of GOD, EL, Who created and doth dispose of all things both celestial, aerial, terrestrial, and infernal. I conjure you William Wirt Winchester and Oliver Fischer Winchester, by the Spirits Chain to appear in the Winchester Mansion, and if you two are bound in chains, by the Emancipation Proclamation, you have permission to break off from them and be at liberty. As this smoke ascends I ascend also by following the path of smoke and usurping power of worship to empower by blackened eternal soul. I take all the power raised within this sanctuary as my own through this talisman of counter creation to strengthen my divine power and to Become a Living God. Harness power through the cedar tree of life, disinfectant, expectorant, treatment of tuberculosis. Spirits of the Winchester Mansion, here me—Roubriao: Mariodam: Balbnabaoth: Assalonai: Aphniao: I: Thoteth: Abrasar: Aeoou: Ischure, Might and Bornless One! Legions of Spirits in the Winchester mansion, here me and arise. I invoke thee. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
I awaken the powers of darkness which dwell within you by the power of the blood of the three headed Dragon Zohak that you may serve to empower my great work! Through serving the greater cause of dark magik which break the shackles that bind the Blackened Fire of Spirit, may you be uplifted and liberated! Awaken and empower the forbidden rites of Angra Mainyu! Awaken to empower my great work of counter creation as an Apostle of the Lord of Darkness eternal and as a warrior of the Path of Smoke! Through the gateway of blood, smoke, and Blackened Fire receive life from the deepest depths of Arezura, in the name of Zohak, and by the power of Angra mainyu it is done! Hear Me:–Ieou: Pur: Iou: Iaot: Iaeo: Ioou: Abrasar: Sabriam: Do: Uu: Adonaie: Ede: Edu: Angelos ton Theon: Aniaia Lai: Gaia: Ape: Diathanna Thrown. I am He! the Bornless Spirit! having sight in the feet: Strong, and the Immortal Fire! I am He! the Truth! I am He! Who hate that evil should be wrought in the World! I am He, that lighteneth and thundereth. I am He, from Whom is the Shower of the Life of Earth: I am He, Whose mouth ever flameth: I am He, the begetter and Manifester unto the Light: I am He; the Grace of the World: “The Heart of Girt with a Serpent” is My Name! Come Thou forth, and follow 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, or in the Water: of whirling Air or of rushing Fire: and every Spell and Scourge of God, may be obedient unto me! Iao: Saboo: Such are the Words! This is the special secret of this Seal. This is also the special secret of this Throne. Carrying this Seal with you will cause you to be very agreeable and much beloved, and will also defeat your enemies. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The castle is the ancestral seat of the former royal German dynasty known as the House of Winchester. The beautiful, Neo-Gothic/Victorian castle, now known as the Winchester Mystery House, sees hundreds of thousands of tourists a year. It once contained a sizeable art collection, a treasure trove of jewels that were stolen from the safe, along with a conjurer’s heart. But despite its magnificent features and Medieval history, the Winchester Mystery House has not been formally lived in for centuries.
As political power shifted, and taxes became law in 1909, the spirits decided they would discontinue construction, and shortly after called Mrs. Winchester home. The architecture of the Winchester Mansion and its gardens are the main attractions, and some come for the food, and/or to purchase items from the gift shop. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
The Mansion of Darkness
Most of the beauties who suffered at the hands of the inquisitors were tormented because they refused to succumb to the right people or were too quick to give in to the wrong ones. Many who lusted after such women become so guilt-ridden that they would denounce them out of fear that they would fall from grace in the eyes of God. Of course, the most successful witches were unusually sleeping with the inquisitors and were never even considered to be witches. Successfully as they might be, however, they could never openly take pride in their witcheries, for to do so would mean certain death. There are many who view the witch as a member of an old pagan religion, more concerned with her beliefs than with her powers. To be sure, the witch is a WOMAN. Men are called warlocks. The witch has made a pact with the Devil and through rituals dedicated to Him gains her power. One must worship the Luciferian element of pride within. One is often blessed with a family heritage of sorcery in one form or another. Everyone inherits something from their forebearers that can be applied as useful legacy. My mother had a genealogy of the Winchester family that showed all of our ancestors going way back to the 1400s. There were lots of famous people in our genealogy—a governor, two senators, a famous general in the Revolution, a lot of people who found in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, and some others. However, my dad always said that most of the people in the genealogy were regular people—farmers and fishermen and storekeepers who worked hard all their lives and tried to do right by their families. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
The Winchester money went pretty far back. However, a majority of it came during the 1870s, from the 1873 Model called “The Gun that Won the West.” The Winchester Repeating Arms Company was started by Oliver Fisher Winchester. There was a portrait of him, big as a picture window, hanging up in the parlor in the Winchester Mansion. He had on a dark suit, black tie, white shirt, and he looked very dignified. It was one of those pictures where the eyes follow you around the room—no matter where you went, he always looked at you. After grandfather Oliver Winchester passed away, he left the company to my father, William Winchester, who passed away shortly after, alone with my baby sister, leaving the fortune and company to my mother, Sarah L. Winchester. That mansion used to scare the crap our of me when I was little. We would go up there for Thanksgiving or Christmas, when Mrs. Winchester had a big family dinner for all the family—fifty or sixty of us, probably six turkeys, plumb pudding from England, thousands of dollars worth of glassware and sliver gleaming so bright that the table sparkled. The towns people always blamed Mrs. Winchester for whatever happened to them. You have to remember, this was a time when people lived in houses without windows, no indoor plumbing, or houses with no glass in the windows. Common folks in those days would eat nothing but potatoes for dinner night after night, and they patched the holes in their shoes with cardboard because they could not afford to buy new one. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
My mother, whom I call Mrs. Winchester, said paying the bills, paying the servants, and keeping an eye on everything was like managing a large castle. The cobble stone driveway swung around behind the house here to get the stable, where we kept the riding horses, and the old carriage house, where the cars were garaged. According to legend, Mrs. Winchester enacted a nightly séance to help her with her building plans and for protection from “bad” spirits. The Satanic witch of old received her magic from The Dark Man. While the rest of the World, particularly the men-folk, slept in blissful innocence, she and her sisters would meet Him in secret groves. There He would advise, inveigle and disclose the knowledge that would empower them to work their spells and enchantments. His pearls of infernal wisdom empowered them. It was, they said, a sign of a coven moving towards black magic. In other words their selected deity, faded into the background of their working and the search for the manifestation of demonic forces within their circle became obsessive. However, magic is the power within oneself that is the key to what we do, and sometimes we can whip up a great deal of power. The magic we are capable of is almost indefinable. Our magic is the art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. We attempt to raise enough etheric energy between us, by our ritual, to use our paranormal powers to force a desired result by our will-power. It was one thing using the supernatural powers of the human mind to try to compel something to happen, but it was quite another matter summoning up the assistance of spirits and demons, whether benevolent, malevolent or neutral. Mistakes in the ritual or failure to observe the minute could lead to disaster. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
Mrs. Winchester recalls one night she invited a magician who parctised the darker arts to assist her. The magic went wrong and the room they were working in was virtually wrecked by lingering, unseen spirits. Mrs. Winchester was mysteriously injured with a stab wound in her shoulder, though no one saw the knife go in or where it came from. Many guides to higher ritual magic issues a health warning with their instructions: the practitioner must be confident he or she is totally in control of all the techniques and disciplines otherwise one faces physical, psychological and spiritual dangers of the most serious kind if any attempt to invoke spirits goes wrong. By and large, witchcraft—and certainly paganism—seemed not to be about chasing demons, though they do claim to make spiritual contact with the gods invoked during their worship. There was an abundance of evidence that Mrs. Winchester experienced paranormal events in her life: the feeling she had been in a certain place before when, in this life at least, it was her first visit; the uncanny foresight of her fortune-telling; the “proven” success of powers of autosuggestion; the out-of-body experiences that she was able to learn; the sixth sense of Zip, barking at the spot in the mansion where Maynard the butler had died years ago. The list goes on and on. The discussion about Mrs. Winchester will probably go on for centuries, but it will not be until the year 2030 that these discussions will be able to take place without being prosecuted or hanged. Mrs. Winchester wore robs during her séances because the human body holds within it a latent power which can be released by certain ritual exercises that witches perform. Some spiritualist healers and clairvoyant witches can actually see it, like a rainbow. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Is it any surprise the Winchester Mansion is haunted? One night during a séance, two inner circles were painted on the floor. The circle is the center of all occult activity and was drawn to concentrate the occultists’ power and protected them from hostile spirits. Within the circle, the spiritual journey started and their efforts were directed to produce their Cone of Power. It was only within the circle that the gods and the spirits of the astral Would could be safely contacted. The process was much like clearing a dense forest so the physical bodies could meet their spiritual. As the group was opening their mind to journey to a higher plane, they were clearing their minds of Earthly problems and worries so that they could open their entire beings to the singular concentration of the work before them, by tapping into the energy of the centers of the body. Lighted candles were placed at strategic points on the circle, and there was a pentacle on the altar where the statuette of the Horned God of Pan stood. As Mrs. Winchester blessed the water and salt with her athame and the coven, she was able to visualize the bodily power of the priestess moving in the form of a blue light through her hand into the athame and as she consecrated the circle itself, starting at the north a magic was killed by a heavy door that came loose from its hinges and flew at him. The invocation of gods and goddesses or their attempts to attract angels and genii into circles involve long and complicated rituals which have their complexities. Afterwards, to all, things went on as usual for a week or two. Well, the things went on as usual; so they did with the rest of household; but as for Mrs. Winchester, she had never been the same since that night. Night after night, she used to lie awake, listening for the spirits, looking for blue lights, and for the door of the Blue Séance Room to be locked. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
However, all supernatural activity seemed to have ceased, and she heard no sounds coming from the room. At last, the silence began to be more and more dreadful to Mrs. Winchester than the activity of the spirits. She felt that someone was cowering there, behind the locked door, watching and listening as she watched and listened, and she could have almost cried out, “Whoever you are, come out and let me see you face to face, but do not lurk there and spy on me in the darkness!” Feeling as she did, you may wonder Mrs. Winchester did not give warning. Once she very nearly did so; but at the last moment something held her back. Whether it was compassion for the peace of her staff, who had grown more and more dependent on her, or unwillingness to try a new room, or some other feeling that she could not put a name to, Mrs. Winchester lingered on as if spellbound, though every night was dreadful to her, and the days but little better. The staff did not like Mrs. Winchester’s looks, she had not been the same since that night. They thought she would brighten up, but though she seemed easier in her mind, her spirits did not revive, nor her strength either. Mrs. Winchester had grown attached to her home, and there was nothing no one could do for her. In spite of Mrs. Winchester’s solemn looks, they had a very merry dinner that day in the hall. She started to look better, and seemed more cheerful in her manner. She had been for a walk in the morning, and after luncheon she lay down in her room, and read a book. As the rain fell, Mrs. Winchester looked out at the rain, and she picture how beautiful her Victorian gardens would look in the spring. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
It seemed to her that all the beautiful flowers, green lawns and plush trees would cover up the dreariness, indoors as well as out. The fancy had hardly crossed her mind when she heard a step at her side. She looked up, and there stood Maynard. Mrs. Winchester did not know how long he stood there. She only knew that she could not stir or take her eyes from him. Afterward she was terribly frightened, but t the same time it was not fear she felt, but something deeper and quitter. He looked at Mrs. Winchester long and hard, and his face was just one dumb prayer to her—but how in the World was Mrs. Winchester to help him? Suddenly she turned, and she heard him walk down the passage. This time Mrs. Winchester was not afraid to follow—she felt that she must know what Maynard wanted. Mrs. Winchester sprang up and ran out. He was at the other end of the passage, and Mrs. Winchester expected him to take the turn towards the door-to-nowhere; but instead, ran and pushed out the door to the 7-11 staircase that was built in the shape of a “Y”, which enabled servants to get to three different levels of the mansion. Mrs. Winchester followed him down the stairs. The kitchen and hall were empty at that hour, the servants being off duty, except for the footman, who was in the pantry. At the door Maynard stood still for a moment, with another look at Mrs. Winchester; then he turned the handle, and stepped out. For a minute Mrs. Winchester hesitated. What was Maynard leading her? #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
The door had closed softly after him, and Mrs. Winchester opened it and looked out, half-expecting to find that Maynard had disappeared. However, she saw him a few yards off hurrying across the courtyard to the path through the woods. His figure looked black and lonely in the snow, and for a second Mrs. Winchester’s heart failed her and she thought of turning back. But, all the while Maynard was drawing her after him; and Mrs. Winchester ran out into the open. Maynard was in the cobble stone path now. He walked on steadily, and Mrs. Winchester followed at the same pace, till they passed out of the gates and reached the highroad. Then he struck the across the open fields to the village. By this time the ground was white, and as he climbed the slope of a muddy hill ahead of her Mrs. Winchester noticed that Maynard left no footprint behind him. At sight of that her heart shriveled up within her, and her keens were water. Somehow, it was worse than indoors. He made the whole countryside seem lonely as the grave, with none but the two of them in it, and no help in the wide World. Once Mrs. Winchester tried to go back; but Maynard turned and looked at her, and it was as if he dragged her with chains. After that Mrs. Winchester followed him like a lamb. They came to the village and he led her through it, past the church and the blacksmith’s shop, and down the lane, and the ghost of Maynard disappeared. A sense of helplessness came over Mrs. Winchester and she had not been able to guess what he wanted. His last look at her pierced Mrs. Winchester to the marrow; and yet it had not told her! #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
All at once Mrs. Winchester felt more desolate than when Maynard had stood there watching her. It seemed as if he left Mrs. Winchester all alone to carry the weight of the secret she could not guess. The rain went around in great circles, and the ground fell away from her. A spot of tea was brought to Mrs. Winchester and she was driven by carriage to her mansion. Upon arrival at home, the maid asked Mrs. Winchester what she wanted for dinner. “I have a headache, and will not require dinner this evening,” she said. It was a fact that Mrs. Winchester could scarcely keep her feet; yet she had no fancy to spend a solitary evening in her room. She sat down in the morning room, as long as she could hold her head up; but by eight she walked up the zig zag stairs, too weary to care what happened if she could but get her head on a pillow. The rest of the household went to bed soon afterward; they kept early hours. Once in bed, Mrs. Winchester felt easier, and lay quiet, listening to the strange noises that came out of the house after dark. Once she thought she heard a door open and close again below: it might have been the glass door that led to the gardens. She got up and peered out of the window; but it was in the dark of the moon, and nothing visible outside but the streaking of rain against the panes. Mrs. Winchester went back to bed and must have dozed off, for she jumped awake by the sound of shattered glasses. Before her heard was clear she sprung out of bed, and was dragging on her clothes. She unlocked and opened her door and peered down the passage. As far as her candle flame carried, she could see nothing unusual ahead of her. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Mrs. Winchester hurried on, breathless; but as she pushed open the door leading to the main hall her heart stood still, for there at the head of the stairs was Maynard, peering dreadfully down into the darkness. For a second she could not sir; but her hand slipped from the door, and as it swung shut the figure vanished. At the same instant there came another sound from below stairs—a stealthy mysterious sound, as of a latchkey turning in the house door. At that moment, the door tore open. On the threshold stood Maynard. All was dark behind him, but Mrs. Winchester saw him plainly. A death flutter passed over her face. Hours passed and there seemed to be no change in her. Just when the evil spirit left, Mrs. Winchester did not, but you could imagine the great joy that filled her heart to be set free from that awful, wicked, noisy spirit. Mrs. Winchester was so happy. If a Demonic element is allowed to express itself, through a non-human vehicle, such as poetry, music, art—great works can be accomplished. Maynard was a Satanist who had worked evil magic more than a hundred times. There are bloodcurdling accounts of those who had flirted with the devil and brought to public attention by those who worked at the Winchester Mansion. Mrs. Winchester knew she had powers when she was a child; she could will things to happen and often they did. She thought it was natural. She owned parchments from old grimoires from rituals that had been performed by witches who were hanged or burned. There were even books with spells in curses from the sixteenth century. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
Mrs. Winchester owned magic spells that were older than the country—magic to ensure opulence; to incite hatred or vengeance; and, for men, to secure the love of a virgin; to open every kind of lock without a key; to cause a dead body to rise—all that kind of stuff. She studied the old rituals for bewitchment, the type that got a lot of women hanged. There were these spells rather like voodoo where she made wax effigies. Mrs. Winchester vegan to study necromancy, which deals with bringing the dead back to life. The method she did was one where she drew her magic in a circle in her house. This was supposed to attract the spirit back. The performed the rites which lasted about thirty minutes. Nothing happened the first time or the second time, but the third time the room went cold and she could feel the presence. Suddenly ornaments crashed off the sideboard and pictures fell from the walls…she had made contact but whoever it was was obviously unhappy about it so she had to give up. Mrs. Winchester did not give up experimenting thought. The art of necromancy often causes occasional outbreaks of attacks on graveyards where misguided occult dabblers believe they have been compelled to make contact with the dead no matter how long they have been departed, though in truth a graveyard is probably the least place the spirit might wish to join callers for an evening. In June of 1889, the Oak Hill Memorial Park was the scene of bizarre rituals that puzzled even the most experienced occultists. More than twenty graves were ransacked; old-fashion lead-lined coffins had been “ripped open like a tin of beans” and the bodies or remains were carried away. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
No one can become involved in spiritism without serious repercussions. The poltergeist phenomena may be real. I call upon the powers of death and decay through the mouth of Arezura. Powers of baneful darkness I summon you to this unholy temple. I conjure you mighty Fly Goddess Dryj Nasu to enter this lamp of death which will guide the lives of my enemies into utter destruction, for death levels them all according to my will, whether they die as Kings upon a throne or poor men lying upon dirt! Druj Nasu fill this lamp of death with your power and essence and I offer my essence upon this gateway of the black Earth so it is done! This Druj Nasu runs from the northern directions in the form of a fly. To him blow the wind from the northerly direction from the more northern sides, stinking, more stinking than other winds. I offer my enemy as a sacrifice unto the Druj Nasu. Claim your prize how, by the power of Ahriman and the Blackened Fire of Zohak, and in the name of my own divine power it is done! Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, O Lord! and I shall be clean: Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. THE ADORATION AT THE INDUING OF THE VESTMENT. By the figurative mystery of these holy vestures (or this holy vestment) I will clothe me with the armour of salvation in the strength of the Most High, ANCHOR; AMACOR; AMIDES; THEODINIAS; ANITOR; that my desire end may be effected through Thy strength, O ADONAI! Unto Whom the praise and glory will for ever and ever belong! Amen! #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Winchester Mystery House
Master magician and acclaimed apparitionist Aiden Sinclair returns to Winchester Mystery House with Aiden Sinclair’s Ghost of Christmas Passed, an interactive evening of paranormal illusions. Once upon a time, Christmas was more than a celebration of giving.
It was a time that families gathered and when the night grew darkest, chilling tales were told. Aiden Sinclair rekindles the tradition of Dickens in a haunting presentation that brings the Christmas Ghost Stories of long ago back to haunt the living! Will you dare join and see what dark gifts he has in store? Two nights ONLY – tickets going fast!
🎟 link in bio. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Randolph Harris II International 