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Yeah, You Sure Do Have a Problem!
Just because you do not understand it, does not mean It is not so. Contemporary investigations of family relationships and schizophrenia center more on explaining the course than the cause of the disorder. There are, however, some notable instances where researchers have employed family-of-origin variables to predict the onset of schizophrenia. Three family variables that have been, and continue to be, particularly influential in this area are communication deviance, expressed emotion, and family affective style. In the classic family approaches to schizophrenia, patients’ families often have odd and unfocused styles of interacting with each other, perhaps in the service of sustaining pseudomutuality. Members of these families have difficulty establishing and maintaining a shared focus of attention through their discourse. Out of this original set of studies and hypotheses about family interaction and schizophrenia emerged a very influential line of research on communication deviance. It has been theorized that people learn to focus their attention and derive meaning from external stimuli through their interactions, particularly with parents, during the early years of life. Odd and deviant styles of communication among the parents were presumed to interact with biological predispositions to contribute to thought and communication disturbances in children who are unable to relate to and understand their parents. A considerable body of evidence indicates that a family affected by a member’s schizophrenia will communicate in odd, idiosyncratic, illogical, and fragmented language, even when that member is not present. Topics of conversation will often drift or abruptly change direction, with a lack of closure. Such interactions are marked by a blurred focus of attention and meaning. This characteristic style of family communication has been labeled CD (communication deviance). #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Traditionally, CD has been assessed from transcripts of parents’ responses to projective tests such as the Rorschach or the Thematic Apperaption Test (TAT). These responses are generally made in the absence of the child. People with schizophrenia may have a contorted peculiar language and misinterpratations of social and verbal language. This is referred to as interactional communication deviance (ICD), and it classifies parents’ discourse into categories such as idea fragments (exempli gratia “But the thing is as I said, there’s got…you can’t drive in the alley), contradictions or reactions (exempli gratia, “No, that’s right, she does” and ambiguous reference (exempli gratia ‘Kids stuff that’s one thing but something else is different too). Abundant evidence indicates that CD is higher in parents of patients with schizophrenia than it is in parents of either patients without schizophrenia or healthy controls. It is particularly intriguing that this distorted form of communication is highly reminiscent of the communication style that typifies the person who actually has schizophrenia. It is therefore unclear whether parental CD reflects a genetic effect that is evident in both parent and child, or a parental behaviour that contributes to the child’s problem. The onset of schizophrenia can be predicted. In one study, parents from families with moderately disturbed teenagers each responded to TAT protocols, from which measures of CD were taken. Fifteen years later, the lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia in the children was assessed. High CD in the parents was strongly associated with the appearance of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders in some of the family of offspring at follow-up. In a similar study, disturbed high-risk adolescents were followed over a period of 5 years. By the end of the study, approximately 10 percent of those whose parents who were low or intermediate in CD went on to develop schizophrenia, whereas 56 percent of those whose parents were high in CD developed schizophrenia. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Other researchers on CD has examined its role in the course of schizophrenia. For example, one group of patients with schizophrenia and their parents were followed for over the course of 1 year. Within the 12-month period of the study, slightly over 50 percent of the patients has experienced a relapse. Parental CD at the time of the patients’ discharge was significantly higher among the parents of those who relapsed versus those who did not. However, in the assessment of parental CD at time 1, there were no differences among parents of those who did versus those who did not relapse. As it turns out, the parents of those patients who relapsed exhibited a dramatic increase in their CD over the course of the study. This investigation indicates that returning to a home with high CD will increase the likelihood of relapse. The results of an adoption study conducted in Finland illustrate the power of parental CD to influence schizophrenic outcomes in children. Children who were genetically at risk or predisposed to develop schizophrenia, were especially likely to develop the disorder when reared by an adoptive family that was high in CD. However, among the low-risk adoptees, there was no relationship between CD in the adoptive parents and thought disorders in children. These findings suggest that parental CD may be a family stressor that interacts with a preexisting diathesis to influence the development of schizophrenia. It is reasonable to wonder whether parental CD is a repose to schizophrenia in a child. Interaction with a person afflicted with schizophrenia may possibly bring about CD. However, the parental CD is not a consequence of living in a household with someone who has schizophrenia. In addition to distorted verbal behaviour, parental CD may be accompanied by problematic use of nonverbal behaviour. Parents who are high in CD also exhibit gaze aversion and rigidity in facial expression while interacting with their children. These are powerfully disconfirming behaviours. At the same time, they fit well with poor focus of attention that is the hallmark of CD. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
When a high-CD parent “interacts” with a child, both verbal and nonverbal behaviour suggest that the parent’s thoughts and emotions are elsewhere, and that there is some tension between the parent and the child. Consequently, the child may be met with fragmented and disconfirming behaviour in both the verbal and nonverbal channels when interacting with the high-CD parent. It appears that parental CD functions as a type of stressor that affects the course and outcome of schizophrenia. When parents’ communication is particularly amorphous and peculiar, children may become confused and uncertain about even basic and fundamental social realities. This confusion undoubtedly has functional significance in the course of the schizophrenia, as it is so central in the constellation of symptoms that make up the disorder. It is difficult to read the transcripts and hear the speech of a high-CD parents, and not wonder about the parent’s own mental health, aside from that of the child. It is therefore understandable that when patients are discharged into the care of such parents, they offspring remain at risk for future relapse. Early investigations of family expressed emotion (EE) identified a pattern of criticism, overinvolvement, overprotectiveness, excessive attention, and emotional reactivity that appeared to create a vulnerability to relapse and poor social adjustment among patients with schizophrenia. EE represents an attitude of criticism and emotional overinvolvement on the part of the parent, which is expressed during an interview with a researcher or clinician. Originally a special interview procedure, known as the Camerwell Family Interview, was employed to assess family EE. The construct is operationalized through the frequency of critical remarks, degree of hostility, and the degree of emotional overinvolvement expressed by a family member during the interview. Generally, parents who express more than six criticisms during the interview are characterized as high in EE. EE is a combination of four behavioural characteristics: intrusiveness; anger and/or acute distress and anxiety; overt blame and criticism of the patient; and an intolerance of the patient’s symptoms. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
One study revealed that patients who returned to a home with high-EE relatives exhibited a 9-month relapse rate of 51 percent, whereas only 13 percent of those who returned to a low-EE family relapsed. Family therapy programs that improve communication and problem solving, thus lowering EE, have been shown to lower relapse rates significantly. Recently discharged patients with schizophrenia who returned to either high-EE or low-EE families were examined. Patients from high-EE families exhibited more odd and disruptive behaviour during a family interaction approximately 6 weeks after hospital discharge than did patients from low-EE households. Relatives in the high EE households were more critical of the patients when they verbalized unusual thoughts than low-EE family members were. Studies such as these clearly paint a picture of a vicious circle in high-EE family relations: These parents respond to a patient with a lot of criticism, because patients from these households appear to exhibit more bizarre and disruptive behaviour than patients from low-EE homes. It is likely that the negative reactions they receive from their families contribute further to the potential for relapse among patients. A review of 25 studies on family EE indicated a 50 percent relapse rate, over a period of 9-12 months, among patients discharged to high-EE families, but only 21 percent among those with low-EE relatives. These findings indicate that the odds of relapse are increased by approximately 2.5:1 for patients discharged to high- versus low-EE relatives. Similar findings are evident in a recent meta-analysis of this literature, indicating an effect size of r =.30 for the association between family EE and relapse. Studies of family EE show that three factors are prominent in protecting a patient with schizophrenia from relapse. The first factor is low-EE in the relatives who live with the patient. For better or worse, most patients are discharged back to their families of origin. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
When family members harbour critical and hostile attitudes toward a patient, the likelihood of relapse is high. On the other hand, low-EE, which may be indicative of greater tranquility, support, acceptance, can greatly reduce the probability of relapse. A second protective factor is low (id est, less than 35 hours per week) face-to-face contact with high-EE parents. Again, avoiding the agitating effect of high-EE family members appears to pay some dividends. The final protective factor identified is whether a patient is maintained on medication. Obviously, those who comply with medication regiments are at reduced risk for relapse. These authors argue that of the three factors, low-EE in the family is most important in reducing relapse within a year from discharge, as it appears to have a prophylactic effect regardless of compliance with medication. Family EE may function as a stressor that precipitates relapse among recovering patients with schizophrenia. The experience of a psychological problem as profound as schizophrenia can leave a recovering patient in a very fragile psychological and social state. Even though symptoms may be under control and in remission, the interpersonal disruption that is associated with this disorder may still be evident, leaving the patient in a precarious state of interpersonal behaviours, the patient may have minimal opportunity for seeking social support and validation from other sources. The end result of this state of affairs may be relapse into an episode of schizophrenia upon being pressed by EE from family members. There is reason to believe that parents who are particularly high in EE may have psychological problems of their own. Studies found that lifetime rates of major psychiatric disorders were 100 percent in high-EE parents of patients with schizophrenia, and only 44 percent in parents who scored low on measures of EE. Although this 44 percent lifetime prevalence rate for the low-EE parents may seem high, it considered normal when contrasted with other studies, suggesting that these parents as a group are no different from those in the general population. The amazingly high rate of psychiatric disorder in the high-EE parents raises the possibility that EE may be a marker of genetic transmission of mental illness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Family EE is assumed to be a stressor that evokes psychiatric symptoms in a patient. Do patients find high-EE to be stressful? To explore the issue, patients with schizophrenia were asked to discuss happy and unhappy memories from their lives. Patients with high-EE parents recalled significantly fewer positive memories that involved their parents, compared to patients with low-EE parents. Overall, parents were featured in twice as many positive as negative memories. However, high-EE parents were featured in roughly equal proportions of positive and negative recollections. The study provides at least indirect evidence that high-EE parents are experienced as stressful by patients with schizophrenia. Research on family EE continues to flourish. In addition to being a useful and reliable predictor of relapse, EE may be fruitfully understood as a familial risk indicator for schizophrenia. High-EE parents are especially likely to have their own history of psychopathology. Thus parental EE may signal a possible genetic transmission of psychopathology. High-EE parents feel that their own psychological problems were overcome though internal efforts. Whether family EE is viewed as a predictor of relapse or a risk factor, one can interpret it within a diathesis-stress framework, in which this conflictual and hostile family attitude functions as a stressor on the patient. At the same time, however, it is important to bear in mind that EE may also reflect parents’ frustration and appraisal of the burden of dealing with their son or daughter with schizophrenia. Whereas EE reflects the content of communications, CD reflect the form of communication. As if to make a potentially disruptive family situation worse for patients with schizophrenia, families are that are high in CD also tend to be high in EE. Consequently, patients may be dealt a double dose of problematic interactional exchanges with their family members. It is little wonder that patients discharged to parents high in EE, who are also likely to express unclear, odd, and fragmented ideas, are at such a high risk for relapse. When the two variables were put side by side in the same investigation, family CD proved to be a more powerful predictor of schizophrenia outcomes (exempli gratia, number of relapses, time hospitalized, ratings of psychosocial functioning) then family EE. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Affective style (AS) is a measure of the verbal behaviour of family members during discussion of a conflict-laden issues with the patient present. Whereas EE is an attitude of hostility, criticism, and overinvolvement expressed by a family member during an interview in the absence of the patient, AS represent the family members’ actual verbal behaviours when interacting with the patient. It may be viewed as the behavioural manifestation of the attitude indexed by the expressed emotion construct, but this relationship has been difficult to establish empirically. Although AS and EE are close related and perhaps overlapping constructs, a distinct body of literature exists on AS, indicating that (like EE) it is often predictive of relapse among patients with schizophrenia. Measures of AS are typically taken from a series of brief family discussions about a current unresolved problem in the family. As might be expected, these conversations pull for substantial emotional expression. The conversations are then transcribed, and the family members’ speech content is coded for support, criticism, guilt induction, and intrusiveness. The unit of analysis for the coding is typically six lines of uninterrupted speech by a single speaker. The results of the coding are used to classify families into one of three profiles AS profiles: benign, intermediate, or poor. Benign-As families display a lack of negative behaviours (id est, personal criticism, guilt induction, and critical or neutral intrusiveness) during their interactions. Intermediate-As families are those who express some negative but some positive speech behaviours (id est, primary support) during the family discussion. Finally, poor-AS (also referred to as negative-AS) families are those in which one or both parents exhibit negative verbal behaviours, but no positive verbal behaviours. In one of the first AS studies, 65 families of high-risk, disturbed, but not psychotic adolescents participated in the family discussion. The adolescents were then assessed at a follow-up 5 years later. When a broad schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis (exempli gratia, including schizoid personality disorder) was used as the outcome criterion, only 8 percent of adolescents with a benign-AS family profile at time 1 received a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis at time 2. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Among those with an intermediate-AS family profile at time 1, 50 percent were diagnosed at time 2. This figure increased to 59 percent among those with a poor-AS family profile. Although it has been found that the best prediction of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders involved a combination of As and Cd, it is clear that family AS is a marker of risk for schizophrenia. In a longitudinal study of even longer duration, a group of moderately disturbed teens and their families were followed over a period of 15 years. The families participated in the typical conflict discussion. They were then classified as either negative- or benign-AS. Results for the study indicated that within those families classified as benign-AS, no cases of extended schizophrenia-spectrum disorder developed over the 15-year interval. However, almost all the schizophrenia-spectrum cases observed at time 2 occurred in the context of a family where one or both parents were high in EE and As. Like the studies on EE, the early studies on AS clearly supposed the hypothesis that family expression of criticism and hostility, in the absence of any supportiveness, indicates a risk for the development of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders among high-risk adolescents. These findings are consistent with early research showing that many psychiatric patients use mental hospitals as a refuge from stressful environments, in which they seek a carefree lifestyle. In addition to being a risk factor in the initial development of the disorder, AS may also predict relapse. In one investigation, patients with schizophrenia whose families had benign-AS profiles at the time of their discharge from the hospital evidenced a 40 percent rehospitalization rate over the next 12 months, whereas those who returned to negative-AS families had over twice the rate (83 percent) of rehospitalization. Even more striking are the findings for AS in concert with medication compliance: Patients with negative-AS families and noncompliance with medication exhibited a 100 percent rehospitalization rate, compared with only 17 percent among those with benign-As families and medication compliance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Of further interest is the fact that researchers were tested for, and it was largely ruled out that the possibility that those patients from negative-As families were sicker in the first place and therefore more likely to relapse. This finding suggests that it is unlikely that family AS is merely a reaction to the severity of a child’s illness. Approximately 70 percent of those families characterized by excessive criticism and emotional overinvolvement at initial assessment remained that way over the course of the study, regardless of the patient’s clinical status. Furthermore, about 20 percent of the parents become more critical over the course of the study, despite the fact that the patients’ condition actually improved. For most families, AS reflects a relatively stable and enduring style of interaction, which is resistant to treatment and independent of the patients’ recovery status. The connection between family AS and rehospitalization could be the result of at least two different processes. The most straightforward hypothesis is that family AS is a stressor that pushes an already fragile individual “over the edge.” Experiencing a serious psychological problem can leave a recovering patient in a delicate psychological state, as noted earlier. The criticism and intrusiveness evident in a negative-AS household have the potential to strain the already sensitive patient to such an extent that the full disorder may redevelop. An alternative but related hypothesis is that family AS is a stressor that pushes the recovering patient out of the household and back into the hospital, in an effort to seek refuge from the family. Most people would find a negative-AS household to eb an aversive environment. It is understandable that almost anyone would want to get out of such an environment. For the patient with a learning history that involves being taken care of in a hospital, remission and readmission may be functional, in that it removes one from the stressful confines of the negative-As family origin. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Is negative AS specific to families of patients with schizophrenia? Several studies have been conducted to explore this issue, and these generally suggest that the problem is particularly exaggerated in such families. For example, when compared to parents of patients with bipolar disorder, the parents of patients with schizophrenia have been found to make more intrusive and critical statements toward the patients after discharge from the hospital. When compared to families of patients with anorexia nervosa, families of patients with schizophrenia were much more likely to have negative-As profiles. In this sample, only 1 of the 11 families of patients with anorexia nervosa had a negative-As profile. Family AS appears to have a relationship with both the onset and course of schizophrenia. At the same time, the variable has not been as widely embraces as CD or EE. This is due to problems with reliably rating AS. Consequently, the variable appears almost exclusively in research studies of the group at or from UCLA who originally developed the construct. Nevertheless, the available research findings indicate that it is a family interaction phenomenon with potential equal to CD or EE in explaining considerable variance in the course of schizophrenia. Modern conceptualizations of family interaction and schizophrenia fit well within a diathesis-stress framework. Some individuals may harbour a biological predisposition to develop schizophrenia. This predisposition is more formally known as the diathesis. It is unquestionably stressful to live with parents who communicate in odd and illogical ways, and who are unable to establish and maintain a shared focus of attention. It is equally stressful to live with parents who harbour as well as express attitudes of hostility, criticism, and overinvolvement. Sadly, many of these destructive and stressful family interaction patterns cooccur. The confusion and disorientation that parental CD produces, and the guilt, shame, and bewilderment about ego boundaries that parental EE and negative AS create, have the effect of combining flame and fuel among those with an existing predistortion toward schizophrenia and/or trigger relapse. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Current evidence indicates that one could question the mental health of any parent who exhibits excessive hostility, criticism, and emotional overinvolvement toward a child, along with an inability to establish and maintain a shared focus of attention in discussions that have a bizarre tone and structure. These family variables have an undeniable role in the course and in some cases onset of schizophrenia. It is not possible to fully understand and predict this disorder without at least some consideration of the family context in which a patient with schizophrenia was reared and into which one is discharged. The upsurge of interest in Eastern religion and Western cults is welcome, and may help a turn to the Good; but it has its negative side in a matching interest in Evil with a capital E. These evils, sufferings, and calamities exist for all, the good and the bad; such is the human lot. Whether in politics or in society, there is widespread double-talk, publicly upheld untruth, and differing views expressed. Many people have had their eyes opened to the depth and extent of the evil in humans, and they have become sad over it. Today nobody needs to become illumined in order to see the same thing. If some humans wish to withdraw from the World, disgusted with its repeated brutalities and malignances, need we wonder? Because the Universe is a manifestation of the Divine, it must be divinely guided. Therefore its history must be divinely controlled. What has happened in human World affairs so recently and so dramatically is not outside the divine will. What is happening today is just as much inside it. The degenerative process which replaces the universal-mindedness of Goethe by the fanatic narrowness of Goebbels, the calm wisdom of the earlier man by the obscene insanity of the later one, is a subject for reflection. The good and the evil in humans is such long-associated partners that cooperation of the good alone between humans is impossible. At some point of their contact, in some way, the reptilian evil will creep in and make its unpleasant discordant presence felt. Hence universal brotherhood is only a beautiful dream, to be shattered upon awakening to the ugly facts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The lives of so many good humans in our time have moved inexorably to disaster, like the gloomy story of a Greek tragedy, that the helpless but friendly onlooker may well wonder where God is. A period so filled with confusion and so rife with evil, drives thoughtless people to more sensuality and materialism but thoughtful ones to more aspiration and higher values. O Lord Jesus, Your life was such a small stretch in human history, and even that was despised by Humankind. Despite what the history of the World has said and done, grant that I may imitate You in all respects. “The servant is not greater than the master, nor the student, the teacher.” That is how Your Matthew put it (10.24). We Devouts will be exercised in this life because there is where we will find our Salvation and True Sanctity. Outside of these applications of the spiritual life, whatever I read or hear about You will not give me the same pleasure as knowing You personally. “Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in one’s heart, but believes that what one says is going to happen, it shall be granted to one. Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they shall be granted you,” reports Mark 11.23-24. If you are in a touch situation today, now more than ever you need to guard what you say and now allow any negative, destructive words to come out of your mouth. Scripture says, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue; and you will eat the fruit thereof,” reports Proverbs 18.21. In other word, you create an environment for either good or evil with your words, and you are going to have to live in that World you have created. If you are always murmuring, complaining, and talking about how bad life is treating you, you are going to live in a pretty miserable, depressing World. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
You will always be tempted to use words to describe negative situations, but God wants us to use our words to change our negative situations. Do not talk about the problem, talk about the solution. Receive the Cross from Jesus Christ’s very hand. Carry it as Jesus handed it over to you, carry it to the death. Truly the life of a good self-actualized is the Cross, and the Cross is the passage to Heaven. The Cross is an uphill trudge, and once begun, you cannot just stop and turn around and go downhill. Ah, my friends, let us make the trudge together—Jesus will be with us. It is because of Him we took up this cross, and it is because of Him we will preserve in the Way of the Cross. He will lead the way, and we will follow. If He falls, we will help. And the other way around. Look, there Jesus is. Our King enters before us. He will fight for us. Let us follow him virilely, and no one will fear the terrors. Let us be prepare to die bravely in war. “Let us not fear the terrors. Let us not bring disgrace on our glory,” as the First Maccabist would say (9.10), by fleeing from the Cross. “Let the weak say I am strong. Let the oppressed say I am free. Let the sick say I am healed. Let the poor say I am well off,” reports Joel 3.10. Started calling yourself healed, happy, whole, blessed, and prosperous. Stop talking to God about how big your mountains are, and start talking to your mountains about how extraordinary your God is. When you are facing obstacles in your path, you must boldly say, “Greater is He who is in me than one who is in the World,” reports 1 John 4.4. “No weapon formed against me is going to prosper,” reports Isaiah 54.17. God always causes His loved ones to triumph. Stop complaining about lack and limitation and start declaring, God supplies all of my needs in abundance. Stop complaining that nothing good ever happens to you and start declaring, “Everything I touch prospers and succeeds.” We must stop cursing the World. Let us start loving God’s creation. There is a miracle in your mouth. If you want to change your World, start today by changing your words. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Never pray your problem. If you pray the problem, it will get worse. If you pray the problem, you loose the ability of the enemy. Pray the problem and it will grow greater and your faith will flee away on the wings of doubt. Pray the thing you desire. Go to the Word of God and find out what God said about it. You will find that the Word says, “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them,” reports Mark 11.24. So you would pray the desire: “Father, I desire my husband to be saved and filled with the Holy Spirit. I ask You to send labourers across his path to witness to him. As I am praying right now, I believe that I receive it in the name of Jesus Christ. I cast all my cares over onto You; and when I get up in the morning, I will not pray about it again. I will continue to thank you. Father, I want to speak words that are consistent with Your Word; may my words be filled continually with faith and hope, and may they create an environment in which You can do great and mighty things in and through my life.” Now you have returned God’s Words to Him, He will perform it. Now that may not happen overnight. This is where the force of patience is exercised. Learn to be silent to the Lord as is mentioned in Psalm 37, verse 7. Do not use vain repetitions. Do not pray the same prayer over and over (but if you are just learning to pray, do what you can, God hears all prayers). Do not be held in bondage. I am a farmer by trade and let us say that I have just planted a field of cotton. Now, if I went out and said the next morning, “Man, something is wrong. This cotton is not coming up. Let us plow it up and plant it again,” would it not be foolish? The next day the same thing happened. If I kept doing that, I could plant 365 days and still not produce any cotton. We need to become as smart in the spiritual realms as we are in the natural. That kind of farming practice will cause one to go bankrupt quick! Our prayers many times have held us in bondage, causing spiritual bankruptcy. No one would dare plant a garden and next morning dig it up. Well, Sarah Winchester might. He plants and flowers and trees were known to grow years overnight. However, for most of us, it takes time for these things to happen. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
God has certain laws that He operates under. He had regulated Himself by His Word. God has the power to do anything. However, so many times He cannot use His power in our behalf because if He did, it would violate His Word. That is one thing God cannot do! He cannot violate His Word. If He did some of the things we ask, He would have to lie to do it. We have prayed beyond His ability to answer because of our violation of His rules concerning prayer. Jesus said, ‘What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them.” Some of you have been praying all the bad things, the problems. If God did what you really desire, then He would violate His Word. He said that you can have what you say when you pray, and you have said the problem in prayer over and over until all you are seeing and believing is the problem. Have you ever prayed, “Lord, it is not working out. It is not getting any better”? Well, I was praying that every prayer one morning and the Lord spoke something into my spirit. If I heard it in my ears, it would not have been any louder. He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Lord, I am praying.” He said, “No, you are not; you are complaining!” A lot of folks are complaining, thinking they are praying. They are telling God their problems. In Matthew, chapter 6, Jesus said that the Father already knows the problem. He already knows what you have need of before you ask Him. Then there is no need to pray the problem. What we need to do is zero in one the answer. Pray and speak the answer; cast the problem over on Him. The enemy has deceived the Christians into praying the problem. Did you know the more you pray the problem, the more you say the problem? The more you say the problem, the more you will believe in the problem. The problem will grow because you are keeping it always before you. It is just like fertilizing the problem. It will grow bigger and bigger. You tell others about it and they will say, “Yeah, you sure do have a problem.” They will agree with you, and then they will tell someone else. Finally, you will have fifty people agreeing that you have a problem. “Then you do have a problem! For Jesus said, ‘If two of you shall agree on Earth as touching anything, it shall be done,’” reports Matthew 18.19. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Now you can see the deception of the enemy. He has deceived us by twisting the Word of God around so we use it against ourselves. The adversary does not care how much you pray. One does not care how much you go to church. If one can distort the Word of God so that your prayers are ineffective, one has defeated you. Yes, you may make it to Heaven, but you may not do anything while you are here on Earth, except suffer, struggle along, and feel sorry for yourself. Many people get the idea that they are just suffering for Jesus; when, in fact, if they would just act on the Word of God and stand against the enemy, rebuking one in the name of Jesus, they could live in success. There is success in the name of Jesus Christ. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the enemy, and one will flee from you,” reports James 4.7. The Helpless Christian is in the same yacht with the ret of humanity in having weaknesses. The only difference is that even when a trusting relationship with God has been established, the Helpless Christian still feels the fear of being overwhelmed by life. This person feels that one hardly has the right to exist, much less grow. The Helpless Christian is stuck on the weakness polarity. Out of a sense of fear, the Helpless Christian distorts a religious commitment by reaming infantile and dependent. This person’s fear takes one of two forms. First, one may see God as the Great Rescuer and so stay helpless and continually wait for God’s help. Or, second, one may feel so overwhelmed by God because one is so big and by contrast one is so small that there is nothing else to do except sit shaking one’s boots in one’s presence. Either way, fear blocks growth. This person is unconsciously relating to God in the same manipulative ways that one has learned to relate to others. The helpless person has never learned to stand on one’s own feet. The body structure often reflects this in that the upper torso is often somewhat caved in, making the person appear fragile. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The Helpless Christian may experience a very nice payoff for infantile and dependent behaviour. There are many people who would like nothing better than to constantly rescue and take care of such a needy person. So the individual secretly enjoys the big fuss made over one’s difficulties, needs, and problems. If one dummies up, and does not learn to think for oneself, then others can be tricked into doing all the thinking. If one never has enough faith for anything, then other can be made to do the praying. If one is not willing to face life and learn to cope with it, the others can be hooked into giving advice, making decisions, and taking all the responsibility that should rightfully be one’s own. So the Helpless Christian says, “I cannot do it; I give up.” And the rescuers says, “That is all right; we will do it for you. Since getting in touch with one’s own strength and adequacy will mean accepting new responsibility, the Helpless Christian may prefer to continue seducing others into doing the thinking, feeling, and acting. Of course, one unknowingly pays the terrible price of remaining a psychological and spiritual infant throughout life. The other factor that may exert an unconscious influence on the attitudes and behaviour of the helpless person may be early traumatic experiences with family or peers. It is highly probable that the person has felt overwhelmed, humiliated, or severely taken advantage of while growing up. Therefore, one no longer trusts anyone. One does not even trust oneself, because there is a residual feeling of terror and helplessness about not being able to cope with life on one’s own. When people carry residual feelings of shame and embarrassment, as well as patterns of promiscuity into their adult Christian life, they may never experience an emotional reliable relationship, and it will be extremely difficult to understand others. That will make one an all too easy mark for predators. One must decide to face one’s life, and this will allow for the experience of new hope and lead to the discovery of a deep desire to amount to something. One will then take an active interest in determining how things will turn out for oneself, and be surprised that one’s choices can make such a big difference. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
This enlightenment will allow an individual to build friendships with humans that are genuine and supportive and allow one the dignity of being oneself. One will take an active interest in one’s careers, education, and hobbies and this disciplining time and energy will allow one to reach long term goals of vocational excellence. Then one day one will feel, “I am really loved. God loves me. And I can tell that some of my friends love me. And I am starting to love myself!” It may not be easy, but one can make real progress in climbing out of the rut of helplessness and apathy. At the manipulative level, the helpless Christian uses tactics of withdrawal and avoidance in order to escape the demands of responsible growth and self-direction. At the character level, some people may find themselves cold, aloof, and emotionally detached from others. In psychological terms, we souls say that the person is developing a schizoid character. In lay terms, we could say that the person is becoming lifeless and devoid of feeling. Having at some point felt a denial of the right to a fulfilling life, one is now determined never to again feel the pain of betrayal. Thus one psychologically locks oneself into solitary confinement and becomes numb to life, avoiding relationships and taking comfort in a hermit-like life where there is no emotional energy invested in another living thing except a dog or a cat. The passion, the interest or excitement with life, and the vision for fulfillment of one’s destiny are all gone. Encountering such an individual, one wonders if there is a person at all inside the stiff, fortified body. At the psychotic stage, helpless people melt silently into schizophrenia or an ultimate kind of “shut-offness” from the World. Not having learned how to live in the real World, they create a World of their own. Going further, they regress to an earlier, totally dependent form of infantile behaviour, relying on forces outside themselves for even the most simple bodily needs. This is both an alarming and depressing picture. Yet it is happening in people’s lives. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
If you find some of these tendencies unfolding in your own life, we urge you to begin reversing the pattern. The material throughout this report, coupled with your own desire and prayer, ought to provide you with many good options for growing out of the rut of being a Helpless Christian. If you feel that pressures in your own personality make it impossible to grow or change in healthy directions, then it would be wise for you to prayerfully seek a relationship with a competent professional counselor or therapist. Many people nowadays are benefiting from several weeks or months of individual group counseling or therapy with a qualified professional. Mother, Father, God, Universal Power, please remind us daily of the sanctity of all life. Please touch our hearts with the glorious oneness of all creation, as we strive to respect all the living beings on this planet. Please penetrate our souls with the beauty of this Earth, as we attune ourselves to the rhythm and flow of the seasons. Please awaken our minds with the knowledge to achieve a World in perfect harmony and please grants us the wisdom to realize that we can have Heaven on Earth. O Lord, open the Heavens and please pour down your rain. Yes, Lord, please refresh us, and pour down your spirit. Pour water on the thirsty land, and stream on the dry ground; pour your spirit upon our offspring, and your blessings on our descendants. Your Heavens above, rain down your righteousness; let the clouds show it down. Let the Earth open wide, let salvation spring up, let righteousness flourish with it; as You, the Lord, have created it. Please, loving God, bring us rain to renew the ground, to replenish our dams, to bring some chance of feed, to bring the possibility of some reward to those who have toiled so hard. We turn to you in faith and hope and love. With permission of Him who is exalted above all blessing and adoration, revered above all hymns of praise, wise in heart and might in strength and power, sovereign of the World and Lord of all creation, and with permission of all the righteous ones of this congregation, gathered here this day to rejoice in the Torah, and assembled to complete, then reverently to begin again in joy to read the Torah, stand forth, stand forth, stand forth, Hatan Bereshit. Inasmuch as you are chosen to be the first to perform so perfect a command, how great is your privilege, exceedingly great your reward! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Witches, Warlock, and Ghost in the Mansion of Mrs. Winchester!
Some people call themselves witches, and believe that they are able to contact and utilize powers from the invisible realm. However, there are many questions about witchcraft. Is it merely a game some people play? Is it beneficial to humanity? Or is it evil and dangerous? Universities all over the World are offering courses in occultism, and teams of scientists are investigating reports of mysterious magical phenomena all over the globe. They are baffled by some of the amazing incidents they encounter, and admit that present scientific knowledge cannot account for them. The Word of God may not provide a specific explanation for every problem one may encounter as one studies Satan, Satanism, and witchcraft, but it sheds much light on these subjects and offers practical guidelines by which God’s children can avoid dangers inherent in occultism. An unexpected and amazing development of this enlightened age is the resurgence of interest in Satan and an increase in occultic activity. A few years ago, most people assumed that the devil was dead, in the same manner that some theologians recently have affirmed the death of God. It is now becoming increasingly apparent that these reports were premature. Satan is very much alive, and is actively involved in today’s World. Though many scientists and philosophers still scoff at the idea of a personal devil, highly educated people all over the World meet regularly to worships Satan. Some groups, having dedicated themselves to the service of the devil, have committed brutal sacrificial slayings, while others engage in vile acts of immorality. Witchcraft, seances, and fortunetelling, for many years limited to areas of ignorance and superstition, are now discussed in highly respected magazines. Newspapers carry horoscopes, and multitudes consult them seriously every day. Prominent people have received a great deal of publicity by reporting the reception of personal messages from the spirits of the dead. The late Bishop Pike, for example, published a widely-read book telling of seances in which he purportedly talked with his dead son who had committed suicide. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Others, claiming the ability to foretell the future, also have become the objects of widespread interest, and have name Jeane Dixon comes to mind. She reportedly communicated with Mrs. Winchester who wanted to continue the restoration of her mansion. Mrs. Dixon is considered a prophetess by many people, and top leaders in government industry consult her for information about the future. In Europe today, more people are making a livelihood through the practice of occultism than the total number engaged in the Christian ministry. Belief in the existence of an unseen spiritual realm to be entered at death, and which has an influence upon human life, has captivated the minds of multitudes. The millions involved with occultism are unaware of the real nature of these mysterious and dangerous areas of investigation, and refuse to turn to the one source of truth regarding the kingdom of darkness. The Bible, the holy Word of God, reveals the true nature of the supernatural. It teaches that two real spiritual Worlds exist, one good and the other evil. It tells us that God is a Spirit (John 4.24), and that a great number of angels called “ministering spirits” (Hebrews 1.14) worship Him in Heaven and carry out His assignments upon Earth. The other invisible kingdom is evil, and is under the direction of Satan, who controls an organized host of wicked spirit beings. They are a formidable foe arrayed against God and His people, and the apostle Paul declared, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this World, against spiritual wickedness in high places,” reports Ephesians 6.12. All that can be known about the devil’s origin, fall, and present activity is to be found in the Bible. Although it does not specifically answer every question we may ask, it tells us the important facts about him and his kingdom. He was once a glorious, sinless creature, but he rebelled against God, was cast out of Heaven to Earth, and now leads his great army of spirit beings in a futile attempt to defeat God and destroy His people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The devil was created an angelic being of great beauty and splendor and at one time had great favour with God. Ezekiel describes him in his sinless state as follows, “Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyre, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord God: Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold; the workmanship of thy timbrels and of thy flutes was prepared in thee in the day thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth, and I have seen thee so; that wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee,” Ezekiel 28.12-15. Although the prophet was addressing these words primarily to an Earthly ruler, the king of Tyre, it is apparent that the full meaning of this prophecy is not exhausted by its reference to a flesh-and-blood monarch. The ultimate subject of Ezekiel’s words was Satan, the real instigator of the king’s pride and cruelty. Many Bible students reject this interpretation of Ezekiel’s dirge. They consider this viewpoint to be untenable and imaginative, and prefer to consider the prophet’s description to be a highly figurative portrayal of the king of Tyre. Some even say this lamentation incorporates a well-known Tyrian myth about a primeval being who lived in the “Garden of God” until he was expulsed for pride and rebellion. It is unlikely, however, that the inspired prophet would incorporate a myth into his message of judgment. Then, too, many prophetic pronouncements contained a double perspective. Isaiah, for example, after giving a stern warning of impending disaster, told Ahaz that the Lord would give a sign that the message he had spoken was true. “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken by both her kings,” reports Isaiah 7.14-16. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The fourteenth verse is a definite reference to Christ, the virgin-born Son of God, but verses fifteen and sixteen point to Maher-shalal-hash-baz, the infant son of Isaiah whose birth and early years are described in the following chapter. Before the lad was three years old, Pekah and Rezin, king of Israel and Syria, had been executed as the prophet had predicted. Since this type of double reference is common in the prophetic Scriptures, it should not be thought strange that Ezekiel, in pronouncing judgment upon the king of Tyre, should also be alluding to Satan, who motivated the Earthly monarch to his sinful pride and cruelty. The prophet declared that in his original state Satan was a creature of great wisdom and beauty. He portrays the devil as having been in Eden, the garden of God, and describes him as having been lavishly adorned with jewels at that time. The translation in our King James Version also speaks of the “timbrels” and “flutes” prepared by him on the day he was created, and some Bible students have inferred from this that he had great musical ability and was given charge of the Heavenly choirs which sang their praises to God. The Hebrew words, however, are difficult to translate, and most students are convinced that the words rendered “timbrels” and “flutes” more likely refer to the gold settings and engravings of his ornamental attire. “Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold; the workmanship of thy timbrels and of thy flutes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created,” reports Ezekiel 28.13. This exalted creature is also declared to be “the anointed cherub that covereth,” reports Ezekiel 28.14, which indicates that God appointed him to have a place of special prominence in connection with his throne. The remainder of the verse, “thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire,” indicates that before his sin, he was in the immediate presence of God’s glorious holiness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In fact, Satan may have been the most exalted of all the angels, and the memory of this former glory could have been the reason Michael did not dare “bring against him a railing accusation,” (Jude 9). Dr. Eric Sauer suggests the possibility that even before God created man, He committed to Lucifer a position of authority in relation to the Earth and its surrounding planets. For this reason, Satan is called the “god of this World” in the New Testament. In England and Scotland during the mediaeval and later periods of its existence, witchcraft was an offence against the laws of God and man; in Celtic Ireland dealing with the unseen were not regarded with such abhorrence, and indeed had the sanction of custom and antiquity. Consequently, when the Anglo-Normans came over, they found that the native Celts had no predisposition towards accepting the view of the witch as an emissary of Satan and an enemy of the Church, though they fully believed in supernatural influences of both good and evil, and credited their Bards and Druids with the possession of powers beyond the ordinary. The persecution of witches did not cease in the countries where that the growth and spread of witchcraft made headway—far from it; on the contrary it was kept up with unabated vigour. Infallibility was transferred from the Church to the Bible; the Roman Catholic persecuted the witch because Supreme Pontiffs had stigmatized her as a heretic and an associate of Satan, while the Protestant acted similarly because Holy Writ contained the grim command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The evil that was wrought by such amongst an unenlightened and superstitious people can be well imagined; unbelievers would be converted, while the credulous would be rendered more secure in their credulity. In the 16th century, during the rule of the Commonwealth Parliament thirty thousand witches were put to death in England. Even as late as 1690 torture was judicially applied to extract evidence, for in that year a Jacobite gentleman was questioned by the boots. However, Scotland, even at its worst, fades into insignificance before certain parts of the Continent, where torture was used to an extent and degree that can only be termed hellish; the appalling ingenuity displayed in the various methods of applying the “question extraordinary” seems the work of demons rather than of Christian, and makes one blush for humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Nonetheless, the punishment of death by fire for witchcraft or sorcery was not employed to any extend in Ireland. We have one undoubted instance, and a general hint of some others as a sequel to this. How the two witches were put to death in 1578 we are told, but probably it was by hanging. Subsequent to the passing of the Act of 1586, the method of execution would have been that for felony. On the Continent the stake was in continual request. In 1514, three hundred persons were burnt alive for this crime at Como. Between 1615 and 1635, more than six thousand sorcerers were burnt in the diocese of Strasburg, while, if we can credit the figures of Bartholomew de Spina, in Lombardy a thousand sorcerers a year were put to death for the space of twenty-five years. The total number of person executed in various ways for this crime has, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, been variously estimated at from one hundred thousand to several millions; if the latter figure be too high undoubtedly the former is too low. In the persecution of those who practised magical arts, no rank or class in society was spared; the noble equally with the peasant was liable to torture and death. This was especially true of the earlier stages of the movement when sorcery rather than witchcraft was the crime committed. For there is a general distinction between the two, though in many instances they are confounded. Sorcery was, so to speak, more of an aristocratic pursuit; the sorcerer was the master of the Devil (until his allotted time expired), and compelled him to do his bidding: the witch generally belonged to the lower classes, embodied in her art many practices which lay on the borderland between good and evil, and was rather the slave of Satan, who almost invariably proved to be a most faithless and unreliable employer. Anybody might become a victim of the witch epidemic; noblemen, scholars, monks, nuns, titled ladies, bishops, clergy—none were immune from accusation and condemnation. Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
According to alchemists, the souls of the dead can be pinned into homunculi. A homunculi is a very small human being or humanoid creature; a supposed microscopic but fully formed human being which a fetus was formerly believed to develop. Much that passed current in the west as White (id est permissible) Magic was only a disguised goeticism, and many of the resplendent angels invoked with divine rites reveal their cloven hoofs. It is not too much to say that a large majority of past psychological experiments were conducted to establish communication with demons, and that for unlawful purposes. The pentagram is a symbol of faith, a symbol of the five elements Spirit, Air, Earth, Water, and Fire (one for each point), and the circle (the Universe) contains and connects them all. The Golden Ratio is the number 1.61803399, represented by the Greek letter Phi, and considered truly unique in its mathematical properties, prevalence throughout nature, and its ability to achieve a perfect aesthetic composition. It is integral to the pentagram. Shorter and longer sections of each line exist in golden ratio. If you look at God’s fingers and the general position of the bodies in Michelangelo’s fresco, you will see pentagrams. After Mrs. Winchesters mysterious disappearance in 1922, the mansion of emptied of her belongings. It took six trucks working around the clock for six weeks to move all of her furniture out. Many people say not only was it a lot of stuff, but the movers would get lost in the mansion. Nonetheless, some things were left behind. From time to time the mansion was rented out. A young couple Oliver Hall and Ethel Taylor rented the place, but the story of what happened is very fascinating. No one ever thought that Ethel Taylor would marry Oliver Hall; but he thought differently, and things which Oliver Hall intended had a queer way of coming to pass. He asked her to marry him before he went Yale. She laughed and refused him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The Next time Oliver came home, he asked her again. However, she laughed, tosses her luscious blonde locks, and refused again. A third time he asked her; she said it was becoming a confirmed bad habit, and laughed at him more then ever. Oliver was not the only man who wanted to marry her, but his attempts were like an elephant, at whose clumsy feats were considerably amusing. Ethel was the belle of the Santa Clara Valley, and every one was in love with her more or less; it was a sort of fashion, like masher collars or Inverness capes. Therefore everyone was very annoyed as surprised when Oliver Hall walked into the Bank of Italy Building and invited everyone to his wedding. “Your wedding?” “You do not mean it?” “Who is the happy fair? When is it to be?” Oliver Hall filled his pipe and lighted it before he replied. Then he said—“I am sorry to deprive you fellow of your only joke—but Miss Taylor and I just let the Winchester mansion and are to married at the estate in April. “You do not mean it?” “He has got the mitten again, and its turned his head.” “No,” he said, rising “I see it is true. Lend me a pistol someone—or a first class fare to other end of Nowhere. Hall has bewitched the only pretty girl in our twenty-mile radius. Was it a mesmerism, or a love-potion, Oliver?” “Neither, sir, but a gift you will never have—perseverance—and the best luck a man ever had in this World. It is so glorious to know of a surety that now we can think, feel, speak, act—above all, love one another—haunted by no counteracting spell, responsible to no living creature for our life and our love.” There was something in his voice that silenced everyone, and all chaff of the other fellows failed to draw him further. The queer thing about it was that when we congratulated Miss Taylor, she blushed and smiled, and dimpled, for all the World as though she were in love with him, and had been in love with him all the time. They had been laughing very heartily, cherishing the mirth, as it were like those who caress a lovely bird that had been frightened out of its natural home and grown wild and rare in its visits, only tapping at the lattice for a minute, and then gone. Women are strange creatures. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
In Santa Clara everyone who was anyone was asked to the wedding at Llanada Villa. Many people were truly more interested in the trousseau than the bride herself. The coming marriage was much canvasses at afternoon tea-tables, and at the Bank of Italy over the saddler’s, and the question was always asked: “Does she care for him?” The best man used to ask that question in the early days of their engagement, but after a certain evening in April, the pause between the acts, when the house was half-darkened, and the laughter died away made him never ask that question again. “How cold is it,” said John, the best man, shivering. Oliver shivered too; but not with cold, it was more like the involuntary sensation at which people say, “Someone is walking over my grave.” He said so, jestingly. “Hush, Oliver,” whispered John, and again the draught of cold air seemed to blow right between them. The next week, John was coming home from the Bank of Italy through the churchyard. Their church was on a thyme-grown hill, and the turf about it is so thick and soft that one’s footsteps are noiseless. He made no sound as he vaulted the low lichened wall, and threaded his way between the tombstones. It was at the same instant that he heard Oliver Hall’s voice, and saw his face. Ethel was siting on a low flat gravestone with the full splendour of the western sun upon her mignonne face. Its expression ended, at once and for ever, any question of her love of Oliver; it was transfigured to a beauty John should not have believed possible, even to that beautiful little face. Many people said she was like a reincarnation of Mrs. Winchester. Oliver lay at Ethel’s feet, and it was his voice that broke the stillness of the golden April evening. “This spring is cold for you, my love. I half wish we had taken courage, and sailed once more for Hispaniola. My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the if you wanted.” John coughed at once to indicate his presence, and passed on into the shadow fully enlightened. “Oh, no—oh, no! No mor of the sea. Llanada Villa is perfect for me,” she said, with another and stronger shoulder. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
“Ethel,” he said at last, rousing himself, with a half-smile, “I think I must have grown remarkably attractive. Look! half the glasses opposite are lifted to our box. It cannot be to gaze at me, you know. Do you remember telling me I was the ugliest fella you ever saw?” “Oh, Oliver!” Yet it was quite true—she had thought him so, in far back, strange, awful times, when she, a girl of sixteen, had her mind wholly filled with one idea!—one insane, exquisite dream; when she brought her innocent child’s garlands, and sat him down under one spreading magnificent tree, which trees of the Victorian garden at Llanada Villa, until she felt its dews dropping death upon her youth, and her whole soul withering under its venomous shade. “Oh, Oliver!” She cried once more, looking fondly on his beloved face, where no unearthly beauty dazzled, no unnatural calm repelled; where all was simple, noble, manly, true. “My dearly beloved, I thank Heaven for that dear ‘ugliness’ of yours. Above all, though blood runs strong, they say , I thank Heaven that I see you no likeness to—” Oliver knew what name she meant, though for a whole year past—since God’s mercy made it to them only a name—they had ceased to utter it, and let it die wholly out of the visible World. The wedding was to be early in April. Two days before, John had to run up town on business. The train was late, of course, for they were on the South-Eastern, and as he stood grumbling with his watch in his hand, who should he see but Oliver Hall and Ethel Taylor. They were walking up and down the unfrequent end of the platform, that he obtrusively passed the pair with his Gladstone, and took the corner in a first-class smoking-carriage. He did this with as good an air of not seeing them as he could assume. John prided himself on his discretion, but if Oliver were traveling alone he wanted his company. He had it. “Hullo, old man,” came his cheery voice as he swung his bad into John’s carriage; “here is luck; I was expecting a dull journey!” “Where are you off to?” John asked, discretion still bidding him turn his eyes away, though he saw, without looking, that hers were red-rimmed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
“To old San Francisco,” he answered, shutting the door and leaning out for a last word with his sweetheart. He stood—clasping her hand secretly and hard; then he grew quitter; until, as the drop-scene fell, the same cold air swept past them. It was as if someone fresh from the sharp sea-wind had entered the box. “Oh, I wish you would not go, Oliver,” she was saying in a low, earnest voice. “I feel certain something will happen.” “Do you think I should let anything happen to keep me, and the day after tomorrow our wedding-day?” “Do not go,” she answered, with a pleading intensity which would have sent anyone’s Gladstone on to the platform and one after it. However, Oliver Hall was made differently; he rarely changed his opinion, never his resolutions. He only stroked the little ungloved hands that lay on the carriage door. “I must go, Ethel, The old boy’s have been awfully good to me, and now he is dying I must go and see him, but I shall come home in time for—” the rest of the parting was lost in a whisper and in the rattling lurch of the starting rain. “You are sure to come?” she spoke as the train moved. “Nothing shall keep me,” he answered; and they steamed out. After he had seen the last of the little figure on the platform he leaned back in his corner and kept his silence for a minute. When he spoke it was to explain to John that his godfather, whose heir he was, lay dying in Le Petit Trianon, some fifty miles away, and had sent for Oliver, and Oliver felt bound to go. “I shall be surely back tomorrow,” he said, “or, if not, the day after, in heaps of time. Thank Heaven, one has not to get up in the middle of the night to get married nowdays!” “And supposed Mr. Koshland dies?” “Alive or dead I mean to get married on Thursday!” Oliver answered, as he unfolded Oakland Tribune. At the Third and Townsend Depot they said their “goodbye,” and he got out and John saw him ride off; John went to Berkeley, where he stayed the night. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
When John got home the next afternoon, a very wet one, by the way, his sister greeted him with—“Where is Oliver Hall?” “Goodness knows,” he answered testily. Every man, since Cain, has resented that kind of question. “I thought you might have heard from him,” she went on, “as you are to give him away tomorrow.” “Is he not back,” I asked, for I had confidently expected to find him at Llanada Villa. “No, John,”—his sister Alexis always had a way of jumping to conclusions, expecially such conclusion as were least favourable to her fellow-creatures—“he has not returned, and, what is more, you may depend upon it he will not. You mark my words, there will be no wedding tomorrow.” His sister Alexis has the power of annoying him which no other human being possess. “You mark my words,” John retorted with asperity, “you had better give up making such a thundering idiot of yourself. There will be more wedding tomorrow than ever, you will take first part in.” A prophecy which, by the way, came true. However, though, John could snarl confidently to his sister, he did not feel so comfortable when, late that night, standing on the door step of the Winchester mansion, heard the Oliver had not returned home. Filled with German superstitions, the young man grew almost pale, but kept a courteous calmness. There was nothing too ghastly or terrible for his own imagination to conjure up. John went home gloomily through the rain. Next morning brought a brilliant blue sky, gold sun, and all such softness of air and beauty of cloud as to make up a perfect day. However, he woke with a vague feeling of having gone to bed anxious, and of being rather averse to facing that anxiety in the light of full wakefulness. However, with his shaving-water came a note from Oliver which relieved his mind and sent him to the Winchester mansion with a light heart. Ethel was in the garden. He saw her blue gown through the hollyhocks as the mansion’s gates swung behind him. So he did not go up to the mansion, but turned aside down the turfed path. “He has written to you too,” she said, without preliminary greeting, when John reached her side. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
“Yes, I am to meet him at the station at three, and come straight back to the mansion.” Her face looked pale, but there was brightness in her eyes, and a tender quiver about the mouth that spoke of renewed happiness. “Mrs. Koshland begged him so to stay another night that he had not the heart to refuse,” she went. “He is so kind, but I wish he had not stayed.” John was at the station at half-past two. He felt rather annoyed with Oliver. It seemed a sort of slight to the beautiful young lady who loved him, that he should come as it were out of breath, and with the dust of travel upon him to take her hand, which some of them would have given the best years of their lives to take. However, when the three o’clock train glided in, and glided out again having brought no passengers to their little station, John was more than annoyed. There was no other train for thirty-five minutes; he calculated that, with much hurry, he might just get back to the mansion in time for the ceremony; but, oh, what a fool to miss that first train! What other man could have done it? That thirty-five minutes seemed like a year, as he wandered round the station reading the advertisements and the time-tables, and the company’s bye-laws, and getting more and more angry with Oliver Hall. This confidence in his own power of getting everything he wanted the minute he wanted it was leading him too far. John hated waiting. After no sight of Oliver, he flung himself into the carriage that he had brough for him. “Drive to the mansion!” he said, as someone shut the door. “Mr. Hall has not come by this train.” Anxiety now replaced anger. What had become of the man? Could he have been suddenly taken will? John had never known Oliver to have an illness in his life. And even so, he might have telegraphed. Some awful accident must have happened. Maybe his corpse was picked up off a wreck, and committed to the deep—in the Gulf of Mexico. The thought that he had played her false never—no, not for a moment, entered John’s head. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Yes, something terrible had happened to Oliver, and on John lay the task of telling his bride. John almost wished the carriage would upset and break his head so that someone else might tell her, not Joh, who—but that is nothing to do with the story. It was five minutes to four as they drew up to the gate of the Winchester mansion. A double row of eager onlooker lined the path of the palm avenue. John sprang from the carriage and passed up between them. The estate’s gardener had a good front place near the door. He stopped. “Are they waiting still, Thomas?” he asked, simply to gain time, for of course he knew they were by the waiting crowd’s attentive attitude. “Waiting, sir? No, sir, why it must be over by now.” “Over! Then Mr. Hall has come?” ‘To the minute, sir; must have missed you somehow, and I say, sir,” lowering his voice, “I never see Mr. Oliver the bit so afore, but my opinion is he has been drinking pretty free. His clothes was all dusty and his face a sheet. I tell you I did not like the looks of him, with never a look or a word for none of us; him that was always such a gentleman!” I had never heard Thomas make so long a speech. The crowd in at mansion wee talking in whispers and getting ready rice and slippers to throw at the bride and bridegroom. The ringers were ready with their hands on the ropes to rung out the merry peal as the bride and bridegroom should come out. A murmur from the Winchester mansion announced them; out they came, Thomas was right. Oliver Hall did not look himself. There was dust on his coat, his hair was disarranged. He seemed to have been in some row, for there was a black mark above his eyebrow. He was deathly pale. However, his pallor was not greater than that of the bride, who might have been carved in ivory—dress, veil, orange blossoms and all. As they passed out the ringers stooped—there were six of them—and then, on the ears expecting the gay wedding peal, came the slow tolling of the Winchester Bell. A thrill of horror at so foolish a jest from the ringers passed through all the guests. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
However, the ringers themselves dropped the ropes and fled like rabbits down the belfry stairs. The bride shuddered, and grey shadows came about her mouth, but the bridegroom led her on down the path where the people stood with the handfuls of rice; but the handfuls were never thrown, and the wedding-bells never rang. In vain the ringers were urged to remedy their mistake: the protested with many whispered expletives that they would see themselves further first. In a hush like the hush in the chamber of death the bridal pair passed into their carriage and its door slammed behind them. Then the tongues were loosed. A babel of anger, wonder, conjecture from the guests and spectators. “If I had seen his condition, sir,” said old Seymour to me as we drove off, “I would have stretched him on the floor of the mansion, sir, by Heaven I would, before I would have let him marry my daughter!” Then he put his head out of the window. “Drive like fury,” he cried to the coachman; “do not spare the horses.” He was obeyed. They passed the bride’s carriage. John forbore to look at it, and old Seymour turned his head away and swore. They reached reception hall before it. They stood in the hall doorway, in the blazing afternoon sun, and in about half a minute, they heard the wheels crunching the gravel. When the carriage stopped in the front of the steps old Seymour and John ran down. “Great Heaven, the carriage is empty! And yet—” he had the door open in a minute, and this is what he saw—No sign of Oliver Hall; and of Ethel, his wife only a huddled heap of white satin lying half on the floor of the carriage and half on the seat. “I drove straight here, sir,” said the coachman, as the bride’s father lifted her out; “and I will swear no one got out of the carriage.” We drove back to the Winchester mansion, and carried her back into the house in her bridal dress, and drew back her veil. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Her face. No one would ever forget. White, white and drawn with agony and horror, bearing such a look of terror as no one has never seen except in dreams. And her hair, her radiant blonde hair, it was white like snow. As John and her father stood, both half mad with horror and mystery of it, a body came up the avenue—a telegraph boy. They brought the orange envelop to John. He tore it open. “Mr. Hall was thrown from his horse on his way to the station at half-past one. Killed on the spot!” And he was married to Ethel Taylor in the Winchester Mansion at half-past three, in the presence of fifty guests. “I shall be married, dead or alive!” What had passed in that carriage on the drive to the reception hall? No one knows—no one will ever know. Oh, Ethel! Oh, my dear!” Before a week was over they laid her beside her husband in the Oak Hill Memorial Park on the northern most hill in the San Juan Bautista Hills of South San Jose. Thus was accomplished Oliver Hall’s wedding. Whether or not one believes in superstitions about spirits, it is hard to dismiss the unusual events that have taken place at this estate. Just like the original construction, restoration and maintenance work at Winchester Mystery House is never complete. The actual amount of materials requires is staggering. For example, it takes over 20,000 gallons of pain to cover the exterior—and by the time the workers have finished, they have to start all over again! Continuous work is being done on the massive structure, with carpenters, painters, and gardeners toiling away just like they did during Mrs. Winchester’s day. The sons, grandsons, and great grandson of Mrs. Winchester’s original employees have been some of these workmen! The restoration work is very demanding. Although you can still find spots where the cracked plaster has not been fixed after the 1906 Earthquake, almost everything will eventually be restored. This has been left like this on purpose, like a frozen moment in time, to show people how Mrs. Winchester lived there. An ongoing search continues for fine examples of the period furnishings, similar to what Mrs. Winchester herself would have used. Her original furnishings were auctioned off after her death and never have been recovered. The job of overseeing the restoration is a painstaking one. The historical accuracy of every project is researched and approved by the Restoration Board of Directors. Winchester Mystery House receives no funds from any government agency; the continuous restoration and maintenance programs are funded entirely from tour, café, and gift shop revenues. Since 1973, millions of dollars have been invested to ensure that this unique landmark will be preserved as the premier showcase of the Santa Clara Valley’s gracious past. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The Witches Cap 🧙🏼♀️- named for it’s conical resemblance of a witches hat. Many famous mediums claim this room was “important” to Sarah Winchester, although we do not know what it was used for. How did you feel when you experienced the Witches Cap for the first time? winchestermysteryhouse.com
The Dead and the Living Can Never be One—God Has Forbidden it!
Life is richest when you realize that we are all snowflakes. Each of us is absolutely beautiful and unique. And we are here for a very short time. Mrs. Winchester was a pretty little brunette, rather pale, with dark hair, brilliant brown eyes, a resolute mouth and a bright, intelligent expression. She was orderly, trim and feverishly energetic, and seemed to live every moment of her life. The Winchester mansion was like a paradise on Earth; and in this light I still regarded it, until a great change came over the temperature, and the month of April introduced me to red-hot winds, sleepless nights, and the intolerable “brain fever” bird. The next morning, rested and invigorated, we set out on a tour of inspection; and it is almost worthwhile to undergo a certain amount of baking on the sweltering heat of the plains, in order to enjoy those deep first draughts of cool hill air, instead of a stifling, dust-laden atmosphere, and to appreciate the green valleys and blue hills by force of contrast to the far-stretching, eye-smarting, white glaring roads that intersect the burnt-up plains—roads and plains that even the pariah abandon, salamander though he be! No doubt the work of some extremely roughish-looking and grotesque imps and demons, who were inflicting various torments. However, to our delight and surprise, Mrs. Winchester had by no means overdraw the advantages of her new estate. The Grand Queen Anne Victorian mansion was solidly built of wood, brick, and stone, nine storied, and ample in size. It stood on kind of a shelf cut out of the hill side, and was surrounded by a pretty flower garden, full of roses, fuchsias, carnations. There was also a fruit orchard, many exotic trees and plants, and an avenue of palm trees. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
There was a delightful, flagged verandah. The stairs were very steep. At the head of them, the passage and rooms were repeated. There were very small nooks, a switchback staircase, which has seven flights with forty-four steps, rising only about nine feet, since each step was just two inches. Miles of twisting hallways, secret passageways in the walls, a labyrinth of rooms, and dressing-rooms, 13 bathrooms, and plenty of good water. From the fourth-floor balcony, there was a glorious view, across a valley, far away, to the snowy range. As we looked around the drawing-room, here were carpets, curtains, solid, very solid chairs, and Berlin wool worked screens, a card-table, and any quantity of pictures. All the rooms were well, almost handsomely, furnished, in an old-fashioned style. There was no scarcity of wardrobes, looking-glasses, or even armchairs, in the bedrooms, and they pantry was fitted out—a most singular circumstance—with a large supply of handsome glass and china, lamps, old moderators, coffee and tea pots, plated side dishes, and candlesticks, cooking utensils and spoons and forks, wine coasters, and a cake-backet. The chins was Spoke, the plate old family heirlooms, with a crest—a winged horse—on everything, down to the very mustard spoons. There were gold- and silverplated chandeliers, imported Tiffany art glass windows, German silver and bronze inlaid doors, Swiss molded bathtubs, rare precious woods like mahogany and rosewood. Handsome Dresden china vases, nice boxes of firewood in every room, clocks, real hair mattresses—in short, it was a treasure trove. It was well built with some peculiar effects such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, doors that go nowhere and that opened onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
It is estimated that there were some 500 to 600 rooms in the house. However, it is haunted! According to a Boston medium, Mrs. Winchester and her family and her fortune were being haunted by spirits. Supposedly the untimely deaths of her daughter and husband were caused by these spirits, and it was implied that Mrs. Winchester would be the next victim. We soon forget about the dismal prophecy, being too gay and too busy to give her, or it a thought. We had so many engagements—tennis parties and tournaments, picnics, concerts, dances and little dinners. We ourselves gave occasional afternoon teas in the verandah, using the best Spode cups and saucers and the old silver cake-basket, and were warmly complimented on our good fortune in being guests in such a charming house and garden. Mrs. Winchester also had an African grey parrot—a rare bird indeed—and a cute little dog named Zip. Later that night, we had dinner in a handsome and somewhat antique-looking room. A cheerful wood-fire blazed in the capacious hearth; a little at one side an old-fashioned table, with richly-carved legs, was placed—destined, no doubt, to receive the supper, for which preparations were going forward; and ranged with exam regularity stood the tall-backed chairs whose ungracefulness was more than counterbalanced by their comfort. A stranger stopped at the door of the room, and displayed his form and face completely. He wore a dark coloured cloth cloak, which was short and full, not falling quite to the knees; his legs were cased in dark purple silk stockings, and his shoes were adorned with roses of the same colour. The opening of the cloak in front showed the undersuit to consist of some very dark, perhaps sable material, and his hands were enclosed in a pair of heavy leather gloves which ran up considerably above the wrist, in the manner of a gauntlet. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
In one hand he carried his walking-stick and his hat, which he had removed, and the other hung heavily by his side. A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and its fold rested upon plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck. So far all was well; but the face!—all the flesh of the face was coloured with the bluish leaden hue which is sometimes produced by the operation of metallic medicines administered in excessive quantities; the eyes were enormous, and the white appeared both above and below the iris, which gave to them the impression of insanity, which was heightened by their glassy redness; the nose was well enough, but the mouth was writhed considerably to one side, where it opened in order to give egress to two long, discoloured fangs, which projected from the upper jaw, far blow the lower lip; the hue of the lips themselves bore the usual relation to that of the face, and was consequently nearly black. The character of the face was malignant, even satanic, to the last degree; and, indeed, such a combination of horror could hardly be accounted for, except by supposing the corpse of some atrocious malefactor, which had long hung blackening upon the gibbet, to have at length become the habitation of a demon—the frightful sport of satanic possession. It was remarkable that the worshipful stranger suffered as little as possible of his flesh to appear, and that during his visit he did not once remove his gloves. There was something indescribably odd, even horrible about all his motions, something undefinable, something unnatural, unhuman—it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The stranger said hardly anything during his visit, which did not exceed half an hour; and the host himself could scarcely muster courage enough to utter the few necessary salutations and courtesies; and, indeed, such was the nervous terror which the presence of Theophilus Dunn inspired, that very little would have made all his entertainers fly bellowing from the room. During his stay he did not once suffer his eyelids to close, nor even to move in the slightest degree; and further, there was a death-like stillness in his whole person, owing to the total absence of the heaving motion of the chest caused by the process of respiration. These two peculiarities, though when told they may appear trifling, produced a very striking and unpleasant effect when seen and observed. He saw a shadowy and ill-defined form gliding into the apartment. Sharp guests of wind and warning rumblings of thunder that seemed to shake the mountains, blew away the table cloth. As it was whirling into space, Dunn drew his sword, and raising the candle as o throw its light with increased distinctness upon the objects in the room, he entered the chamber into which the figure had glided. No figure was there—nothing but the furniture which had belonged to the room, and yet he could not be deceived as to the fact that something had moved before them into the chamber. A sickening dread came upon him, and the cold perspiration broke out in heavy drops upon his forehead; nor was he more composed when he heard the increased urgency, they agony of entreaty, which Mrs. Winchester implored him not to leave for a moment. “I saw him,” she said. “He is there! I cannot be deceived—I know him. He is by me—he is with me—he is in the room. Then, for God’s sake, as you would save me, do no stir from beside me!” #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
Mrs. Winchester had it prevailed upon her to lie down upon the bed, where she continued to urger everyone to stay by her. She frequently uttered incoherent sentences, repeating again and again, “The dead and the living cannot be one—God has forbidden it!” and then again, “Rest to the wakeful—sleep to the sleep-walkers.” There was a Greek curse inscribed on a lead tablet in the drawing room from the city of Selinus in Sicily. Mrs. Winchester used it to communicate with gods and spirits. A spirit had been summoned and bound to the tablet to make sure the curse was effective. Souls after death do as yet love their body which they left, as those souls do whose bodies want due burial or have left their bodies by violent death, and as yet wander about their carcasses in a troubled and moist spirit, being, as it were, allured by something that hath an affinity with them. Many spirits had been invoked that night, this one had been brought out and seated on a sixteen-sided stand (an improvement on the double pentacle called Solomon’s seat). Mrs. Winchester lay in the inner chamber, the door of which was open; and by the side of the bed, at her urgent desire, stood her niece Marion “Daisey” Marriam Marriott; a candle burned in the bedchamber, and three were lighted in the outer apartment. Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton arrived, and cleared his voice, as if about to commence a prayer; but before he had time to begin, a sudden gust of air blew out the candle which served to illuminate the room in which Mrs. Winchester lay, and she with hurried alarm, explained: “Sir Lancelot, bring in another candle; the darkness is unsafe.” Sir Lancelot stepped from the bedchamber into the other, in order to supply what she desired. “O God! do not go, Sir Lancelot!” shrieked the unhappy Mrs. Winchester; and at the same time she sprang from the bed and darted after him, in order, by her grasp, to detain him. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
However, the warning came too late, for scarcely had he passed the threshold, and hardly had Mrs. Winchester has time to utter the startling explanation, when the door which divided the two rooms closed violently after him, as if swung to by a strong blast of wind. Sir Lancelot and Dunn both rushed to the door, but their united and desperate efforts could not avail so much as to sake it. Shriek after shriek burst from the inner chamber, with all the piercing loudness of despairing terror. Sir Lancelot and Dunn applied every energy and strained every nerve to force open the door; but all in vain. There was no sound of struggling from within, but the screams seemed to increase in loudness, and at the same time they heard the bolts of the latticed window withdrawn, and the window itself grated upon the sill as if thrown open. One last shriek, so long and piercing and agonized as to be scarcely human, swelled from the room, and suddenly there followed a death-like silence. A light step was heard crossing the floor, as if from the bed to the window; and almost at the same instant the door gave way, and yielding to the pressure of the external applicants, they were nearly precipitated into the room. It was empty. The window was open, and Sir Lancelot sprang to the chair and gazed out upon the fruit orchard and the lake below. He saw no form, but he beheld, or thought he beheld, the waters of the broad lake beneath settling ring after ring in heavy circular ripples, as if a moment before disturbed by the immersion of some large and heavy mass. No trace of Mrs. Winchester was ever after discovered, nor was anything certain respecting her mysterious wooer detected or even suspected; no clue whereby to trace the intricacies of the labyrinth, and to arrive at a distinct conclusion was to be found. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
However, an incident occurred, which, though it will not be received by our rational readers as at all approaching to evidence upon the matter, nevertheless produced a strong and a lasting impression upon the mind of Sir Lancelot. Many years after the events at the Winchester Mansion, which we have detailed, Sir Lancelot, then remotely situated, received an intimation of his father’s death, and of his intended burial upon a fixed day in an independent chapel in Bath late in the day upon which the funeral was appointed to take place. The procession had not then arrived. Evening closed in, and still it did not appear. Sir Lancelot strolled down to the church—he found it open; notice of the arrival of the funeral had been given, and the vault in which the body was to be laid had been opened. The official who corresponds to our sexton, on seeing a well-dressed gentleman, whose object was to attend the expected funeral, pacing the aisle of the chapel, hospitably invited him to share with him the comforts of a blazing wood fire, which as was his custom in winter time upon such occasions, he had kindled on the hearth of a chamber which communicated by a flight of steps with the vault below. In this chamber Sir Lancelot and his entertainer seated themselves; and the sexton, after some fruitless attempts to engage his guest in conversation, was obliged to apply himself to his tobacco-pipe and can to solace his solitude. In spite of his grief and cares, the fatigues of a rapid journey of nearly forty hours gradually overcame the mind and body of Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton, and he sank into a deep sleep, from which he was awakened by someone shaking him gently by the shoulder. He first thought that the old sexton had called him, but he was no longer in the room. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
There was a kind of ghostly twilight. The ghostly lights passed and disappeared in the gathering darkness. He roused himself, and as soon as he could clearly see what was around him, he perceived a female form, clothed in a kind of black robe of muslin, part of which was so disposed as to act as a veil, and in her hand she carried a lamp. She was moving rather away from him, and towards the flight of steps which conducted towards the vaults. Sir Lancelot felt a vague alarm at the sight of this figure, and at the same time an irresistible impulse to follow his guidance. He followed it towards the vaults, but when it reached the head of the stairs, he paused; the figure paused also, and turning gently round, displayed, by the light of the lamp it carried, the face and features of the beloved, Sarah Winchesters. There was nothing horrible, or even sad, in the countenance. On the contrary, it wore the same arch smile which used to enchant him long before in his happy days. A feeling of awe and interest, too intense to be resisted, prompted him to follow the specter, if specter it were. She descended the stairs—he followed; and, turning to the left through a narrow passage she led him, to his infinite surprise, through the door to nowhere, into what appeared to be an old-fashioned Victorian apartment. Abundance of costly antique furniture was disposed about the room, and in one corner stood a four-post bed, with heavy black cloth curtains, and by the light of the lamp which she held towards its contents, she disclosed to the horror stricken clergyman, sitting bolt upright in the bed, the livid and demoniac form of Theophilus Dunn. Sir Lancelottt had hardly seen him when he fell senseless upon the floor, where he lay until discovered, on the next morning, by persons employed in closing the passages into the vaults. He was laying in a cell of considerable size, which had not been disturbed for a long time, and had fallen beside a large coffin which was supported upon small stone pillars, a security against the attacks of vermin. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
To his dying day Sir Lancelot was satisfied of the reality of the vision which he had witnessed, and he has left behind him curious evidence of the impression which it wrought upon his fancy, in a painting executed shortly after the event we have narrated, and which is valuable as exhibiting not only the peculiarities which have made the Winchester Mansion sought after, but even more so as presenting occurrences in Mrs. Winchester’s interviews and journals that defy explanation. However, Mrs. Winchester’s mysterious fate must ever remain a matter of speculation. Yes; sometimes at night the most terrible weeping and sobbing can be heard coming from the “Daisy bedroom,” and a phantom horse can be heard plunging in the carriage house, and the wild, unearthly and utterly appalling shriek. The scene of horrible dinner parities has even been seen in the dining room. A party of ghouls meets there a few times of year, after midnight, and are assembled with the spoils of the graves they have violated, and are feasting on the flesh of long-buried corpses. One of the servants even saw his own wife, who, by the way, never touched supper at home, playing no inconsiderable part in the hideous banquet. Hundreds of wild stories have appeared about this mysterious mansion. It seems odd that none of her relatives or former employees ever came forward to contradict these stories, despite the fact that many of them lived for forty years after the estate was opened for tours. For some reason, did they feel threatened by talking—or did they continue to guard Mrs. Winchesters privacy? At the Winchester Mystery House, we may never be able to separate fact from legend—so here are some stories that have been told since the late 1800s and early 1900s. We leave it to guests and readers to decide for themselves why Mrs. Winchester really built the house the way she did, or what is it really? A portal or just a museum? #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Winchester Mystery House is an extravagant maze of Victorian craftmanship—marvelous, baffling, and eerily eccentric, to say the least. Tour guides must warn people not to stray from the group or they could be lost for hours. Countless questions come to mind as you wander through the mansion—such as, what was Mrs. Winchester thinking when she had a staircase built the descends seven steps and then rises eleven? By the way, Harry Houdini, an occultist, was attracted to the Winchester and tried to escape from the mansiin blindfolded; he also died Halloween 1926.
Winchester Mystery House
What it feels like walking through a microscopic spiderweb….🕷🕸
All Hallows’ Eve, Lost in the House tour tickets are still available for tonight. Hurry and purchase before they sell out!
🎟link: http://ow.ly/k5wM50GqWTb
In a Nightmare of Supernatural Terror—Afraid to Move Hand or Foot II!
Immediately after I sat down…and did see a black thing jump into the window. And it came and stood just before my face. The body of it looked like a monkey, only the feet were like a cock’s feet with claws, and the face somewhat more like a man’s than a monkey’s. And I being greatly affrighted, not being able to speak or help myself by reason of fear, I suppose, so the thing spoke to me and said, “I am a messenger sent to you. For I understand you are troubled in mind, and if you will be ruled by me you shall want for nothing in this World.” I would have cried out—would have shrieked, if every never had not been paralyzed. I could not doubt the evidence of my sense—if I could have done so the cold, unearthy horror which sicked my very soul would have borne its undeniable testimony that I had behold the impersonation of the hidden curse that rested on this dwelling. I stood there rigid and immovable, as if that blighting Medusa-glance had indeed changed me into stone. It may have been but a very few minutes—it seemed to me a cycle of painful ages, when the light of a brightly burning lamp shone before me, and I heard the cheerful sounds of the new nurse’s voice in my ears: “Come along, cook. Bless your heart, my dear! you need not be nervous; there is no occasion. Mrs. Winchester, ma’am, are you not well, ma’am? “No,” I said faintly, staggering to the woman’s outstretched hands. “Not down there—upstairs to the children.” She turned as I bade her, and supported me up the stairs and into the nursery, the cook following close at my skirts, muttering fervent prayers and chants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The sight of the peacefully sleeping little ones did far more to restore me than all the essences and chafing and unlacing which the two women busily administered. I had got suddenly ill when coming upstairs was the explanation I gave, which the cook, plainly perceived, most thoroughly doubted, at least without the cause she suspected being assigned, which, even in the midst of my terror-stricken condition, I refrained from giving, I did not speak to the nurse either of what had happened, but I felt that she knew as well as if she had been by my ide all the time. However, when William returned I told him. Distressed and alarmed on my account though he was, yet he did not, as before, refuse credence to my story. “We must leave the house, William. I should die here very soon,” I said. “Yes, Sarah; of course we must leave if you have anything to distress or terrify you in his manner, though it does seem absurd to be driven out of one’s house and home by a thing of this kind. Someone’s practical joke, or a trick prompted by malice against the owner of the property in order to lessen its value. I have heard of such things often.” “William, it is nothing of the kind,” I said earnestly; “you know it is not.” “No, I do not,” said William shortly and grimly, as he opened his case of revolvers, “and I wish I did.” The night passed away quietly, to our ears at least; but next morning when William had concluded the usual morning prayers, instead of the usual move of the servants, they remained clustered at the door, Jansen with an exceedingly elongated visage standing slightly in advance of the group as a spokesman. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
“Please, sir and ma’am, we cannot tell you what to do.” “Why, go and do your work,” retorted William, with a nervous tug at his moustache and an uneasy glance at me. Jansen shook his head slowly. “It cannot be done, sir—cannot be done, ma’am. Why, no living Christian, not to speak of humble, but respectable servants,” said Jansen with a flourish, quite unconscious of the nice distinction he had made, “could stand it any longer.” “What is the matter, pray?” said my husband. “Ghosts, sir—spirits—unclean spirits,” said Charles, in an awestruck whisper which was re-echoed in the cook’s “Lor” “a” mercy!” as she dodged back from the doorway with the housemaid holding fast to one of her ample sleeves, and the lady’s maid holding fast to the other. The New nurse, quietly dandling the baby in her arms, was alone unmoved. “What stories have you been listening to now?” said their master, what a slight laugh and a frown. “No stories, sir; but what we have seen with our eyes and understanded with our ears, and—and—comprehended with our hearts,” said Jansen, with an unsuccessful attempt at quoting Scripture. “What was it as walked the floors last night between one and two, sir? What was it as talked and shrieked and run and raced? What was it as frightened the mistress on the stairs last evening?” And the whole posse of them turned to me, triumphantly awaiting my testimony. I was feeling very ill, and looking so, I daresay, having struggled downstairs in order to prevent the servants having any additional confirmation of their surmises. “That is no affair of yours,” said William gravely; “your mistress is in delicate health, and was feeling unwell all day.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
“Will you allow me to speak, please, sir?” said the nurse, and, as her maser nodded assent, she turned to the frightened group with a pleasant smile. “You have no cause to be afraid, cook, or Mr. Jensen, or any of you,” said she, addressing the most important functionary first—“not in the least. I am only a servant like the rest, and here a shorter time than any one; but I think you are very foolish to unsettle yourself in a good situation and frighten yourselves. You need not think they will harm you. Fear God and do your duty, and you need not mind wandering, poor, lonely souls—-” “Lor” “a” mercy! ‘ow you talk, Mrs. Lewis!” said the coo indignantly. “I have seen them more times than one—many and many a time, Mrs. Cook; and they never harmed a hair of my head,” said the nurse, “nor they will ever harm your.” “Well, then,” said the cook, packing into the hall, followed by her satellites, “not to be made Cleopatra, nor the Virgin Mary neither, would I stay to be frighted out of my seven senses, and made into a lunatic creature like poor Linda was!” “Please to make better omelettes for luncheon, cook, than you did yesterday,” said William calmly, though he looked pale and angry enough, “and leave me to deal with the ghost—I will settle accounts with them!” The nurse turned quickly and looked earnestly at him: “I would not say that, sir—God forbid,” said she in an undertone, and the next moment was singing softly and blithely as she carried the children away to their morning bath. William and I looked at each other in silence. “I wish we have never come into this house, dear,” I said. “I wish from my heart that we never had, Sarah,” he responded; “but we must manage to stay the season out, at all events. It would be too absurd to run away like frightened hares, not to speak of the expense and trouble we have gone through expanding the mansion to four floors with a nine-story tower.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“We can may get it taken off our hands with a substantial loss, perhaps,” I suggested. “See the house-agent, William.” “I have seen him, but we have one of the largest, and most expansive estates in the country. No one can afford it,” he replied. “He deeply regretted that we should have any occasion to find fault, especially after our huge investment in expanding the estate, and it is not even completed yet. The agent also said he was happy to do anything in the way of clearing up this little mystery, et cetera. Of course he was laughing at me in his sleeve.” Again, as after our previous alarms, says passed on and lengthened into weeks in undisturbed quietude. William had a good many business matters to arrange; the children looked as rosy and healthy as in their country home, from their constant walking and playing in the airy, pleasant parks. My own health was not every good; and Dr. Winchester, William’s cousin, was kindest and wisest of grave, gentlemanly doctors; so, all thing considered, we stay at the Winchester mansion we have build into a 600 room Queen Anne Victorian mansion from an 18-room farmhouse. Only on my husband’s account, I wished for any change. Something seemed to affect his health strangely, although he never complained of anything beyond the usual lassitude and want of a tone which a gay Santa Clara season might be expected to bequeath him. He was sleepless, frequently depressed, nervous, and irritable; and still he vehemently declared he was quite well, and seemed almost annoyed when I urged him to put his business aside for the present and leave town. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
He had been induced to enter into a large “Highly Finished Arms” promotion and sales of deluxe Winchesters, and had, besides, some heavy money matters to arrange, connected with his sister’s marriage settlements, which he expected would be required about Christmas. So, all things considered, he had some cause for feeling as haggard as he did. “It will be as well for William to leave Santa Clara, Mrs. Winchester, as soon as he can, said his cousin Dr. Winchester at the close of one of his pleasant “run-in” visits. “His nerves are shaky. We men get nervous nearly as often as the ladies, though we do not confess to the fact quite so openly. A little unstrung, you know—nothing more. A few weeks in sea or mountain air will quite brace him up again.” And as I dressed for dinner that evening, I determined that if wifely entreaties, and arguments, and authority, should not fail for the first time in our wedded life, William should have the sea or mountain air without another week’s delay; and, of course I determined, likewise, to back up entreaties, arguments, and authority with the prettiest dress I could put on. I cannot tell why wives, and young wives too, will neglect their personal appearance when “only one’s husband” is present. It is unpolitic, unbecoming, and unloving; and men and husbands do not like neglect—direct or implied, be sure of that, ladies—young, middle-aged, or old. “Your brown silk, ma’am?—it is rather cold this evening for that cream-coloured grenadine,” said Agnus, rustling at my wardrobe. “No, Agnus, I will not have that brown, I am tired of it,” I replied. If so happened that it was this dress which I had worn on the three occasions when I had been terrified by the strange occurrences in this house; and I had acquired a superstition aversion for this particular robe. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
So Agnus arrayed me in a particularly charming demi-toilette of pale yellow silk grenadine and white lace; and I felt myself to be a most amiable and affectionate little wife, as I went downstairs to await William’s return for dinner. I never sat in my pretty dressing-room alone. Truth to tell, I disliked the apartment secretly and intensely, and only for fear of troubling and displeasing George I would have shut it up from the first evening I spent in it. He was late for dinner, and I was quite shocked to see how thin and ill he looked by the gas-light; and, as soon as it was concluded, and that by the assistance of excellent coffee and a vast amount of petting, I had coaxed him into his usual smiles and good-humour, I began my petition—that he would leave town for his own sake. He listened to me in silence, and then said, “Very well, Sarah, we will go as soon as we can board up the east wing; I suppose you may come back here. “Oh! yes, I think so,” I replied, “maybe someone attracted these bad spirits and we need to let things cool off again. We shall spend Winter in New Haven, in our dear old house, William.” “Very well,” he said wearily, “though you must know, Sarah, I am not going on account of this one thing. I would hardly quit my house, indeed, because of ghostly or bodily sights or sounds.” He started up from the couch on which he was lying, flushed and excited as he always was when the subject was mentioned, his eyes gleaming as brightly as the flashing scabbard which hung on the wall before him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“Certainly not, dearest,” I said soothingly. “I wish I could solve the mystery,” he pursued, more excitedly; “I would make somebody suffer for it! One’s peace destroyed, and people terrified, and servants driven away, as if one was living in the dark ages, with some cursed necromancer next door!” “Oh! well, it is some time ago now, and the servants have got over their fright. Pray, do not distress yourself about it, dear William.” “Ah, well—you do not—never mind,” he muttered; “but I mean to have tangible evidence before ever I leave this house—I have sworn it!” He was not easily roused, and I felt both surprise and alar to see him so now, and for so inadequate a cause. I had almost fancied he had forgotten the matter, as we, by tacit consent, never alluded to it. “Do not you allow yourself to be alarmed, Sarah, that is all I care about,” he went on, pacing the floor. “I have been half mad with anxiety on your account, for fear those idiotic servants should manage to startle you to death some dark evening-cowards, every one of them; but I mean to have someone to stay here and sit up—-” He paused suddenly, and listened, then stepped noiselessly to the door, and opening it, listened again intently. “William,” I whispered. He took no heed of me; but rapidly unlocking a cabinet drawer, he drew out a thirty-shooter, loaded and capped, and with his finger on the trigger stole softly to the door and into the hall, whither I followed him. Everything was silent, and the hall and stairs lamps were burning clear and high. I could hear the throbbing of my own heart as I stood there watching. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Suddenly we both heard heavy rapid footsteps, seemingly overhead; and then confused noises, as of struggling, and quarrelling, and sobbing, mingled in a swelling clamour which sounded now near, deafeningly near, and then far, far away; now overhead, now beside us, now beneath, undistinguishable, indescribable, and unearthly. Then the rushing footsteps came nearer and nearer. And, clenching his teeth, while his face grew rigid and white in desperate resolve, William sprang up the staircase with a bound like a tiger. It has all passed in less than half the time I have taken to relate it, and while I yet stood breathless and with straining eyes, William had nearly reached the last step when I saw him stagger backwards, the thirty-shooter raised in his hand. There was a struggle, a rushing, swooping sound, two shots fired in rapid succession, a floating cloud of white smoke, through which I saw the streaming yellow hair and steel-blue eyes flash downward, and then a shriek rang out—the dreadful cry of a man in mortal terror—a crashing fall, beneath which the house trembled to its foundations, and I saw my husband’s body stretched before the conservatory door, whither he had toppled backwards—whether dead or dying I knew not. I remember dimly hearing my own voice in agonized screams, and the terror-stricken servants hurrying from the kitchens below. I remember the kind of face of my new nurse as she bravely rushed down and dispatched someone for the doctor, and made others help her to carry the senseless figure, with blood slowly dripping from the parted lips and staining the snowy linen shirt-front in great gouts and splashes, up to the chamber, where they laid him on his bed, and I, a wretched frenzied woman, knelt beside him with the sole, ceaseless prayer that brain or lips could form—“God help me!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
I remember the physician’s arrival, and the grave face and low clear voice of Dr. Winchester, as he made his enquiries; and then another physician summoned, and the low frightened voices, and peering frightened faces, and the lighted candles guttering away in currents of air form opening and shutting doors, and the long hours of night, and the cold grey dawning, the heart-rendering suspense, and speechless, tearless, wordless agony, and the sun rose, gloriously cloudless, smiling in radiance, as if there was not the shadow of death over the weary World beneath his rays, and I hear the verdict—“there was scarcely a hope.” However, God was merciful to me and to him, and my darling did not die. With a fevered brain and a shattered limb he lay there for weeks—lay there with the dark portals half opened to receive him; lay there, when I could no longer watch beside him, but lay prostrate and suffering in another apartment, tended by kind relatives and friends; but at length, when the mellow sunshine, and the crisp clear air of the soft shadowy October days stole into the sick room. William was able to be dressed and sit up for an hour or two amongst the pillows of his easy-chair by the window. And there he was, longing to be gone away from London. “Sarah, darling, weak or strong I must go,” he said in his trembling uncertain voice, and with a restless longing in his faded eyes, “I shall never get better in this house.” And so a few days afterwards, accompanied by the doctor and two nurses, we went down in a pleasant swift railroad journey to our dear, beautiful, peaceful home in New Haven. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
William never spoke of that night of horror but once, when Dr. Winchester told of the story connected with the original 18-room farmhouse we purchased, which morphed into a labyrinth of endless room, twisting and winding tunnels, and catacombs. Thirty years before we bought the farmhouse, the man who was both proprietor and tenant of the estate died, leaving his two daughters all he possessed. He had been a bad man, led a bad wild life, and died in a fit brough on by drunkenness; and these two daughters, grown to womanhood, inherited with his ill-gotten fold his evil nature. They were only half-sisters, and were believed to have been illegitimate also. The elder, a tall, masculine, strongly built woman, with masses of coarse fair hair, and bright, glitter blue eyes; and the younger, a plump, dark-haired rather pretty girl, but as treacherous, vain, and bold, as her elder sister was fierce, passionate, and cruel. They lived in this house, with only their servants, for several years after their father’s death, a life of quarrelling and bickering, jealousy, witchcraft, and heart-burnings, on various accounts. The elder strobe to tyrannize over the younger, who repaid it by deceit and crafty selfishness and black magic. At length a lover came, who the elder sister favoured; whom she loved as fiercely and rashly as such wild untamed natures do; and by fiercely and rashly as such wild untamed natures do; and by falsehood and deep-laid treachery the younger sister cast a love spell on the man and won his fickle fancy from the great, harsh-featured, haughty, passionate elder one. The elder woman soon perceived it, and there were dreadful scenes between the two sisters, when the younger taunted the elder, and the elder cursed the younger. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, as fate would have it, one night and at length—there had been a fiercer encounter of words than usual, and the dark-haired girl maddened her sister by insults, and the sudden information that she intended leaving the house in the morning, to stay with a relative until her marriage, which was to take place in one week from that time—the wronged woman, demon-possessed from that moment, waited in her dressing-room, until her sister entered, and then she sprang on her and screaming and struggling, they both wrested until they reached the staircase, where the younger sister, escaping for an instant, rushed wildly down, followed by her murderess, who overpowered her in spite of her frantic struggles, and with her strong, cruel, bony hands deliberately strangled her, until she lay a disfigured palpitating corpse at her feet. She had several scars that seemed as if they had been long there, and they were done by witchcraft. The officers of justice arrested the murderess a few hours afterwards. The jailers put irons on her legs (having received such a command). [It was the curious theory that chaining the prisoner would prevent her specter from afflicting anyone.] The weight of them was about eight pounds. These irons and her other afflictions soon brought her into convulsion fits so they thought she would die that night. She died by poison self-administered on the second day of her imprisonment. What is now known as the Winchester Mansion had been shut up and silent for many a year afterwards, and when, at length, and when, at length, an enterprising landlord put it in habitable order, and found tenants for it again, he only found them to lose them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Year after year passes away, its evil fame darkening with its massive masonry, for none could be found to sanctify with the sacred name and pleasures of home that dwelling blighted by an abiding curse. “I never told you, Sarah,” William said, “although I told my cousin Dr. Winchester, that from the first evening I led a haunted life in that beautiful house, and the more I struggled to disbelieve the evidence of my senses, and to keep the knowledge from you, the more unbearable it became, until I felt myself going mad. I knew I was haunted, but will that last night I had never witnessed what I dreaded day and night to see. And then, Sarah, when I fired, and I saw the devilish murderess face, with its demon eyes blazing on me, and the tall unearthly figure hurrying down to meet me, dragging the other struggling, writhing figure, with her long sinewy fingers seemingly pressed around the convulsed face, then I knew it was all over with me. If there had been a flaming furnace beside me I think I should have leaped into it to escape that awful sight.” That was over a century ago. Sarah eventually returned to the Winchester all along and made several changes to it over 38 years. It is now a 4 story, 160-room mansion, with over 25,500 square feet, sitting on four acres. It was once up to 600 rooms, likely 95,625 square with as many as 737 acres. The strange thing about witchcraft and legends is many of them are based in truth, and sometimes there are unexplainable continuity errors. Take for example An hysterical fit, from J.M. Charcot, Lectures on the Disease of the Nervous System (London, 1877). Look at the extruded tongue, reported during the seventeenth century in witchcraft cases at Gordon, Boston, Salem, and elsewhere. Notice also the legs crossed in spasm; at one time Mary Warren’s legs could not be uncrossed without breaking them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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In a Nightmare of Supernatural Terror–Afraid to Move Hand or Foot!
The warning came too late to change that course of event. There has been time when many admitted some doubt of the validity of spectral evidence. This story I will tell to you now, as I have promised to do so, and yet I can hardly make you believe in the reluctance with which I even allow my thoughts go back to the times which I spent in my house—my first town residence after I was married. I loved so much my lovely mansion, I suppose. The wide emerald green lawns and quiet, glassy ponds and streams, bordered by luscious, blooming rhododendrons; of silent, mossy avenues, glorious with the flickering light that stole through pale green beech leaves; of rose gardens with grassy paths, jewel-sprinkled with shell-like petals of white, crimson, pink, and cream-like hues; of old-fashioned rooms with narrow, mullioned windows embowered in scarlet japonica and fragrant, starry jessamine. I supposed I possessed a deep love of them all. This was the first house we were sown in the Santa Clara, California. It was certainly a very fine house, both as o exterior and interior appearances. Large, massively built, agreeably darkened in woodwork and masonry by Time’s shading brush, in excellent repair, and the locality all that could be desire. Wide, lofty apartments, staircases, and landings; a handsome dining-room panelled in velvety dark-green “flock” and gold; a handsome drawing-room panelled in pale cream-colour and gold; airy bed-chambers and dressing-rooms—one, in particular, attached to what seemed the principal bedroom, with a vast mirror occupying the whole side of the apartment which was opposite to the door leading into the bed-chamber. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
“What a nice dressing-room! This house is perfect and expansion will be a joy.” I exclaimed, having a weakness, I confess, for large, handsome mirrors in the rooms I inhabit—William says impertinent things about my “wishing to see as much of myself as I can.” I know I am not all, in fact, rather what he should call petite, if he wished to be polite—but that is not my reason for liking a large mirror. As I spoke the words I looked about mechanically for the house—agent’s clerk who had been sent with us—a nervous-looking little man, with a pasty complexion, and orange-colored hair meekly plastered down at each side of his face. He had been untiringly trotting up and down stairs, unlocking doors, answering questions, and keeping up a harmless soliloquy of chatter about the beauties and excellencies of the “mansiond,” as he called it, ever since he entered its doors, but now he was nowhere to be seen. “What door have you open?” I said, speaking aloud to him, for suddenly a cold blast of air swept up the wide staircase and into the dressing-room door, but not entering. His face looked wither than before, and in his accents there was an almost terrified earnestness that puzzled me. The shadows of the afternoon seemed to deepen. The aspect of the suites of rooms and long silent corridors, with their doors ajar, as if unseen inhabitants were stealthily crouching behind them, drearily impressed me with a sense of dull desolation; and it was with a sudden sensation of childish fear and loneliness that I rushed after my husband, and took his arm as he hastily descended the stairs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
“A spacious, handsome staircase, William” I remarked. “Yes; and a spacious, handsome price, you may be sure,” William responded. However, in this particular, he was exceedingly, and I agreeably, astonished. To our surprise, the house was rather affordable. William figured there must be a screw loose somewhere. He mentioned his opinion to the clerk in a more business-like expression, to the effect that the price seemed low, and that he trusted there was no—peculiar—eh? “Drains, gas, water, all right, sir—right as—a—a trivet, sir. However, the 18-room farmhouse is incomplete,” sad the clerk, looking over his shoulder oddly, as he spoke. “But chimneys, ventilators, roof, tiles—everything in the perfect repair and order, sir!” However, wonderful or not, the house seemed all that we could desire; the lowness of the price made it a decided bargain. I planned to expand the house, and make it even more lofty, and handsome; and in three weeks, huge furniture vanes, and a clever upholstered, had carpeted, curtained, and furnished our town mansion from garret to basement, and William and I, our two babies, a nurse, two maids, a cook, and a butler, were installed in what would become the Winchester Mansion. Dear William had been very generous—nay, almost extravagant—in his provisions for the comfort and pleasure of his wife and children; and my dressing-room and their nursery were fitted up so luxuriously and tastefully, that my feeling at the first inspection of them was that of self-gratulation on being such a fortunate woman, in having such a home, such babies, and such a husband. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
I arrayed myself for dinner that evening quite gleefully; standing before my splendid mirror amid the bule drapery, cushions, and couches of my charming dressing-room. I put on William’s favourite dress—a bronze-brown lustrous silk, with sparkling gold ornaments: he invariably kissed me when he saw it on, stroked my brown curls and face, and called me “Mrs. Winchester”—and was still standing before the glass smiling at myself, like the happy, foolish little woman I was, when I perceived to my discomfiture that William was standing in the doorway watching my doings, and grinning very visibly under his moustache. “Do not mind me, my dear, I beg! do not me the least. However, when you have done admiring Mrs. Winchester, perhaps you will be kind enough to let me know”—then, suddenly changing his tone, he exclaimed, “Have you the window open, Sarah, this chilly evening?” “No William,” I replied, glancing at it to make sure of the fact. “Change in the weather, then,” my husband said. “Come, Sarah, there is no use in making yourself any prettier!” He had just uttered the last words when I saw him spring aside suddenly, and look around. “What is the matter?” I said—“William, dear, what is the matter?” For his face had grown quite white, and with his back against the wall, he was staring about him wildly. “I do not know—Sarah—something”—he explained in a low tone; then recovering himself, with a laugh, he cried—“I struck myself against the door, I suppose! I declare one would think I was composed of old china, or wax, or sugar candy, I hurt and stunned me so! Come, dearest.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
He had not struck himself, for I had been watching him going out on the lobby, and I felt an uneasy conviction that he knew he had not done so, and only spoke as he did in order to deceive or satisfy me. why? Why did I think so? As I live I cannot tell why I thought so then—I know now. We had the “babies”—as William always called them—in the dessert, after the time-honoured fashion of making olives as well as olive branches of them; and then, when the lite ones had gone to bed, we sat side by side in he summer twilight, I lazily fanning myself, William bending over me the lover-husband he was. Then came the lamps, and I played for him, and we sang duet and spent as happy an evening in our new home as a married pair could wish to spend. I cannot tell why I felt so disinclined to go upstairs that night, tired as I was, too—for we had had a long journey up from the country. However as eleven struck, I routed William out of the easy chair where he had been indulging in a preliminary doze, and, ringing for my maid went up to my dressing-room. I like gas in my dressing-room, though not in my bedroom, and the globes at either side the great mirror were a blaze of light. As I entered I caught the reflection of a woman’s figure in the depths of the glass, no my maid’s. The glimpse I had was of a tall woman, strongly built, and broad-shouldered, a quantity of light hair hanging in a disordered manner on her neck, and the profile of a white, hard, masculine face, with the keen glittering eye turned watchfully towards the door. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
This may seem an elaborately detailed description for the momentary glance I obtained, but it is well known with what lightning rapidity the organs of vision will, in moments of terror and amazement, convey impressions to the startled brain, impression accurate and indelible. I had taken but one step on entering, the next step the figure had vanished, and the mirror reflected by my own terrified face, and the homely, cheerful one of my maid Agnus, as she stooped over the dressing-table opening a jewel case. I dropped down on the nearest chair, and, in answer to the girl’s alarmed questions, replied that I did not feel very well. I was sick and shuddering from head to foot. Suddenly it flashed across me that it was from a similar cause I had seen my husband’s face grow ghastly, and that strange, terrified look come into his eyes,–he, who had been a soldier and unflinchingly had fought amidst the dead and dying on bloody Indian battlefields, almost boy as he was then! What was it? What had he seen? Nonsense! was I going to believe I had seen a ghost? Nonsense, a thousand times over! I heard my husband’s cheery voice as he ascended the stairs, and, quite angry with myself for giving way to such folly, I threw on my dressing gown, and, snatching up the brush from Agnus, I pulled my hair down and brushed it quite savagely, until my head ached well—for punishment. If the bright morning light disperses sweet illusions formed overnight, as people say it does, it disperses gloomy ones as well. With the warmth and brightness of the unclouded summer’s sun streaming in through softly coloured blinds, brining out the velvety green of soft new carpets and lounges, the rainbow tints of glittering chandeliers, vases, and ornaments, the gilding on bright fresh wallpaper and the spotless folds of snowy window drapery, it was impossible for an instant to connect anything dark or dismal with the Winchester House. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Why, my dressing-room even where I had been so silly last evening, was like a woodland bower, with its deep purple-blue hangings and rose painted china flower-vases filled with bouquets from our country home. Clustering fragrant honeysuckle half-opened moss roses, drooping emerald-green fern, and masses of delicious jessamine dropping its over-blown blossoms on the white toilet cover, lace-flounced and tied with blue ribbons, as Agnus delighted to have it. “I think this such a charming room and such a charming house altogether, William!” I said; “and you have been such a dear, thoughtful old darling!” For I had perceived that the dear fellow had had his own half-length portrait hung over my writing-table. Quite a pleasant surprise for me, for I thought he intended it to be hung in the dining-room, and I delighted in having the dear pleasant brown eyes looking for a me when I was busy writing or sewing. “I am so glad you like everything, Sarah,” said he. “Why, William, do you not?” However, William had walked off whistling, and presently I heard uproarious baby-laughter, and baby-chatter, and thumping, trotting of small fat feet, as William put the tiny nursery into dire confusion by his morning game of romps with his son and heir, and red-cheeked baby-daughter. And it did seem as if I must have been dreaming or delirious, when this day and many a succeeding one passed away swiftly and pleasantly, without the slightest recurring event to remind me of my strange alarm on the night of our arrival. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
We had been in the Winchester House about a fortnight, when one morning I received a visit from Mrs. Ellen Kenna. A very pretty, lady-like person she was, and as we had some common acquaintances we chattered away very freely and pleasantly for half-an-hour or so. As she rose to go she asked suddenly if we like the house. I replied in the affirmative rather warmly. She was opposite the light, and I saw an involuntary elevation of her eye-brows and compression of her lips that puzzled me. I fancied it was because I had spoken so enthusiastically. Yet her own manner was anything but languidly fashionable, being very cordial and decided. “Yes; it is a very nice house, roomy and well-built,” she said, after a moment’s pause; “I am so glad you like it—I live down the road in Oakland.” We took the carriage to have dinner at Bertha Hass’s mansion that for the following evening, and when we returned about three days later, in spite of a yawning remonstrate from William, I tipped off softly to have a peep at my darlings, before I went to bed. The nursey was a large, pleasant room at the end of the long corridor leading from our own apartments, and, gently turning the handle and gathering my rustling silk dress around me, I opened the door and went in. There was a night-lamp burning clearly, shining softly on the tiny cribs with the sweet flushed infant faces, the long golden-brown lashes lying in dimpled apple-bloom cheeks, the waxen hands and little rounded arms thrown above the tossed golden curls, and the Heavenly calm of the little sleeping forms and pure, peaceful breathing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
I wondered would any mother, no matter how cold and careless, have neglected doing what I did, as I bent over my treasures, and prayed God that His angels might keep watch over each cherub head on its little, soft, white pillow? I had looed at and kissed them, and turned to go, when I glanced toward the nurse’s bed. “Are you not well, Linda? What is the matter?” I said in an anxious whisper. She was a very respectable and trustworthy servant, as well as being, a kind, gentle creature with the little ones, and consequently highly valued by me, but her health was never very good, and she was subject to severe attacks of nervous headache and sleeplessness. She was sitting up in bed, her hands grasping the bedclothes, her face and lips ashy white, and her as big as saucers and staring wildly, as if they would start from their sockets. “Linda! Good Heavens! what is the matter?” I gasped. “Ma’am! Oh, ma’am—oh, mistress, I am dying!” We summoned a doctor and administered restoratives, and chafed the half-senseless girl’s damp, cold hands. I could imagine no cause for her sudden illness, and the others servants were very voluble in exclamations and laments. However, when the physician—a pale, kindly, grave-looking man arrived—after a moment’s examination, he demanded if she had been frightened? I replied in the negative, and was proceeding to describe to him the state in which I had found her, when I heard the housemaid and Agnus whispering energetically together. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The doctor was paying tribute to the dramatic affliction of the girl, when he said, “This strikes hard upon me, that you are at this very present charged with unfamiliar spirits. This is your bodily person they speak to. They say now they see these unfamiliar sprits some to your bodily person. Now what do you say to that?” Agnus said that she saw a specter leaving Linda’s body, as she was going into hideous convulsions. The fit was far too violent to be acting. This was terribly “real” and convincing. “What is it? Speak out at once my god girl!” said the doctor sternly to the housemaid; “you know something of this.” Both servants looked apprehensively at me and at William. “Speak up at once, Bethany; the girl’s life may depend on it! Tell the truth, my girl, and do not be afraid,” said her master kindly, but firmly. “I do not know nothing, sir—indeed, no ma’am, said Angus confusedly; “but—I think, ma’am—she seen the ghost, sir!” “That what!” cried William angrily. “She have, sir!” persisted Agnus eagerly, now that her confession was made. “We are all afraid, sir; but she has been worser nor the rest of us. And she says to me only this morning, ‘Agnus,’ she says, ‘if I see it, I will die!’” “What ghost, you fool?” cried William more angrily. “A pretty set you are!—great, grown men and women, afraid of some bogie story you have heard when you were gossiping with the servants on the balcony, I suppose!” “No, indeed, sir,” said Agnus; “I was not gossippin’, sir; but the parlour-maid over the way, sir Mrs. Kenna’s parlour-maid, ma’am—she told me that there was the Devil–” #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
“I thought so!” interrupted William. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves not to have an ounce of brains among you.” “But, sir! Agnus burst out again, unheeding her master’s rather uncomplimentary phrenological verdict, “we did not mind, sir, though we was a bit frightened, until we see it, sir! The butler see it, and he ran, and cook ran.” “And you ran after them?” said William, with an indignant laugh. “I did, sir, for I saw it too—a big woman with fair hair all over her shoulders,” said Agnus, in an awestruck whisper to Harriet, who nodded her head. The doctor looked up, gravely and without a smile. The servants clustered together near the door, and muttered in undertones. William looked at me with a forced smile, which died away in an instant: “You are not so foolish as to credit any of this nonsense, Sarah?” he said. The servants all turned eagerly to hear their mistress’s opinion. I am afraid it was written in my pallid face. Was it true? Was it what I had seen? Could there be any reality in this, that here, in our pleasant, happy home, beneath the roof with out helpless little one, was a dreadful, unblessed presence—a shadowy horror; that that thing with the watchful, cruel eyes had not been a mere vision of imagination, the mere offspring of an active brain, and the unstrung nerves of an overtired frame? Is there conclusive proof that the person represented had been trafficking with the Devil? “Oh! they imagined something from the stories they heard, I dare say,” I faltered. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The butler shook his head solemnly: “I could swear to it, ma’am.” “And so could I ma’am!” chorused the cook and housemaid. “Hush!” said the doctor, as the nurse, roused, at length, from her stupor, lay quietly, with closed eyes, from which the tears streamed down her face. “Some one must sit up with her now,” said the doctor, looking around. “I will, sir, if my mistress allows me, said Bethany. Certainly, Bethany,” she said at once. He communicated his instructions to her and took his leave, promising to call in the morning. “Did you ever hear anything like this folly, doctor,” said William, as he shook hands with him at the head of the stairs. “Oh! yes, sir, I often hear such stories,” said the doctor quietly, as he bade us both goodnight.” William! what has frightened the girl? What has she seen?” I whispered, clasping my husband’s arm. “Sarah, go to bed, and do not be a goose,” was William’s reply. “William—I saw that thing—that woman, in my dressing-room,” I said, trembling, “and oh! think if the children were to see I and be frightened like poor Mary!” “Well, Sarah,” said my husband sharply, “if you are going to listen to ignorant servants’ superstitions and run out of your house, just as we are comfortably settled in it, on account of a foolish sickly woman fainting from hearing a ghost story—I say—it is a pity you ever came into it.” He spoke very decidedly and sternly, and yet I felt in my inmost heart that the uttered what he wished me to believe, not what he believed himself. I said no more, but went to my bedroom—not into the dreaded dressing-room—and lay awake listening and fevered with nervous anxiety until the next morning dawned. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The nurse was better and able to speak the next day, though extremely weak and unnerved yet. The doctor forbade much questioning, and all that could be got from her at intervals was that something had come up the staircase and ran through the corridor, that she heard struggling and scuffling outside, and then the nursey door opened and she saw a woman’s face peering in, the eyes gleaming wickedly at her, and it had the yellow hair that “belong to the ghost.” “The woman has had a bad fit of nightmare—that is all, Sarah,” said William, rattling his paper unconcernedly, when I repeated to him the story I had just heard from poor Linda’s trembling lips. It might be so; but why were they all agreed as to what they had seen? Why did they all speak of the tangled fair hair, and the wicked gleaming eyes? Was our house haunted? Was this the mysterious cause of the exceedingly moderate price of the house and land and the house-agent’s profuse civility? The nurse did not recover strength, and being worse than useless in her present weak, hysterical condition, I sent her down to her country home for change of air, and hired another temporarily in her place. The newcomer was a stout, small, cheerful woman of about forty. I liked her face the moment I saw her; for, besides its smiling, honest expression, there was a good deal of decided character in the large firm features. “You appear to be a sensible person,” I said, when giving her her first instructions in the nursey, “and I think I can rely on you. You know my nurse is leaving because of illness, and that illness was caused by her being frightened by—a ghost-story.” I paused; but the woman remained unmoved, listening to me in respectful silence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
“The servants downstairs have got some nonsense of the kind into their head,” I went on; “they will try to frighten you, too, and tell you they have seen—-” I could not go on. For my life I could not calmly giver her the description of that shadowy image of fear. “They cannot frighten me, ma’am, said my new nurse quietly. “I am not afraid of spirits.” I thought she spoke in jest, and smiled. “I am not indeed, ma’am,” she repeated. “I have lived where there were such things seen but they never harmed me.” “You do not mean to say you believe such nonsense?” said I, hypocritically trying to speak carelessly. “Oh yes, ma’am, I do! I could not disbelieve it,” said the nurse, opening her eyes with earnestness, “I know the story of this house, ma’am.” What story” I cried. The woman coloured and looked confused. “I beg your pardon, ma’am—I mean what people say is seen here.” “What do they say? Do not frighten me,” I said, and my voice quivered in spite of me; “I have heard nothing but what the servant said.” The nurse looked deeply concerned. “I am very stupid, ma’am; I beg your pardon for repeating such stores to you—I daresay it is only idle people’s gossip.” She went about her duties, and I went—not into my dressing-room—but down into the drawing-room, where I say by the window looking out until my husband returned. Two or three weeks more passed away. I lay down on my pet chintz-covered couch, near the window, to look at the sky and the starts. Dead silence—and the “ting, ting” of the French clock on the mantelpiece marked the half-hour after eight. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Dear me, how dark it was growing! this brooding storm I supposed, which had been making me feel so languid and restless. I wish it would come down and cool the air—not tonight, though. Dear me, how lonely it is. I wish William were home. Those women are talking very loudly—I wonder nurse would—here I got drowsy, and my eyes ached looking for the stars that had not come. In a few minutes I roused again, my maternal anxiety changing into indignation as I heard the women’s voices growing louder and shriller, and some doors opened and shut violently. What can nurse be thinking of? They will wake the children most certainly, and William was so long in falling asleep—quite fevers my own boy! I shall really reprover her very plainly. I never needed to do so before. What could she be thinking of? Dead silence again. Well, this was lonely; I was inclined to ring for lights, and turn on all the burners in the chandeliers by way of company. Then I remembered there were some wax matches in one of the drawers of a writing-tray just at hand, and thought I would light the gas myself instead of brining the servants down—yes—but I wanted company. It was so dark and dreary, and—and—I was afraid. Afraid to stir—afraid to look at the door! a numbing, chilling tide of icy fear ebbing through every vein—afraid to draw a breath—afraid to move hand or foot, in a nightmare of supernatural terror. At last, by a violent effort, I sprang at the bell-handle, and pulled it frantically, and as soon as I had done so, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, I felt thoroughly ashamed of my childish cowardice, although I could not have helped it, and it had overcome me as suddenly as unexpectedly. How William would have laughed at me! #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
There were those servants talking again, tramping about and banging the doors as before. Really, this was unbearable; cook must be in one of her fits of temper, and certainly had forgotten herself strangely. And, as the quarrelsome tones grew louder and louder—evidently in bitter recrimination, although I could not catch a word—my own anger rose proportionately, and, forgetting loneliness and darkness in my indignant anxiety lest my children should be waked by this most unseemly behaviour of the servants, I ran hastily out of the room and up the wide staircase. The dime light from the clouded evening sky, still further subdued by the gold and purple-stained glass of the conservatory door, streamed faintly down the steps from the first landing, and by it, just as I had ascended half way, I discovered the short, thick-sett figure of the nurse rushing down—of course, in answer to my ring, I supposed. Involuntarily I stepped aside to avoid coming in violent contact with her as she feld past. No, it was not the nurse; and the woman following her in headlong haste, sweeping by me so that the current of air from their floating dresses struck icily cold on my brow where the clammy dew of perspiration had started in great drops, was—was—-Merciful Heavens! What was that tall figure, with the coarse, disordered, yellow hair, the white face, and glittering, steel-blue eyes, that glinted fiendishly on me for one dreadful instant, and then vanished? Vanished as the pursed and pursuing figures had disappeared in the shadows of the wide, lofty hall, without sound of voice or footstep? #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
If you had a chance to explore areas never before seen within Sarah’s house, would you take it?
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A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
What a Lovely Day for a Bit of Mystery!
It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves. I hear your words, My dear Devout; now you hear Mine. You will find them not only suasive, but also persuasive. In fact, they exceed in wisdom all the accumulated knowledge of Philosophy since the World began. My particular words for you today are “spirit and life.” My Beloved Disciple recorded them in his Gospel (6.63), but Humanity cannot seem to make any sense out of them. Important words, they should not be exegeted smugly, if I may allude to that hoary Preacher of Ecclesiastes (9.17), but listened to respectfully. That is to say, they should be received with all humility and yet great affection. Our seventeenth-century ancestors differed from us in most ways, but in nothing did they differ more than in their attitude toward the truth. In this they were closer to the Middle Ages than to us. For them a lie—a breaking of one’s faith—was the worst of sins. Today, many do not regard lying as a serious moral wrong. If the word “morality” is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites, especially of pleasures of the flesh, barbiturates, paraphernalia, liquor and contraband. If the word “morality” is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites very seriously—perhaps too seriously—but we do not regard lying as a mortal sin. We are one of the few civilizations in which entire professions (TV news media, for example, and public relations) are seriously devoted to bending the truth. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divided sins into three kinds: those of lust, those of violence, and those of fraud. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The sins of lust—those we tend to take most seriously—were those that Dante thought most trivial; the sins of fraud—which we take lightly—were for Dante the worst of all. To create a “credibility gap” as our revealing phrase has it (as though the only relevant issue is whether a statement will compel belief), to lie, was for the medieval humans to break one’s faith, and it was faith which constituted the bonds between humans and their fellow humans, between humans and the state, between humans and God. To lie was to reduce all the most valuable relationships of life to chaos. And the seventeenth-century Puritan, like Dante, was still living by his faith. Just how important the truth was to the seventeenth-century Puritan may be gathered from the fact that all of the innocent persons who were executed—and the majority of those executed were innocent—could have saved themselves by lying. After the first execution—that of Bridget Bishop—took place in June it became obvious to everyone that persons who confessed, like Tituba and Dorcas Good, were not being brought to trial. Thus any suspected person might have one’s life by confessing. Twenty people died, nineteen of them hanged and one pressed for refusing to plead. Bridget Bishop, Mammy Redd, and George Burroughs were three of these. One cannot be at all certain of the guilt or innocence of several more. However, at least a dozen now seem to be clearly innocent. Twelve people, and probably more, chose to die rather than belie themselves. It is impressive evidence of the Puritan’s attachment to the truth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Yet it was not really so simple as that, because the truth was not easy to find in Salem in 1692. The greatest difficulty was created by the genuineness of the afflicted persons’ fits. Their sufferings were so convincing that they often shook the confidence of the accused. One example is William Hobbes, who began by stoutly denying that he had anything to do with the afflicted girls’ convulsions. When he looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne accused him of overlooking them (id est, of he evil eye), yet still he denied it. Abigail Williams cried out that she saw his specter going to hunt Mercy Lewis “and immediately said Mercy fell into a fit and diverse others.” “Can you now deny it?” said Hathorne. “I can deny it to my dying day,” said William Hobbes. However, he did not. Here, after all, were people in hideous convulsions, and saying that his specter was the cause. How could this be? Hathorne suggested that the Devil might be able to use Hobbes’ specter because of Hobbes’ sins; he had not observed either public or private worship. Might not the Devil have taken advantage of that? Hobbes “was silent a considerable space—then said yes.” The girls’ fits shook not only Hobbes’ confidence in himself, but also his confidence in his daughter Abigail, the wild young girl who had boasted that she had sold herself “body and soul to the Old Boy.” Hathorne wanted to know whether Hobbes had not known for a long time that his daughter was a witch. “No, sir,” was the reply. “Do you think she is a witch now?” asked Hathorne. And all that Hobbes could say was, “I do no know.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Abigail Faulkner’s experience was similar. At her first examination, on August 11, she firmly denied that she had anything to do with the girls’ afflictions. When she looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne asked her, “Do you not see?” Yes, she saw. However, she had nothing to do with it. Yet she would not doubt that the girls were suffering, and saw no reason to doubt their word that it was her specter afflicting them. Therefore the Devil must be appearing in her form: “It is the Devil does it in my shape.” However, by August 30 she was no longer so sure of her innocence. It was true, she said, that she had been angry at what people said when her cousin, Elizabeth Johnson, had been arrested. She had felt malice toward the afflicted persons then because they were the cause of her cousin’s arrest. She has wished them ill, and “her spirit being raised she did pinch her hands together.” Perhaps the Devil had taken advantage of that to pinch the girls, thus exploiting her malice. Even those whose confidence was not shaken bore testimony to the impressiveness of the fits. Mary Easty knew that has had not bewitched the girls, and she was confident as well of the innocence of her sisters, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyse. Yet she had to grant that there was something preternatural in the girls’ behaviour. “It is an evil spirit,” she said, “but whether it be witchcraft I do not know.” Even George Burroughs, who had been audacious enough to boast of occult powers, found himself stunned by the girls’ behaviour. “Being asked what he thought of these things he answered it was an amazing and humbling Providence, but he understood nothing of it.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Indeed, these courtroom fits were so convincing that most of the indictments were for witchcraft committed during the preliminary examination rather than for the offenses named in the original complain. The typical order of events in the Salem witchcraft cases was: the swearing out of a complaint for acts of witchcraft; a preliminary examination during which the afflicted persons had convulsive fits; an indictment for acts of witchcraft performed during the preliminary examination; and the trial. The direct cause of these fits, in the courtroom or out of it, was, of course, not witchcraft itself, but the afflicted person’s fear of witchcraft. If fits were occasioned by fear of someone like Bridget Bishop, who was actually practicing witchcraft, they might also be occasioned by fear of someone who was only suspected of practicing it. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law! The Winchester Estate had belonged to the family ever since the reign of George Washington, and there was a curious old wing and a cloistered quadrangle still remaining of the original edifice, and in excellent preservation. The rooms at the end of the house were ornate, and somewhat darksome and gloomy, it is true; but, though rarely used they were perfectly habitable, and were of service on great occasions when the Winchester was crowded with guests. The central portion of the Winchester had been rebuilt in the reign James K. Polk, and was of noble and palatial proportions. The southern wing, and a long music-room with thirteen tall narrow daisy-stained glass windows added on to it, were as modern as the time. Altogether, the Winchester was a very splendid mansion with 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, and even once had a nine-story tower. It was one of the chief glories of our country. All the land in the Winchester estate, and for a long way beyond its boundaries, belonged to the Winchester family. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The Winchester estate grounds actually expanded all the way down to Steven’s Creek Boulevard. The community church was once within the park walls. The former estate was actually much larger than it is today, it was composed of 500 to 600 rooms at one time, but the 1906 Earthquake brought down the nine-story tower and much of the fourth floor with it. The death of William Wirt Winchester left his son, William Wirt Winchester II, unprovided for, and he was fain to go out into the bleak unknown World, and earn his living in a position of dependence—a dreadful thing for a Winchester to be obliged to do. Out of respect for the traditions and prejudices of his race, he made it his business to seek employment abroad, where the degradation of one solitary Winchester was not so likely to inflict shame upon the ancient house to which he belonged. Happily for himself, he had been carefully educated, and had industriously cultivated the usual modern accomplishments in the calm retirement of the University of Cambridge. He was so fortunate as to obtain a situation at Vienna, in a German family of high rank; and remained there for seven years, laying aside year by year a considerable portion of his liberal salary. When his pupils had grown up, his kind mistress procured for him a still more profitable position at St. Petersburg, where he remained for five more years, at the end of which time he yielded to a yearning that had been long growing upon him—an ardent desire to see his dear old country home once more. He loved the soil from which he had sprung. In all of her letter for some time past, his mother, Mrs. Winchester begged that whenever he felt himself justified in coming home, he would pay a long visit to the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“I wish you could come home at Christmas,” she wrote, in the autumn of the year of which I am speaking. “We shall be very gay, and I expect all kinds of pleasant people at the Winchester. When he arrived there, the Old Winchester was in its glory, at about nine o’clock on a clear starlit night. A light frost whitened the broad sweeping lawns, 12,000 boxwood hedges that were winding through the garden, and the other 1,500 plants, trees and shrubs. From the music room at the end of the southern wing, to the heavily framed gothic windows of the old rooms on the north, there shone one blaze of light. The scene was reminiscent of some unusual place in a German legend; and young William half expected to see the lights fade out all in a moment, and long shingled façade wrapped in sudden darkness. The old butler, whom he remembered from his very infancy, and who did not seem to have grown a day older during his twelve years’ exile, came out of the dining-room as the footman opened the hall-door for him, and gave him a cordial welcome, nay insisted upon helping to bring in his portmanteau with his own hands, an act of unusual condescension, the full force of which was felt by his subordinates. “It is a real treat to see your pleasant face once more, William,” said this faithful retainer, as he assisted William to take off his travelling-cloak. “You have not aged a day since you used to live at the Winchester twelve year ago, and you are looking uncommon well; and, Lord love your heart, sir, how pleased they all will be to see you!” They arrived at last at a very comfortable room—a square tapes-tried chamber, with high ceiling support by a great mahogany beam. The room looked cheery enough, with a bright fire roaring in the wide chimney; but it had a somewhat ancient aspect, which the superstitiously inclined might have associated with possible ghosts. “We are in the East Wing, are we not?” young William asked. “This room seems quite strange to me. if I have ever been here before, I doubt it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“Very likely not, sir. Yes, this is the old East Wing that your mother once had boarded up. Your window looks out into the old stable-yard, where the kennel used to be in the time of your grandfather, when the Winchester was even a finer place than it is now. We are so full of company this winter, you see, sir, that we are obliged to make use of all these rooms. You will have no need to feel lonesome. There is Captain and Mrs. Foster in the next room to this, and the two Miss Griffins in the blue room opposite.” (Some believe that reopening the East Wing is what upset the spirits and caused the 1906 Earthquake.) Young William admired the perfect comfort of his chamber. Every modern appliance had been added to the ornate and ponderous furniture of an age gone by, and the combination produced a very pleasant effect. As he awoke in the morning and opened the door, Mrs. Winchester sailed in, looking radiant in a dark-green velvet dress richly trimmed with old point lace. Above her beauty, she had a charm of expression which was to most more rare and delightful than her beauty of feature and complexion. She put her arms around her son, and hugged him. “I have only this moment been told of your arrival, my dear William,” she said; “you look just like your father. My dear child, I have been looking forward so anxiously to your coming, and I should not have liked to see you for the first time before all those people. Welcome home. Remember, William, this house is always to be your home, whenever you have need of one.” William, being a hunting man. Had, indeed, a secret horror of the sport; for more than one scion of the house had perished untimely in the hunting-field. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The family had not been altogether a lucky one, in spite of its wealth and prosperity. It was not often that goodly heritage had descended to the Winchesters or their only son, William. Death in some form or other—on too many occasions a violent death—had come between the heir and his inheritance. And when one pondered on the dark pages in the story of the house, many wonder if Mrs. Winchester was ever troubled by morbid forebodings about her only and fondly loved son. Was there a ghost at the Winchester—that spectral visitant without which the state and plendour of a grand old house seem scarcely complete? Yes, many have heard vague hints of some shadowy presence that had been seen on rare occasions within the precincts of the Winchester mansion. Those whom were questioned were prompt to assure investigators that they had seen nothing. They had heard stories of the past—foolish legends, most likely, not worth listening to. On the property, there was once a stable-yard, a spacious quadrangle, surrounded by the closed doors of stable and dog-kennels: low massive buildings of grey stones, with the ivy creeping over them here and there, and with an ancient moss-grown look, that gave them a weird kind of interest. This range of stabling must have been disguised for a long time. The stables that were more recently used were a pile of handsome red-brick buildings at the other extremity of the house, to the rear of the music room, and forming a striking feature in the back view of the Winchester. According to legend, some believed that spectral entities, had been haunting the Winchester estate for centuries. Several large black dogs, with eyes large as saucers, or something flaming, appear and disappear, often without a trace. In many of the legends, the dogs are malevolent: assaulting guests, frightening livestock to death, attacking other dogs, and heralding death or disaster. Perhaps that is why the heirs of Winchester who have come to an untimely end have all died tragically. Oliver Winchester was killed in a dual. William Winchester I was murdered; and William Winchester II broke his back on his return home to the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The butler concealed the death of William Winchester II from Sarah, telling her simply that he was called away and said he would never return. Her heart was so broken that she wrote him out of existence, as if her had never been born. After the heartbreaking news that her only son has abandoned her, Mrs. Winchester was sitting in her blue séance room; half meditating, half dozing, mixing broken snatches of thought with brief glimpses of dreaming, when she was startled into wakefulness by a sound that was strange to her. It was a huntsman’s horn—a few low plaintive noes on a huntsman’s horn—notes which had a strange far-away sound, that was more unearthly than anything her ears ever heard. She thought of the music in Der Freischutz; but the weirdest snatch of melody Weber ever wrote had not so ghastly a sound as these few simple noes conveyed to her ear. She stood transfixed, listening to that awful music. It had grown dusk, her fire was almost out, and the room in shadow. As she listened, a light suddenly flashed on the wall before her. The light was as unearthly as the sound—a light that never shone from Earth or Sky. She ran to the window; for his ghastly shimmer flashed through the window upon the opposite wall. The great gates of the stable-yard were open, and men in scarlet coats were riding in, a pack of hounds crowding in before them, obedient to the huntsman’s whip. The whole scene was gleams of a lantern carried by one of the men. It was this lantern which had shone upon the tapestried wall. She saw the stable doors opened one after another; gentlemen and grooms alighting from their horses; the dogs driven into their kennel; the helpers hurrying to and fro; and that strange wan lantern-light glimmering hither and tither was the gathering dusk. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, there was no sound of horse’s hoof or of human voices—not one yelp or cry from the vicious looking hounds with flaming eyes. Since those faint far-away sounds of the horn had died out in the distance, the ghastly silence had been unbroken. As Mrs. Winchester stood at her window quite calmly and watched while the group of men and animals in the yard below noiselessly dispersed. There was nothing supernatural in the manner of their disappearance. The figures did not vanish nor melt into empty air. One by one she saw the horses led into their separate quarters; one by one the redcoats strolled out of the gates, and the grooms departed, some one way, some another. The scene, but for its noiselessness, was natural enough; and had she been a stranger in her own home, she might have fancied that those figures were real—those stables in full occupation. However, she knew that stable-yard and all its range of building to have been disused for more than half a century. Could she believe that, without an hour’s warning, the long-deserted quadrangle could be filled—the empty stalls tenanted? Had some hunting-party from the neighbourhood sought shelter there, glad to escape the pitiless rain? That was impossible, she thought. And yet the noiselessness, the awful sound of that horn—the strange unearthly gleam of that lantern! A cold sweat broke out on her forehead, and she trembled in every limb. Mrs. Winchester was pale as a ghost and trembling. Mrs. Winchester had kept the secret. That evening, the butler came to her. “Mrs. Winchester, there is no use in trying to hide it from you any longer. Your son was killed in the hunting-field, brought home dead one December night, an hour after his father and the rest of the party had come home to the Winchester. He was found by a labouring-man, poor lad, lying in a ditch with his back broken, and his horse beside him staked.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Shortly after Mr. Winchester Sr. never rode to hounds again, though he was passionately fond of hunting. Dogs and horses were sold, and the north quadrangle had been empty from that day. Some evil have come upon the Winchester mansion, it was not in human power to prevent its coming. Some had beheld the shadows of the dead. Sudden terror overcomes some visitors, even to this day. There are reports of an ominous danger, as people’s hearts grow cold while on tour. Staff have been startled by seeing a man, with is hat in his hand not in evening costume; a man with a pale anxious-looking face, peering cautiously into the room. Their first thought is of evil; but in the next moment than man disappears, and they see no more of him. Sometimes when flowers are placed in the house, people see the drooping moments later and lights dying out one by one in the brass sconces against the walls. It is no wonder Mrs. Winchester shut herself from the outer World, burying herself almost as completely as a hermit in its cell. While great wealth brings some people joy, there is some times a hefty fee. Be careful what you wish for, you never know who or what you might invite in your doors. I invoke and move thee, O thou Spirit Gusion and being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, Obey! in the name Beralensis, Baldachinesis, Paumachia, and Apologiae 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. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
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 Spirit Gusion. And I say to thee obey, in the name of him who spake and it was; and in every one ye, O ye names of God! Moreover in the names Adonai, El, Elohim, Elohi, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, Zabaoth, Elion, Iah, Tetragrammaton, Shaddai, Lord God Most High, I stir thee up; and in our strength I say Obey! O Spirit Gusion. Appear unto His servants in a moment; before the circle in the likeness of man; and visit me in peace. And in the ineffable name Tetragrammaton Iehovah, I say, Obey! whose mighty sound being exalted in power the pillars are divided, the winds of the firmament groan aloud; the sire burns not; the Earth moves in Earthquakes; and all things of the house of Heaven and Earth and the dwelling-place of darkness are as Earthquakes, and are in torment, and are confounded in thunder. Come forth, O Spirit Gusion, 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 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. Let it be so, Truefold, whatever ill news has come to us we will hear it together. He put is arm round his wife’s waist. Both were pale as marble, both stood in stony stillness waiting for the bow that was to fall upon them. It is said that perhaps you will see a glimpse of Mrs. Winchester and Mr. Winchester, Sr., while on tour, if you repeat the invocation thirteen times before your visit. Life is broken for her, there hah passed a glory from Earth, and that upon all pleasures and joys of this World she looks with the solemn calm of one for whom all things are dark with the shadow of a great sorrow. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
We’re one week away from Friday the 13th! Missed out on tickets for Flashlight Tours? Don’t worry, we have ghoulishly fun plans All Hallows’ Eve 👻🎃🍿🏠
All Hallows’ Eve:
👉 link in bio. 🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
If Speak You Must, then Let Loose Your Own Wretched Spiritual Condition!
My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all night long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart.
We would like to believe that everything we think and say is right, but we cannot. That is because we do not have grace enough or sense enough. Of course, there is a wit in each of us, but even this is dimmed through negligence. What we really fail to notice is that we are losing our interior vision. How do you know?? When we act so daily, and the excuses we cook up are so abysmal! When we explode with passion and think, no I am not angry, I am just defending the faith. When we peck at the peccadillos of others, and our own whoppers we let pass unchallenged, as the Evangelist Matthew has pointed out (7.3)! When we ponder what we will put up with from others, but pay little attention to how much others will have to put up with from us! Is there a moral anywhere in this? Whoever wants one’s own actions to be tolerably received would do well not to judge the behaviour of others so intolerably. Whoever has an interior life should put the spiritual care of oneself before the care of others. You will never be internal and devout until you hold your tongue about others. If speak you must, then let loose your own wretched spiritual condition. If you focus entirely on your relationship to God, precious little of the hubbub of the World will be able to penetrate your recollection. When you have that vacant stare in your eye, you might well ask yourself, before someone else does, just where are you? When you have run through everything the World has to offer, why, if I may echo Matthew (16.26), do you seem to have advance to the real? The moral? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
If you want True Peace and True Union, then you just have to postpone everything else and attend to your own case. If only you drag your torso away from every temporal festival, you will make spiritual progress. When you put a value on each temporal thing, you will lose spiritual ground. All of which means, you can keep nothing as your own nothing big, nothing small, nothing nice, nothing new; that is to say, nothing except God and everything that smacks of God. However, all hose lovely creaturely consolations that came your way, what about them? Forget about them! The soul that loves God loathes everything that is not God. God Eternal, God Immense, “fulling all the space,” as Jeremiah phrased it (23.24); the soul’s solace, the heart’s True Joy. Although already a thriving business—having sold over 100,000 lever-action repeaters by the early 1880s—Winchester was ready to expand its market with different-action firearms. The Hotchkiss, a bolt action designed by American inventor Benjamin B. Hotchkiss and produced in hopes of military sales, appeared in 1883. In the same year, Winchester bought the rights to the falling block single-shot rifle invented and patented by John M. Browning. Spawned by the Browning connection with Winchester, the single-shot appeared in the Winchester catalogue for 1885. The single-shot would not reach the market until 1885 and remained in product line until approximately 1920. There are so many variations in calibers, barrels, overall configurations, finishes, triggers, sights, and other feature that sportsmen, the military, and target shooters were all offered every variety of possible use for a single-shot rifle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The number of cartridge chamberings for this model exceeds that of any other firearm made by Winchester: approximately sixty-five. The single-shot was made at a time when target shooting was as popular as golf is today and a major match like the Creedmoor (on New York’s Long Island) was very much the Masters of its day. Not only were the single-shots beautifully constructed and of a solid, virtually unbreakable design, but they were phenomenally accurate, used in international matches which were shot at distances up to 1,000 yards, with exquisitely constructed open sights and finely built tubular scope sights. The champion target shooters were international celebrities, and elaborate trophies were designed and built by such silversmiths as Gorham and Tiffany. The Browning-Winchester single-shot rifles were also a favourite of sportsmen-hunters as the wide selection of chamberings meant that cartridges were available for every type of North American game animal. Then, as now, hunters preferred the simplicity and reliability of a single-shot mechanism, as well as the challenge of having only one shot available, without the rapid-repeating capability of magazine arms. Taking a grizzly bear with a nonrepeating rifle required cool nerves and a steady hand. When Oliver Winchester brought out a John Browning design, the company certainly got its money’s worth. The $8,000.00 ($231,230.64 inflation adjusted for 2021) went a long way with the single shot. The Winchester rifles were highly successful. In June of 1888, John and Matt Browning were issued a patent for a slide-action magazine rifle, which—as the Model 1890—became Winchester’s first rifle of that type. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The model 1890, in two basic grades only (Sporting Rifle and Fancy Sporting Rifle, all having 24-inch octagonal barrels and rifle-style steel buttplates), remained in production through 1932, with a total production of nearly 850,000. The 1890 was Winchester’s all-time sales leader in .22 rimfire, and many 1890s are still in use around the World today. As an economical version of the Model 1890, the factory brought out the 1906 pump-action. And the 1906 thereby also became the factory’s first rifle advertised and sold which accommodated the three cartridges interchangeably. A further sales factor was that all Model 1906s featured takedown capability. Serial numbering on the 1906 was in its own range, and, like the 1890, the 1906 achieved an extraordinary sales total—nearly 850,000 made—before being discontinued in 1932. Hundreds of thousand of Winchester rifles were produced and they were assembled in what is called the Winchester Complex, which is in New Haven, Connecticut USA. In 1862, William Wirt Winchester, the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, married Sarah Lockwood Pardee. (Oliver Fisher Winchester was a very wealthy and prominent man, not only the owner of Winchester Repeating Arms, but also Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.) Sarah and William’s life together was happy, and they moved in the best of New England society. However, in 1866, disaster struck when their infant daughter, Annie died of the then mysterious childhood disease marasmus. Mrs. Winchester fell into a deep sadness. Fifteen years later, her husband William Wirt Winchester who was at the time president of Winchester Repeating Arms Company suffered a premature death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Mrs. Winchester inherited 777 shares of Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and $20,000,000.00 ($532,737,254.90 inflation adjusted for 2021). She was told she could rest assure that her life was not in danger and by building a house similar to the Winchester Complex, which was 3,250,000 square feet, would give her eternal life. Now, no one really knows how much the Winchester’s were worth. In 1915, for instance, they may a deal with the British government in the sum of $47,500,000.00 ($1,277,778,217.82 inflation adjusted for 2021), so Mrs. Winchester’s inheritance was just a fraction of their cumulative wealth. In the late 1800s, the Santa Clara Valley presented sweeping visas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for Mrs. Winchester to begin her building project. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished eighteen-room farm house just three miles west of San Jose—and over the next thirty-eight years she produced the sprawling complex we know today as the Winchester Mystery House. The death of the child cannot be explained on natural grounds except by suggesting that there was something wrong with it quite unrelated to the father’s experience. However, there is eloquent testimony about evidence of the power of witchcraft. There were known to witches in New Haven, Connecticut in 1646. A servant named Mary Johnson was accused of being a witch. Others were known to practice black magic. However, it did not occur to anyone to notice that the evidence suggested that the malignant power must also reside not only in the witch but in the charms hey use or in the Devil’s power that lay behind them, since they worked equally well whether they were manipulated by a confessed witch or by a Godly magistrate. I am a believer of words, I believe everything depends on who says them. What if the direful creatures, whose report lingers in these tales of the Winchester, should have an origin far older still? What if they were the remnants of a vanishing period of the Earth’s history long antecedent to the birth of mastodon and iguanodon; a stage, namely, when the World, as we call it, had not yet become quite visible, was not yet so far finished as to part from the invisible World that its mother, and which, on its part, had no then become quite invisible—was only almost such. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
When, as a credible consequence, strange shapes of those now invisible regions, of Eden and Hell, might be expected to gloom out occasionally from the awful Fauna of an ever-generating World upon that one which was being born of it. Hence, the life-periods of a World being long and slow, some of these huge, unformed bulks of half-created matter might, somehow, like the megatherium of later times, a baby creation to them, roll at age-long intervals, clothes in a might terror of shapelessness into the half-recognition of human beings, whose consternation at the uncertain vision were barrier enough to prevent all further know of its substance. Ever since I was born, I suppose the changes of a World are not to be measured by the changes of its generations. When one’s discrimination is no greater than to lump everything marvellous—demons, Angels, kelpies, ghosts, vampires, doppelgangers, witches, fairies, nightmares under the one head of ghost—it upsets the reappearing of the of the departed. It matters very little whether we believe in ghost, or not, provided that we are ghosts—that within this body, which so many people are ready to consider their own very selves, their lies a ghostly embryo, at least, which has an inner side to it God only can see, which says I concerning itself, and which will soon have to know whether or not it can appear to those whom it has left behind, and thus solve the question of ghosts for itself, at least. Is telling a person about a ghost, affording one the source of one’s conviction? It is the same as a ghost appearing to one? Not at all. The impression may be deeper and clearer on your mind than any fact of the next morning will make. Not everyone can feel it, but the person who does is convinced. It cannot be conveyed. It is something you have to experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the year 1825 Oliver Fisher Winchester fell in love. This was before he met and married his wife Jane Ellen Hope. Here are notes from his journal: Well, I was walking along Chapel Street, and feeling a little bewildered in consequence—for it was quite the dusk of the evening. There was a haze in the air, when, from the crossing that cuts off the corner in the direction of Crown Street, just as I was about to turn towards it, a lady stepped upon the kerbstone of the pavement, looked at me for a moment, and passed—an occurrence not very remarkable, certainly. However, the lady was remarkable and so was her dress. I am not good at observing, and I am still worse at describing dress, therefore I can only say that hers reminded me of an old picture—that is, I had never seen anything like it, except in old pictures. She had no bonne, and looked as if she had walked straight out of an ancient drawing-room in her evening attire. The next instant I met a man on the crossing, who stopped and addressed me. So betwixt was I that, although I recognized his voice as one I ought to know, I could not identify him until he got closer, which I did instinctively in the act of returning his greeting. At the same time, I glanced over my shoulder after the lady. She was nowhere to be seen. “What are you looking at?” asked Gary James. “I was looking after that lady,” I answered, “but I cannot see her.” “What lady?” said James, with just a touch of impatience. “You must have seen her,” I retuned. “You were not more than three yards behind her.” “Where is she then?” “She must have gone down one of the areas, I think. However, she looked a lady, though an old-fashioned one.” “Have you been dining?” asked James, in a tone of doubtful enquiry. “No,” I replied, not suspecting the insinuation; “I have only just come from the Museum.” “Then I advise you to call on your medical man before you go home.” “Medical man!” returned; “I have no medical man. What do you mean? I never was better in my life.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
“I mean that there was no lady. It was an illusion, and that indicates something wrong. Besides, you did not know me when I spoke to you. “That is nothing,” I returned. “I had just taken a moment to recall your name.” “How was it you saw the lady, then?” The affair was growing serious under by friend’s interrogation. I did not a all like the idea of his supposing me subject to hallucinations. So I answered, with a laugh, “Ah! to be sure, that explains it. I was just confused.” It was a drizzly afternoon in the beginning of the last week of October when I left the two of New Haven. I hard hardly left the town, and the twilight had only in a post-chaise to ride to East Haven, the property of my friend’s father. I had hardly left the town and the twilight had only begun to deepen, when, glancing from one of the windows of the chaise, I fancied I saw, between me and the hedge, the dim figure of a horse keeping pace with us. I thought, in the first interval of unreason, that it was a shadow from my own horse, but reminded myself the next moment that there could be no shadow where there was no light. When I looked again, I was at the first glance convinced that my eyes had deceived me. At the second, I believed once more that a shadowy something, with the movements of a horse in harness, was keeping pace with us. I turned away again with some discomfort, and not till we had reached an open moorland road, whence a little watery light was visible on the horizon, could I summon up courage enough to look out once more. Certainly then there was nothing o be seen, and I persuaded myself that it had been all a fancy. As we turned into the avenue that led up to East Haven, I found myself once more glancing nervously out the window. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The moment the trees were about me, there was, if not a shadowy horse out there by the side of the chaise, yet certainly more than half that conviction in here in my consciousness. When I saw my friend, however, standing on the doorstep, dark against the glow of the hall fire, I forgot all about it; and I need not add that I did not make it a subject of conversation when I entered, for I was well aware that it was essential to a man’s reputation that his senses should be accurate, though his heart might without prejudice swarm with shadows, and his judgment be a very stable of hobbies. I was kindly received. Mrs. James had been dead for some years, and Florence Ida, the eldest of the family, was at the head of the household. She had two sisters, little more than girls. The father was a burly, yet gentlemanlike Yorkshire squire, who ate well, drank well, looked radiant, and hunted twice a week. In this pastime his son joined him when in the humour, which happened scarcely so often. I, who had never crossed a horse in my life, took his apology for not being able to mount me very coolly, assuring him that I could rather loiter about with a book than be in at the death of the best-hunted werewolf or Hellhound in East Haven. I very soon found myself a home with the James’s; and very soon again I began to find myself no so much at home; for Miss James—Florence Ida as I soon ventured to call her—was fascinating. There was an empty place in my heart. Florence’s figure was graceful, and her face was beautiful. Order was a very idol with her. Hence the house was too tidy for any sense of comfort. If you left a book on the table, you would, on retuning to the room a moment after, find it put aside. What the furniture of the drawing-room was like, I never saw; for not even on Christmas Day, which was the last day I spent there, was in uncovered. Everything in it was kept in bibs and pinafores. Even the carpet was covered with a slippery sheet of brown holland. Mr. James never entered that room, and therein was wise. Gary remonstrated once. She answered him quite kindly even playfully, but no change followed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
What was worse, she made very wretched tea. Her father never took tea; neither did Gary. I was rather fond of it, but I soon gave it up. Everything her father partook of was first-rate. Everything else was somewhat poverty-stricken. My pleasure in Florence’s society prevented me from making practical deductions from such trifles. The first day of November was a very lovely day, quite one. I was sitting in a little arbour I had just discovered, with a book in my hand—not reading, however, but day-dreaming—when, lifting my eyes from the ground, I was startled to see, through a thin shrub in from of the arbour what seemed the form of an old lady seated, apparently reading from a book on her knee. The sight instantly recalled the lady from Chapel Street. I started to my feet, and then, clear of the intervening bush, saw only a great stone such as abounded on the moors in the neighbourhood, with a lump of quartz set on top of it. Some childish taste had put it there for ornament. Smiling at my own folly, I say down again, and reopened my book. After reading for a while, I glanced up again, and once more started to my feet, overcome by the fancy that there verily sat the lady reading. You will say it indicated an excited condition of the brain. Possibly; but I was, as far as I can recall, quite collected and reasonable. I was almost vexed this second time, and sat down once more to my book. Still, every time I looked up, I was startled afresh. I doubt, however, if the trifle is worth mentioning, or had any significance even in relation to what followed. I wondered if Florence practiced witchcraft. There were others who may or may not have practiced it—the evidence is insufficient—but who had clearly used their reputation for occult power to gain illegitimate personal ends. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Gary said that Florence had been dabbling in the occult for years; about five years ago he said she had borrowed a book on palmistry, containing rules on how to know the future. However, he told her it was an evil book and evil art. His charity was wasted, however, since Florence continued telling people’s futures, somethings through reading their faces as well as through reading their palms. Fortunetelling is often only white magic. However, it easily becomes black magic when it concerns itself with the time or manner of the subject’s death. After dinner I strolled out by myself, leaving father and son over their claret. I did not drink wine; and from the lawn I could see the windows of the library, whither Florence commonly retired from the dinner-table. It was a very lovely soft night. There was no moon, but the stars looked wider awake than usual. Dew was falling, but the grass was not yet wet, and I wandered about on it for half and hour. The stillness was somehow strange. It had a wonderful feeling it as if something were expected—as if the quietness were the mould in which some even or other was about to be cast. Even then I was a reader of certain sorts of recondite lore. Suddenly I remembered that this was the eve of All Souls. This is the night on which all the faithful departed, those baptized Christians who are believed to be in purgatory because they died with the guilt of less sin on their souls, came out of their graves to visit their old homes. “Poor dead!” I thought with myself; “have you any place to call a home now? If you have, surely you will not wander back here, where all you have called home has either vanished or given itself to others, to be their home now and yours no more! What an awful doom the old fancy has allotted you! To dwell in your graves all he year, and creep out, this one night, to enter at the midnight door, left open for welcome! A poor welcome truly!—just an open door, a clean-swept floor, and a fire to warm your rain-sodden limbs! The household asleep, and the houseplace swarming with the ghost of ancient times—the miser, the spendthrift, the profligate, the coquette—for the good ghosts sleep, and are troubled with no walking like yours! Not one man, sleepless like yourself, to question you.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“Yet who can tell?” I went on to myself. “It may be your hell to return thus. It may be that only on this one night of the year you can show yourself to one who can see you, but that the place were wicked is the Hades to which you are doomed for ages.” I thought and thought till I began to feel the air alive about me, and was enveloped in the vapours that dim the eyes of those who strain them for one peep through the dull mica windows that will not open on the World of ghosts. At length I cast my fancies away, and feld from them to the library in hopes that no one would raise the Devil to kill or bewitch me. There were many books of fortune-telling and grimoires, of course, full of diagrams. The bodily presence of Florence made the World of ghosts appear shadowy indeed. “What a reality there is about a bodily presence.” I said to myself, as I took y chamber-candle in my hand. “But what is there more real in a body?” I said again, as I crossed the hall. “Surely nothing,” I went on, as I ascended the broad staircase to my room. “The body must vanish. If there be a spirit, that will remain. A body can but vanish. A ghost can appear.” I woke in the morning with a sense of such discomfort as made me spring out of bed at once. When I looked at my watch after I was dressed, I found I had risen an hour earlier than usual. I groped my way downstairs to spend the hour before breakfast in the library. No sooner was I seated with the book than I heard the voice of Florence scolding the butler, in no very gentle tones, for leaving the garden door open all night. The moment I heard this, the strange occurrences I am about to relate began to dawn upon my memory. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The door had been open the night long between All Saints and All Souls. In the middle of the night I awoke suddenly. I knew it was not the morning by the sensations I had, for the night feels altogether different from the morning. It was quite dark. My heart was beating violently, and I either hardly could or hardly dared breathe. A nameless terror was upon me, and my sense of hearing was, apparently by the force of its expectation, unnaturally roused and keen. There it was—a slight noise in the room!—slight, but clear, and with an unknown significance about it! It was awful to think it would come again. I do believe it was only one of those creaks in the timers which announced the torpid, age-long, skin flow of every house back to the dust—a motion to which the flow of the glacier is as a torrent, but which is no less inevitable and sure. Day and night it ceases not; but only in the night, when house and heart are still, do we hear it. No wonder it should sound fearful! for we are we not the immortal dwellers in ever-crumbling clay? The clay is no near us, and yet not of us, that it is every movement starts a fresh dismay. For what will its final ruin disclose? When it falls from about us, where shall we find that we have existed all the time? My skin tingled with the bursting of the moister from its pores. Something was in the room besides me. Sometimes apparitions had the reputation for torture and the torture included choking. People should teach their children to fear God, should come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil. A confused, indescribable sense of utter loneliness, and yet awful presence, was upon me, its blood did cry for vengeance against me. Nobody seemed to have noticed that the specters differed about the means by which the supposed murders were done. The Devil himself did no know so far. This presence was mingled with a dreary, hopeless desolation, as of burnt-out love and aimless life. All at once I found myself sitting up. The terror that a cold hand might be laid upon me, or a cold breath blow on me, or a corpselike face bend down through the darkness over me, had broken my bonds!—I would meet half-way whatever might be approaching. The moment that my will burst into action the terror began to ebb. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The room in which I slept was a large one, perfectly dreary with tidiness. I did not know till afterwards that it was Florence’s room, which she had given up to me rather than prepare another. The furniture, all but one article, was modern and commonplace. I could not help remarking to myself afterwards how utterly void the room was of the nameless charm of feminine occupancy. I had seen nothing to wake a suspicion of its being a lady’s room. The article I have excepted was an ancient bureau, elaborate and ornate, which stood on one side of the large bow window. They very morning before, I had seen a bunch of keys hanging from the upper part of it, and had peeped in. Finding, however, that the pigeon-holds were full of papers, I closed it at once. I should have been glad to use it, but clearly it was not for me. At that bureau the figure of a woman was now seated in the posture of one writing. A strange dim light was around her, but whence I proceeded I never thought of enquiring. As if I, too, had stepped over the bourne, and was a ghost myself, all fear was now gone. I got out of bed, and softly crossed the room to where she was seated. “If she should be beautiful!” I thought—for I had often dreamed of a beautiful ghost that was pleased with me. The figure did not move. She was looking at the faded brown paper. “Some old love-letter,” I thought, and stepped nearer. So cool was I now, that I actually peeped over her shoulder. With mingled surprise and dismay I found that the dim page over which she was bent was that of an old account-book. Ancient household records, in rusty ink, held up to the gliosis of the waning moon, which shone through the parting in the curtains, their entries of shillings and pence!—Of pounds there was not one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
No doubt pounds and fathers are much the same in the World of thought—the true spirit-World; but in the ghost-World this eagerness over shillings and pence must mean something awful! To think that coins which had since been worn smooth in other pockets and purses, which had gone back to the Mint, and been melted down, to come out again and yet again with the heads of new kings and queens—that diners, eaten by the worms—that polish for the floors inches of whose thickness had since been worn away—that the hundred nameless trifled of a life utterly vanished, should be perplexing, annoying, and worst of all, interesting the soul of a ghost who had been in Hades for centuries! The writing was very old-fashioned, and e words were contracted. I could read nothing but the moneys and one single entry—“Corinths Vs.” Currans for a Christmas puffing, most likely! Ah–, poor lady! the pudding and not the Christmas was her care; not the delight of the children over it, but the beggarly pence which it cost. And she cannot get it out of her head, although her brain was “powdered all as thin as flour” ages ago in the mortar of Death. “Alas, poor ghost!” It needs no treasure hoard left behind, no floor stained with the blood of the murdered child, no wickedly hidden parchment of landed rights. Was this a demonic conspiracy? Witches cannot send the Devil to torment people by making a covenant with the Devil. Some people in this town had a lot of evidence against them for trafficking in the occult. In fact, if you recall, during the Salem Witch Trials, renegade members of the clergy had played a large part in the history of witchcraft in fact and in fiction. It should be recalled that Morgan le Fey, King Arthur’s sister, was supposed to have learned her evil craft in the nunnery where she was educated, that Benvenuto Cellini’s sorcerer-friend was a priest, and that a renegade priest is supposed to be necessary to the performance of Black Mass. An old account-book is enough for the hell of the house-keeping gentlewoman! She never lifted her face, or seem to know that I stood behind her. I left her, and went into the bow window, where I could see her face. I was right there. It was the same lady I had met at Chapel Street, walking in front of Gary James. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Her withered lips went moving as if they would have uttered words she had the breath been commissioned thither; her brow was contracted over her thin nose; and once and again her shining forefinger wen up to her temple as if she were pondering some deep problem of humanity. How long I stood gazing at her I do not know, but at last I withdraw to my bed, and left her struggling to solve that which she could never solve thus. It was the symbolic problem of her own life, and she had failed to read it. I remember nothing more. She may be sitting there still, solving at the insolvable. I should have felt no inclination, with the broad sun of the squire’s face, the keen eyes of Gary James, and the beauty of Florence before me at the breakfast table, to say a word about what I had seen, even if I had not been afraid of the doubt concerning my sanity which the story would certainly awaken. What with the memories of the night, I passed a very dreary day, dreading the return of the night, for, cool as I had been in her presence, I could not regard the possible reappearance of those ghost with equanimity. I had a belly ache. Gary James said he would take a pipe of tobacco and light it. I told him that I thought it was not lawful. [The idea that this remedy was unlawful is probably a result of the use of tobacco in it. Tobacco was an “Indian Weed” and used in Indian ceremony and medicine. The Puritans, like other seventh-century Christians, thought the Indians to be Devil worshippers and thought of their medicine men as magicians.] He said it was lawful for man or beast. However, when the night did come, I slept soundly to the morning. The next day, not being able to read with comfort, I went wandering about the place, and at length began to fit the outside and inside of the house together. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The house was a large and rambling edifice, parts of it very old, parts comparatively modern. I first found a beautiful stained-glass window, which looked out back. It was kind of a countercharm and verged on black magic because it was supposed not only to break the witch’s spell but to injure the witch or compel her presence. Below this window, on one side, there was a door. I wondered whiter it led, but found it locked. At the moment Gary James approached from the stables. “Where does this door lead?” I asked him. “I will get the key,” he answered. “It is rather a queer old place. We used to like it when we were children.” “There is a stair, you see,” he said, as he threw the door open. “It leads up over the kitchen.” I followed him up the stair. “There is a door into your room,” he said, “but it is always locked now. And here is Grannie’s room, as they call it, though why, I have not the least idea,” he added, as he pushed open the door of an old-fashioned parlour, smelling very musty. A few old books lay on a side table. A china bowl stood besides them, with some shrivelled, scented rose-leaves in the bottom of it. The cloth that covered the table was riddled by moths, and the spider-legged chairs were covered with dust. A conviction seized me that the old bureau must have belonged to this room, and I soon found the place where I judged it must have stood. However, the same moment I caught sight of a portrait on the wall above the spot I had fixed upon. “Good Lord!” I caried, involuntarily, “that is the very lady I met at Chapel Street!” “Nonsense!” said Gary James. “Old-fashioned ladies are like babies—they all look the same. That is a very old portrait.” “So I see,” I answered. “It is like a Zucchero.” “I don’t know whose it is,” he answered hurriedly, and I thought he looked a little queer.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“Is she one of the family?” I asked. “They say so; but who or what she is, I don’t know. You must ask Jean,” he answered. “The more I looked at it,” I said, “the more I am convinced it is the same lady.” “Well,” he returned with a laugh, “my old nurse used to say she was rather restless. But it’s all nonsense.” “That bureau in my room looks about the same date as this furniture.” I remarked. “It used to stand just there,” he answered, pointing to the space under the picture. “Well, I remember with what awe we used to regard it; for they said the old lady kept her accounts at it still. We never dared touch the bundles of yellow papers in the pigeon-holes. I remember thinking Jean a very heroine once when she touched one of them with the tip of her forefinger. She had got yet more courageous by the time she had it moved into her own room.” “hen that is your sister’s room I am occupying?” I said. “Yes.” “I am ashamed of keeping her out of it.” “Oh! she’’ do well enough.” “If I were she though,” I added, “I would send that bureau back to its own place.” “What do you mean, Oliver? Do you believe ever old wife’s tale that ever was told?” “She may get a fright some day—that’s all! I replied. He smiled with such an evident mixture of pity and contempt that for the moment I almost disliked him; and feeling certain that Florence would receive any such hint in a somewhat similar manner, I did not feel inclined to offer her any advice with regard to the bureau. Little occurred during the rest of my visit worthy of remark. Somehow or other I did not make much progress with Florence. I believe I had begun to see into her character a little more, and therefore did not get deeper in love as the days went on. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
I know I became less absorbed in her society, although I was still anxious to make myself agreeable to her—or perhaps, more properly, to give her a favourable impression of me. I do not know whether she perceived any difference in my behaviour, but I remember that I began again to remark the pinched look of her nose, and to be a little annoyed with her for always putting aside my book. At the same time, I daresay I was provoking, for I never was given to tidiness myself. At length Christmas Day arrived. After breakfast, the squire Mr. James, and the two girls arranged to talk to church. Florence was not in the room at the moment. I excused myself on the ground of a headache, for I had had a bad night. When they left, I went up to my room, threw myself on the bed, and was soon fast asleep. How long I slept I do not know, but I work again with that indescribable yet well-known sense of not being alone. The feeling was scarcely less terrible in the daylight than it had been in the darkness. With the same sudden effort as before, I sat up in the bed. There was the figure at the open bureau, in precisely the same position as on the former occasion. However, I could not see it so distinctly. I rose as gently as I could, and approached it, after the first physical terror. I am not a coward. Just as I got near enough to see the account book open on the folding cover of the bureau, she started up, and, turning, revealed the face of Florence. She blushed crimson. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Winchester,” she said, in great confusion; “I thought you had gone to church with the rest.” “I had lain down with a headache, and gone to sleep,” I replied. “But forgive me, Miss James,” I added, for my mind was full of the dreadful coincidence, “don’t you think you have been better at church than balancing your accounts on Christmas Day?” “The better day the better deed,” she said, with a somewhat offended air, and turned to walk from the room. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“Excuse me, Florence,” I resumed, very seriously, “but I want to tell you something.” She looked conscious. It never crossed me, that perhaps she fancied I was going to make a confession. Far other things were then in my mind. For I thought how awful it was, if she too, like the ancestral ghost, should have to do an age-long penance of haunting that bureau and those horrid figures, and I had suddenly resolved to tell her the whole story. She listened with varying complexion and face half turned aside. When I had ended, which I fear I did with something of a personal appeal, she lifted her head and looked me in the face, with just a slight curl on her thin lip, and answered me. “If I had wanted a sermon, Mr. Winchester, I should have gone to church for it. As for the ghost, I am sorry for you.” So saying she walked out of the room. The rest of the day I did not find very merry I pleaded my headache as an excuse for going to be early. How I hated the room now! Next morning, immediately after breakfast, I took my leave of East Haven. If I lost a wife at all, it was a stingy one. I should have been ashamed of her all my life long. However, extravagant runs the rich, and the stingy robs the poor. I have kept up my friendship with her brother. All he knows about the matter is, that either we had a quarrel, or she refused me—he is not sure which. I must say for Florence, that she was no tattler. Well, here is a letter I had from Gary James this very morning, I will read I to you. My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all nigh long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Some people thought the ghost had come to tell that she had hidden away money in some secret place in the old bureau, one would see why she was permitted to come back. And of course, those wretched accounts were not over and done with, you see. That is the misery of it. Good night. Then I walked out into the wind. We who have lost our sense and our senses—our touch, our small, our vision of who we are; we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our Earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt. We want to rest. We need to rest and allow the Earth to rest. We need to reflect and to rediscover the mystery that lives in us, that is the ground of every unique expression of life, the source of the fascination that calls all things to communion. We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet; for simply being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. Please Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and grant our portion in Thy Torah. Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctified Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who halowest the Sabbath. O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people America and accept their prayer. Please restore America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and please receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
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No One Lives on this Earth without Tribulation–Life is Lived Forwards, but Understood Backwards!
Are lives are defined by our choices. Paths taken and worlds explored. But once we commit, we can never go back, or can we? Bondage of the will is an essential foundation for the doctrine of grace. By ourselves, we are unable to act righteously, to have faith, or to contribute to our own salvation. All credit belongs to God. What then is left to free will? “Nothing! In truth!” insisted Marlin Luther. John Calvin was just as forceful: because the term free will “cannot be retained without great peril, it will…be a great boon for the church if it is abolished.” The divine determinism assumed by the doctrines of God’s foreknowledge, sovereignty, and grace is not identical to naturalistic cause-effect determinism. Yet biblical faith assumes that God works through the created order. Thomas Aquinas argued (in the words of Michael Novak) that “grace operates (except in the rarest cases) through the ordinary contingencies and processes of nature…The whole environment, the whole ‘schedule of contingencies’ that constitutes history is graced.” Believing in God opens one to the possibility of miracles; yet if we accept that all nature is from moment to moment sustained, ordered, and upheld by God, then we no longer need miracles in order to “make room for God.” Whatever their differences, the concepts of absolute determinism and absolute divine sovereignty converge in affirming our dependence on forces beyond our conscious knowledge. Thus they share the problem of how to accommodate ultimate more responsibility. If a superhypnotist were to plant an irresistible suggestion that you should commit a crime, which you then did with a sense of having chosen to do it, surely no one who knew the hidden cases of your behaviour would hold you responsible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Likewise, if we understand the conditions that triggered someone’s acting desirably, we tend to credit the conditions rather than the person. It is only when we are surprised by a person’s heroism—when we do not expect people to behave o nobly under such circumstances—that we give special credit and honour to the hero. In a deterministic World we can judge any behaviour as worthy of praise or blame, but it becomes more difficult to hold the person as ultimately responsible. One is therefore tempted to create a gap in the schemes of natural and divine determination—to open the door to just a dash of ultimate free will, however much is needed to restore our accountability before God and before our human judicial system. God’s sovereignty, we may tell ourselves, does not extend all the way down to the little things, such as what I ate for breakfast this morning. God is concerned only with big events, the ultimate ends. However, as Jonathan Edwards and the other theological masterminds recognized, this assumption of agent causation creates as many problems as it solves. A God who is detached from what you ate for breakfast (or whether you ate breakfast) is not a God who is continuously involved with all events of the creation. And consider: How are the big ends in life achieved apart from the little means? Looking back on our lives, we see our path winding through countless little event and chance encounters, from our initial conception right up to the present. At any decision point we feel free, but looking back, we see causation. “What I so proudly call ‘myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never stared and which I cannot stop,” suggested C.S. Lewis. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Or as Soren Kierkegaard noted, “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” Thus the apostle Paul could sense, “I yet not I, but the grace of God.” So both the absolute determinist and the one who believes in God’s utter sovereignty (perhaps the same person) are left baffled. To limit natural and divine powers makes little sense and only opens that door for pride in self and a judgmental attitude toward others. Yet somehow human accountability must be affirmed. Faced with this paradox of faith, we can take comfort in remembering that we cannot expect to comprehend fully this wisdom and justice of a being whose cognitive stage is infinitely beyond our own. Our situation is like that of someone stranded in a deep well with two ropes dangling down. If we grab either one alone, we sink still deeper into the well. Only when we hold both ropes at once can we climb out, because at the top, beyond where we can see, they come together around a pulley. Grabbing only the rope of determinism or the rope of human responsibility plunges us to the bottom of a well. So instead we grab both ropes, without yet understanding how they come together. In doing so, we may also be comforted that in science as in religion, a confused acceptance of irreconcilable principles is sometimes more hones than a tidy oversimplified theory that ignores evidence. (Remember that advocates of agent causation have no trouble explaining our responsibility, but do face a different mystery—how God could accomplish divine purposes while granting us freedom to do as we choose.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
We also do well to remember both ropes in our everyday attitudes—by viewing ourselves as free and responsible agents and others as influenced by their biology, their past experience, and their current situation. Such a view has the effect of cultivating within us the practical fruits of self-discipline and self-initiative, while being more understanding of the forces that constrain others. Scripture, too, tends to adopt the perspective of self as free and other as caused. When the Bible addresses us directly, it emphasizes our responsibility for our failings. When talking to us about others, especially the poor and disadvantaged, it frequently advocates the complementary perspective: do not judge; act with compassion toward the oppressed; take the beam out of your own eye before worrying about the motes in others; let judgment begin with the house of the Lord. Are we determined or free? Christian psychologists who assume absolute determinism struggle to rationalize human responsibility; those who assume self-causation have solved the problem of human responsibility butt struggle to accommodate natural causation and divine sovereignty in human affairs. Nevertheless, on this much both camps agree: in the fabric of contemporary psychology and Christian doctrine, natural order and human responsibility are the interwoven threads. The new enlightenment which resulted from this development increased human superiority over others terrestrial beings by making them aware that they are from a divine being and created in His image. “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,’” reports Genesis 1.26. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
And because humans learned they were superior to animals, they trained themselves to set traps for them; they tricked them in a thousand different ways. And although several surpassed them or hurt them, humans became the master of the former and the scourge of the latter. Thus the first glance they directed upon themselves produced within them the first string of pride; thus, as yet hardly knowing how to distinguish the ranks, and contemplating themselves in the first rank by virtue of their species, they prepared themselves from afar to lay claim to it in virtue of their individuality. Although their fellow humans were not for one what they are for us, and although they had hardly anything more to do with them than with other animals, they were not forgotten in their observations. The conformities that tie could make one perceive among the, their female, and oneself, made the human beings judge of those they did not perceive. And seeing that they all acted as one would have done under similar circumstances, one concluded that their way of thinking and feeling was in complete conformity with their own. And this important truth, well established in their mind, made them follow, by a presentiment as sure as dialectic and more prompt, the best rules of conduct that it was appropriate to observe toward them for their advantage and safety. Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole motive of human actions, one found oneself in a position to distinguish the rare occasions when common interest should make one count on the assistance of their fellow humans, and those even rarer occasions when competition ought to make one distrust them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
In the first case, humans untied with them in a herd, or at most in some sort of free association, that obligated no one and that lasted only as long as the passing need that hard formed it. In the second case, if one believed that one could, everyone sought to obtain one’s own advantage, either by overt force. Of it one felt oneself to be weaker, one sought to obtain advantage by cleverness and cunning. This is how humans could imperceptibly acquire some crude idea of mutual commitments and of the advantages to be had in fulfilling them, but only insofar as present and perceptible interests could require it, since foresight meant nothing to them, and far from concerning themselves about a distant future, they did not even give a thought to the next day. Were it a matter of catching a deer, everyone was quite aware that one must faithfully keep to one’s post in order to achieve this purpose; but if a hare happened to pass within reach of one of them, no doubt one would have pursued it without giving it a second thought, and that, having obtained one’s prey, one cared very little about causing one’s companions to miss theirs. It is easy to understand that such intercourse did not require a language much more refined than that of crows or monkeys, which flock together in practically the same way. Inarticulate cries, many gestures, and some imitative noises must for a long time have made up the universal language. By joining to this in each country a few articulate and conventional sounds, whose institution, as I have already said, is not too easy to explain, there were individual languages, but crude and imperfect ones, quite similar to those still spoken by carious savage nations today. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Constrained by the passing of time, the abundance of things I have to say, and the practically imperceptible progress of the beginnings, I am flying like an arrow over the multitudes of centuries. For the slower events were in succeeding one another, the quicker they can be described. These first advantages enabled humans to make more rapid ones. The more the mind was enlightened, the more industry was perfected. Soon they ceased to fall asleep under the first tree or to retreat into caves, and found various types of hatches made of hard, sharp stones, which served to cut wood, dig up the soil, and make huts from branches they later found it useful to cover with clay and mud. This was the period of a first revolution which formed the establishment of the distinction among families and which introduced a kind of property, whence perhaps there already arose many quarrels and fights. However, since the strongest were probably the first to make themselves lodgings they felt capable of defending, presumably the weak found it quicker and safer to imitate them than to try to dislodge them; and as for those who already had huts, each of them must have rarely sought to appropriate that of one’s neighbour, less because it did not belong to one than because it was of no use to one, and because one could not seize it without exposing oneself to a fierce battle with the family that occupied it. The first development of the heart were the effect of a new situation that united the husbands and wives, fathers and children in one common habitation. The habit of living together gave rise to the sweetest sentiments known to humans: conjugal love and parental love. “God blessed them and said to them ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it,’” reports Genesis 1.28. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Each family became a little society all the better united because mutual attachment and liberty were its only bonds; and it was then that the first difference was established in the lifestyle of the two genders, which until then had had only one. Women because more sedentary and grew accustomed to watch over the hut and the children, while the man went to seek their common subsistence. With their slightly softer life the two genders also began to lose something of their ferocity and vigour. However, while each one separately became less suited combat savage beasts, on the other hand it was easier to assemble in order to jointly to resist them. In this new state, with simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the tools they had invented to provide for them, since humans enjoyed a great deal of leisure time, they used it to procure for themselves many types of conveniences unknown their fathers; and that was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without realizing it, and the first source of evils they prepared for their descendants. For in addition to their continuing thus to soften body and mind (those conveniences having through habit lost almost all their pleasures, and being at the same time degenerated into true needs), being deprived of them because much more cruel than possessing hem was sweet; and they were unhappy about losing them without being happy about possessing them. At this point we can see a little better how the use of speech was established or imperceptibly perfected itself in the bosom of each family; and one can further conjecture how various particular causes could have extended the language and accelerated its progress by making it more necessary. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Great floods or earthquakes surrounded the inhabited areas with water or precipices. Upheavals of the globe detached parts of the mainland and broke them up into islands. Clearly among humans thus brought together and forced to live together, a common idiom must have been formed sooner than among those who wandered freely about the forests of the mainland. Thus it is quite possible that after their first attempts at navigation, the islanders brought the use of speech to us; and it is at least quite probable that society and languages came into being on islands and were perfected there before they were known on the mainland. Everything begins to take on a new appearance. Having previously wandered about the forest and having assumed a more fixed situation, humans slowly came together and united into different bands, eventually forming in each country a particular nation, united by mores and characteristic features, not by regulations and laws, but by the same kind of life and foods and by the common influence of the climate. Eventually a permanent proximity cannot fail to engender some intercourse among different families. Young people of difference genders live in neighbouring huts; the passing intercourse demanded by nature soon leads to another, through frequent contact with one another, no less sweet and more permanent. People became accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparison. Imperceptibly they acquire the ideas of merit and beauty which produce feelings of preference. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer get along without seeing one another again. A sweet and tender feeling insinuates itself into the soul and at the least opposition becomes an impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love’ discord triumphs, and the sweetest passion receives sacrificed of human blood. In proportion as ideas and sentiments succeed one another and as the mind and heart are trained, the human race continues to be tamed, relationships spread and bonds are tightened. People grew accustomed to gather in front of their huts or around a large tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle humans who had flocked together. Each one began to look at the others and to wan to be looked at oneself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly regarded. And this was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other. And the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. On 8 August 1960, a West Virginia-born chemical engineer named Monroe Rathbone, sitting in his office high over Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, New York United States of America, made a decision that future historians might someday choose to symbolize the end of the Second Wave era. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Few paid any attention when Mr. Rathbone, chief executive of the giant Exxon Corporation, took steps to cut back on the taxes Exxon paid to the oil-producing countries. His decision, though ignored by the Western press, struck like a thunderbolt at the governments of these countries, since virtually all their revenues derived from oil company payments. Within a few days the other major oil companies had followed Exxon’s lead. And one month later, on 9 September, in the fabled city of Baghdad, delegates of the hardest-hit countries met in emergency council. Backed to the wall, they formed themselves into a committee of oil-exporting governments. For fully thirteen years the activities of this committee, and even its name, were ignored outside the pages of a few petroleum industry journals. Until 1973, that is, when the Yom Kippur War broke out and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) suddenly stepped out of the shadows. Chocking off the World’s supply of crude oil, it sent the entire Second Wave economy into a shuddering down-spin. What OPEC did, apart from quadrupling its oil revenues, was to accelerate a revolution that was already brewing in the Second Wave techno-sphere. In the earsplitting clamour over the energy crisis that has since followed, so many plans, proposals, arguments, and counterarguments have been hurled at us that it is difficult to make sensible choices. Governments are just as confused as the proverbial human in the streets. One way to cut through the murk is to look beyond the individual technologies and policies to the principles underlying them. Once we do, we find that certain proposals are designed to maintain or extend the Second Wave energy base as we have known it, while others rest on new principles. The result is a radical clarification of the entire energy issue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The Second Wave energy base, we saw earlier, was premised on non-renewability; it drew from highly concentrated, exhaustible deposits; it relied on expansive, heavily centralized technologies; and it was nondiversified, resting on a relatively few sources and methods. These were the main features of the energy base in all Second Wave nations throughout the industrial era. Bearing these in mind, if we now look at the various plans and proposals generated by the oil crisis we can quickly tell which ones are mere extensions of the old and which are forerunners of something fundamentally new. And the basic question becomes not whether oil should sell at forty dollars (2021 inflation adjusted $363.78) per barrel or whether a nuclear reactor should rise at Seabrook or Grohnde. The larger question is whether any energy base deigned for industrial society and premised on these Second Wave principles can survive. Once asked in this form, the answer is inescapable. Through the past half-century, fully two thirds of the entire World’s energy supply has come from oil and gas. Most observers today, from the most fanatic conservationists to the deposed Shah of Iran, from solar freaks and Saudi sheikhs to the button-down, brief-case-carrying experts of many governments, agree that this dependency on fossil fuel cannot continue indefinitely, no matter how many new oil fields are discovered. Statistic vary. Disputes rage over how long World has before the ultimate crunch. The forecasting complexities are enormous and many past predications now look silly. Yet one thing is clear: no one is pumping gas oil back to replenish the supply. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Whether the end comes in some climatic gurgle or, more likely, in a succession of dizzyingly destabilizing shortages, temporary gluts, and deeper shortages, the oil epoch is ending. Iranians know this. Kuwaitis and Nigerians and Venezuelans know it. Saudi Arabians know it—which is why they are racing to build an economy based on something other than oil revenues. And although we are having issues supplying electricity to major cities in America, and an element used to create batteries in electric cars is expected to run out in the near future, this is why leaders are pushing to increase the demand of electric cars. Petroleum companies know it—which is why they are scrambling to diversify out of oil. (One president of a petroleum company told me at a dinner in Tokyo not long ago that, in his opinion, the oil giants would become industrial dinosaurs, as the railroads have. His time frame for this was breathtakingly short—years, not decades. Perhaps in the next ten years.) However, the debate over physical depletion is almost beside the point. For in today’s World it is price, not physical supply, that has the most immediate and significant impact. And here, if anything, the facts point even more strongly to the same conclusion. The suburban ideology fits somewhat uncomfortably into the urban dichotomy. Suburbs are neither one nor the other. Proponents of suburban living historically have resolved this by emphasizing how suburbs ideally combine the best features of urban and rural living. Opponents stress that they contain the worse of both Worlds. The argument that suburbs have best of both is not new. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
An 1873 promotional tract pushing development of the North Shore of Chicago proclaims, “The controversy which is sometimes brought, as to which offers the greater advantage, the country of the city, finds a happy answer in the suburban ideal which says both—the combination of the two—the city brought to the country. This is a practical and valuable reply. The city has its advantages and conveniences, the country its charm and health; the union of the two (a modern result of the railway), gives to humans all they could ask in this respect.” As the earlier section on romantic suburbs indicates, the suburb was to allow the nineteenth-century city man of business to have it both ways. One would make one’s fortune during the day in the dynamic and vita industrial city and then retire by commuter railroad to the health and domestic tranquility of the picturesque suburb. Although homes in turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs were far less grand and often occupied minimal size lots, the imagery of suburbs being at least surrounded by country persisted. Sometimes the open spaces lasted only until all the planned housing was constructed. Automobile suburbs built prior to the second World War, if anything, accentuated and sharpened the image of suburbs as being distinct from the city. Real estate developers and realtors found it was good for business to foster the image of both spatial and social distance from the central city. The mass suburbanization during the postwar years may have changed the reality, not the ideology, of suburban exclusivity. Builders and developers continued to advertise based upon the image of suburbia as an exclusive enclave where one’s fellow suburbanites would all be upwardly mobile and community involved. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Advertisements spoke less about square footage than about “moving up” and the “quality of life.” Nonetheless, the reality was that suburbia was now open to virtually all. Exclusively had come down to the basics of being employed and European American. Some of the postwar criticisms by cultural elites of the new suburbs were, in fact, a recognition of his change. Literary and cultural criticisms of standardized subdivision housing as an aesthetic wasteland, and the attacks on the middle-brow values of those inhabiting such housing, were in part an elitist response to rapid social change. This “there goes the neighbourhood” response, combined with a glorification of the past, was clearly evident in the comments of influential intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford. One can feel the disdain when he described postwar suburbia as “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at unform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group…conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold.” To many of the urban critics of the 1950s and 1960s, the major crime of the new suburbs was that they were common. Unlike the affluent and exclusive suburbs of earlier decades, the new suburbs, and suburbanites, were seen as lacking the true urbanite’s sense of good taste. Underlying the criticisms is the assumption that the new suburbanites went to the wrong schools, read the wrong books, and even bought the wrong furniture. It was as if former workers and service help had aspired to rise above their true station in life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
There is a World of other people and things—the point of individuation. At this point, there may be either a more home-loving or a more space-loving orientation, but either way, if all goes well, a person will emerge with an integrated personality. However, all may not go well. A person may be struck by a trauma, after which development will be fundamentally influenced by the method which that person invented to cope with the trauma. The Basic Fault is at the point at which people begin to have to “cope.” Use of the English “coping” refers to ego-function! It gives recognition to our ability to survive and to deal with people and things in order to survive, not necessarily with much regard to the moral dimension. “Coping” has two independent and equally relevant root, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: A. Form the Old French coper, Modern French couper, to strike (a blow), to cut. From this root we get our meanings (1) to strike; to come to blows; encounter; engage; (2) to be or prove oneself a match for, content successfully with; (3) to have to do with; (4) to meet, to come in contact (hostile and friendly) with; (5) to match a thing with another equivalent. B. From Middle English Kopen – to buy (cf. cheap). From this root we get (1) to buy; (2) to exchange, barter; (3) to make an exchange, bargain. There is even a third root, from cope meaning cape: to cover with a cope, to hang over like a coping. All very appropriate. To return to our theme after this linguistic digression, trauma is not necessarily a single even. Trauma is more likely to be caused by a long-standing situation in which there was some painful misunderstanding—a lack of fit—between the child and the adults around it. #RandolphHarrs 16 of 25
True, despite the general lack of fit, in some cases some adult may be on the child’s side, but much more often, immature and weak individuals have to cope on their own with traumatic situations: either no help is available, or the only help is of a kind that is hardly more than a continuation of the misunderstand, and thus useless. For lack of the right support, the individual is forced to find its own method of coping, a method hit upon a time of despair or thrown at it by some un-understanding adult who may be a well-wisher, or just indifferent, or negligent, or even careless or hostile. This method will be incorporated in the individual’s personality, and thereafter anything beyond or contrary to this method will strike the person as a frightening and more or less impossible proposition. The individual’s further development will then be prescribed or at least limited by this method which, although helpful in some respects, is often costly, and above all, alien. Most patients cannot tell us what causes their resentment, lifelessness, dependence, what the fault or the defect in them is…some can express it by phantasies about perfect partners, perfect harmony, untroubled contentment….Over and over they repeat that they feel let down, that nothing in the World can ever be worth while unless something hey were deprived of is restored to them. Sophisticated patients may express this something irretrievably lost or gone wrong as the male organ or the breast, usually felt to have magical qualities, and speak of male organ or breast, or castration fear. However, in nearly all cases this is coupled with an unquenchable and incontestable feeling that if the loss cannot be made good, the patient oneself will remain no go. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
It is always a dry season until you give way to the sorrowing of the heart. Only then will the drops of devotion come. Heart-felt sorrow opens many a door. Deep-down compulsion slams the door in your face every time. We may stumble onto happiness, but, remember, we are exiles and the World is alive with peril. You laugh at the defects of the World, but your own spiritual defects you shrug off. Yet hey bedevil your soul, and what do you do about it? You laugh. Nobody laughs in public these days, expect you. You laugh uproariously, but the joke is on you. It is the other way around. Your peccadillos are laughing at you when you should be weeping uncontrollably where no one can see. What is missing is the fear of God and a working conscious. If we do not feel the pain of reformation in our souls, Joy or Liberty cannot be true and good. Happy the self-actualized who can scatter one’s distractions and collect oneself into holy sorrowing of the heart! Happy is the self-actualized who can shield one’s snow-white conscience from bilious gray pigeons! That is to say, from the dropping of one’s own inordinate affections. Face it! When it comes to power, it takes a good habit to whip a bad habit. If you do not care a fig for the World, the World will not care a farthing for you. Do not inundate yourself with the affairs of the low and unlovely, and do not insinuate yourself into the affairs of the high and mighty. Remember, you are a member of a holy company dedicated to spiritual progress. Hence, keep a steely eye on yourself. When necessary, unbraid yourself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
If you cast a knowing wink at the World and the World does not return the wink, do not tear up, do not waste a single tear of your own. Give serious thought to this possibility. You may not have the right stuff to be a servant of God and live the devout life. After all, we do not have many consolations in this sort of life; at least as Flesh counts them. That is what our experience tells us. And rarer still, at least as the Soul counts them, are the Divine Consolations. There has go to be a reason, and it is sin. We just do not seek the sorrowing of the heart hard enough. The least we could is throw our vanities to the wind. Are you worth Divine Consolation? Face it, all you are worth is a bundle of snakes! When you are contrite to the point of perfection, the face your present to the World is never cheerful, always chary. The good person has more than enough to be sorrowful for, to weep for. No matter how you look at it—and your neighbour will confirm it—no one lives on this Earth without tribulation. The more you eye the condition of your own soul, the more openly you weep. The causes of just sorrow and internal contrition are our sins and the vice that lead to our sins. And is it not true that we spend so much time on Earthly grapplings that we have almost no time to give to celestial contemplations? Death is approaching more quickly than life is unfolding. Think about that now, and put more shoulder into your reformation of life. We are on the near side of death now, but on the far side await he pains of Hell or Purgatory. Weigh that in your heart, and maybe now you will be willing to undertake the laborious program of reform, readying yourself for the Final Rigour. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
Why is it that considerations like these do no hit the target? Why are we as blind to the blandishments banded about us? Are we as lazy and loutish as that? What spirit is left in that wretched body of yours? A whistle? A whimper? A whisper? Pray, therefore, humbly to the Lord that He give your spirit of contrition. Say as the Psalmist said (80.5), “With the bread of tears satisfy my hunger, Lord, and with a measure of tears satisfy my thirst.” The number of the predestined is certain, and can neither be increased nor diminished. The number of predestine is certain. Some have said that it was formally, but not materially certain; as if we were to say that it was certain that a hundred or a thousand would be saved; not however these or those individuals. However, this destroys the certainty of predestination; of which we spoke of above. Therefore we must say that to God the number of predestined is certain, not only formally, but also materially. It must, however, be observed that the number of the predestined is said to be certain to God, not by reason of His knowledge, because, that is to say, He knows how many will be saved (for in this way the number drops of rain and the sands of the sea are certain to God); but by reason of His deliberate choice and determination. For the further evidence of which we must remember that every agent intends to make something finite, as is clear from what has been said above when we treated of the infinite. Now whosoever intends some definite measure in one’s effect thinks out some definite number in the essential parts, which are by their very nature required for the perfection of the whole. For of those things which are required not principally, but only account of something else, one does not select any definite number “per se”; but one accepts and uses the in such numbers as are necessary on account of that other thing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
For instance, a builder thinks out the definite measurements of a house, and also the definite number of rooms which one wishes to make in the house; and definite measurements of the walls and roof; one does not, however, select a definite number of stones, but accepts and uses just so many as are sufficient for the required measurements of the wall. So also must we consider concerning God in regard to the whole Universe, which is His effect. For He pre-ordained the measurements of the whole of the Universe, and what number would befit the essential parts of that Universe—that is to say, which have in some way been ordained in perpetuity; how many spheres, how many stars, how many elements, and how many species. Individuals, however, which undergo corruption, are no ordained as I were chiefly for the good of the Universe, but in a secondary way, inasmuch as the good of the species is preserved through them. Whence, although God knows the total number of individuals, the number of oxen, flies and such like, is not pre-ordained by God “per se”; but divine providence produces just so many as are sufficient for the preservation of the species. Now of all creatures the rational creature is chiefly ordained for the good of the Universe, being as much incorruptible; more especially those who attain to eternal happiness, since they more immediately reach the ultimate end. Whence the number of the predestination is certain to God; not only by way of knowledge, but also by way of a principal pre-ordination. It is not exactly the same thing in the cause of the number of the reprobate, who would seem o be pre-ordained by God for the good of the elect, in whose regard “all things work unto good” Romans 8.28. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Concerning the number of all the predestined, some say that so many human will be saved as Angels fell; some so many as there were Angels left; others, as many as the number of Angels created by God. It is, however, better to say that, “to God alone is known the number for whom is reserved eternal happiness [From the ‘secret’ prayer of the missal, “pro vivis et defunctis.’]” These words of Deuteronomy must be taken as applied to those who are marked out by God beforehand in respect to present righteousness. For there is increased and diminished, but not the number of the predestined. The reason of the quantity of any one part must be judged from the proportion of that part of the whole. Thus in God the reason why He has made so many stars, or so many species of things, or predestined so many, according to the proportion of the principal parts to the good of the whole Universe. The good that is proportionate to the common state of nature is to be found in the majority, and is wanting in the majority. Thus is clear that is the majority of humans have a sufficient knowledge for the guidance of life; and those who have not this knowledge are sad to be half-witted or foolish; but they who attain to a profound knowledge of things intelligible are a very small minority in respect to the rest. Since their eternal happiness, consisting in the vision of God, exceeds the common state of nature, and especially in so far as this is deprived of grace through the corruption of original sin, those who are saved are in the minority. In this especially, however, appears the mercy of God, that He has chosen some for that salvation, from which very many in accordance with the common course and tendency of nature fall short. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
All thinking keeps one’s awareness out of the Overself. That is why even thinking about the Overself merely produced another thought. Only in the case of the self-actualized, who has established oneself in the Overself, is thinking no barrier at all. In this case, thinking may coexist with the larger awareness. So it is not enough to be a good thinker; one also has to learn how to be a good non-thinker. Of course, the way to do this is through the practice of deep and meaningful prayer. Appetite has really become an artificial and abnormal thing, having taken the place of true hunger, which alone is natural. The one is a sign of bondage but the other, of freedom. It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life uncecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of one’s ethical standard. If the body is intolerant of particular treatments and allergic to particular foods, it should not be forced to accept them. When either faith healing or naturopathic treatment is too passive, when it refrains from timely co-operation with nature by the use of positive means, by they nontoxic medicines or essential operations, it becomes guilty of sacrificing the patient to its own narrowness. No healer’s treatment is always successful nor is the cure always permanent. Failures are many and relapses are common. Those who shout and splutter from evangelistic public platforms exhibit the ego’s arrogance, not the Overself’s quiet humility. They hold the view which conforms with their presuppositions, their inborn tendencies and governing prejudices, in short, with their little ego, not their impersonal higher Self. This is why there are so many contesting theories, why the body’s ill health may cause the mind to be governed by negative thoughts, why this conflict of authorities shows their worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
All these cults and groups which acknowledge the power of mind over body but which leave out the acknowledgment of the body’s power over the mind, are out of balance and so out of truth to that extent. This statement may be a matter of arguable theory partisan adherents of either side, but it is a mater of tested fact with creative leaders who consciously exercise both powers. If mental and spiritual healing agents are also joined in, the physical cure will surely be accelerated and the physical therapy will surely be helped. In this way the individual limitations of the method of treatment being used will be overcome and each healing agent will contribute to bringing about a complete and successful result. It is foolish to believe that there is any particular healing method which has only to be applied for it to be universally and equally successful or that there is any particular human healer who has only to be visited for one to be cure. If we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, something will have gone out of us as people; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the World, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural World and competent to belong in it. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
And a redeemer shall come to America and to those in Jacob who turn from transgression, saith the Lord. And as for Me, this is My covenant with them, saith the Lord: My spirit that is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart out of your mouth, nor out of the mouth of your children nor your children’s children henceforth and forever. Thou art holy, O Thou that art enthroned upon the praises of America. And one called to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. [And they receive sanction one from the other, and say: Holy upon Earth, the works of His mighty power; Holy forever and to all eternity is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of the radiance of His glory.] And a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me a mighty chorus proclaiming: Blessed be the glory of the Lord everywhere. [Then a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me the mighty moving sound of those who uttered praises and said: Blessed be the glory of the Lord from the place of His abode.] The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. [Then Kingdom of the Lord is established forever and to all eternity.] The time has come to arouse the conscience of all those who sincerely the Good and the Right to their duty in the matter of harming innocent terrestrial beings and the environment and vehicles, a conscience which, if it could speak unperverted by racial habits, would emphatically repeat the Mosaic commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” These are cruelties practiced on objects to gain wealth and pleasures for others, sometimes clothes, entertainment and medicinal drugs. The human claim of necessity as a justification is a mistake one. Whether forged of metal or born of flesh, every form of life has one unquenchable thirst, the urge for freedom. Christianity is not something to be endured, but something to be treasured. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Oh Lord Help Me! Your Signature Appears in the Devil’s Book on the Date of 11 April 1692!
Every Bible believer should have this concept; nothing is impossible with God. If you genuinely want to make spiritual progress, then fear two things, or so the Book of Proverbs has suggested (19.23). Life with God. Life without God. Discipline your senses. Do not let them dance you at the end of a string. There are several points at which, had circumstances been slightly different, the course of events at Salem might have changed entirely, and one of these is the examination of Rebecca Nurse. If she had held the stage alone her evident sincerity might have convinced the community that they had been mistaken, and she may have been exonerated of witchcraft before she was killed. However, unfortunately someone else was arrested and examined at the same time. This was Dorcas Good, the five-year-old daughter of Sarah Good, and within two days of her arrest she had provided Salem its second confession. Oh yes, she told the examining magistrates, she had a familiar. It was a little snake that used to such her at the lowest joint of her forefinger. Here, as on a number of other occasions, the examiners were not at first willing to take a confession at face value. Where did the snake such, they asked; Was it here? “pointing to other places” on the child’s body. No, said the child, not there. Here. And she pointed to her forefinger, where the examiners “observed a deep red spot, about the bigness of a flea bite.” Probably it was a flea bite, and the child had only imagined that she had a familiar who sucked her blood there. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
At this distance in time, it is impossible to know for certain what caused that deep red spot. However, there is no difficulty in imagining the feelings of the examiners when they say it. All of them heard that a demon in the shape of an animal came to the witch and sucked her blood, and here was what seemed to be they physical evidence of just such an “accursed suckage” on the finger of a five-year-old child, pointed out by the child herself as corroboration of her confession, corroboration which the examiners had at first been hesitant to accept. They must have been thoroughly horrified. If five-year-old children were sucking demons, then the Devil had a far surer foothold in Massachusetts than anyone has imagined, and strenuous investigation would be necessary to discover its extent. Yet their horror must have been mixed with triumph, for Dorcas Good’s confession confirmed the rightness of their procedure in imprisoning her mother, since the child accused her mother as well as herself and did it without prodding. Who had given her the little snake, they asked her. Was it the Black Man? Oh no, Dorcas replied, it was not the Black Man; it was her mother, whom she continued to accuse, testifying at her trial that she had three familiars, birds, “one black, one yellow and that these birds hurt the children and afflicted persons.” Dorcas Good’s confession, with the accompanying physical evidence of her Devil’s mark, must have quieted the doubt of the investigation that many had felt at the arrest of Rebecca Nurse. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Because from this time on expressions of sympathy for Rebecca Nurse were met not with doubt but with suspicion. On Sunday, April 3, 1692 Samuel Parris preached on John 6, 70: Have not I chosen twelve, and one of your is a Devil. The implication of the text was clear. The Puritans believed that church members had been chosen—elected—by God. Thus Parris’ text suggested that a church member had betrayed her election just as Judas had betrayed Christ’s choice. In short, it suggested that Rebecca Nurse was guilty before she had been tried. As soon as he had spoken, Sarah Cloyse, a sister of Rebecca Nurse, rose from her seat, left the meetinghouse and slammed the door behind her “to the amazement of the congregation.” They were amazed, of course, not at her resentment of Parris but at her public expression of it in the midst of a church service, a virtually unheard of action in Puritan Massachusetts. It was quite enough to call Sarah Cloyse to the attention of the afflicted girls, who shortly began to see her apparition in their fits, taking the Devil’s sacrament of “red bread and drink.” “Oh Goodwife cloyse,” said one, “I do not think to see you here! Is this a time to receive the sacrament? You ran away on the Lord’s Day, and scorned to receive it in the meetinghouse, and is this a time to receive it? I wonder at you!” This was the third time in four days that the girls had mentioned a witches’ sacrament. The confessions of Tituba and Dorcas Good were beginning to bear fruit; the girls and the community were no longer thinking in terms of individual witches but were beginning to think of an organized society of witches with its own structure and its own sacraments. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In spite of the growing belief that they were facing a diabolical conspiracy, the community was still moving relatively slowly. Goodwife Cloyse slammed the door of Salem Village meetinghouse on April 3. The girls must have seen her apparition within twenty-four hours, because it was on April 4 that Jonathan Walcott and Nathaniel Ingersoll entered complaints against her and Elizabeth Procter, the wife of John Procter. Yet warrants were not issued until the eight, and examinations were not conducted until the eleventh. At least a part of the delay may have been occasioned by the community’s decision to take this next examination more seriously than the early ones, perhaps as a result of the belief that they were facing an organized conspiracy. In any case, for this examination John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin were joined on the bench by four other magistrates, including Samuel Sewall of Boston and Thomas Danforth, the deputy-governor of the colony, who acted as presiding magistrate. Anyone who has read anything of Sewall’s Diary—even the brief excerpts that find their way into the typical anthology of American literature—will know that he was a person of considerable shrewdness, kindness, and common sense. However, the presence of Sewall and the other three new magistrates made no difference in the procedures of the examination. The transcript does not say who asked the questions, but we may assume from the similarity of this to the earlier transcripts that most of the questions still came from Hathorne. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Hathorne began by asking John, Parris’ Carib Indian slave, who had hurt him? Good Procter, said John, and then Goody Cloyse. What had they done to him? Choked him, he said, and brought him the book [the Devil’s book] to sign. (This choking is, of course, one more instance of the globus hystericus, the hysterical lump in the throat, coupled with an hallucination.) Did he know Goody Cloyse and Goody Procter? (That is, did he know the persons themselves or had he only seen their apparitions?) Yes, he answered. “Here is Goody Cloyse.” At this point Goodwife Cloyse could contain herself no longer, and burst out, “When did I hurt thee?” “A great many times.” “Oh,” said Sarah Cloyse, “you are a grievous liar.” The bench questioned John further, then turned to Mary Walcott, whose testimony was interrupted by her falling into fits, and to Abigail Williams. It was these two who testified that they had seen Sarah Cloyse at a meeting of witches (including Rebecca Nurse, Martha Corey, and Sarah Good) at Deacon Ingersoll’s upon which “Sarah Cloyse asked for water, and sat down as one seized with a dying fainting fit [“dying” here has the now archaic meaning of losing consciousness; “fainting” does not mean to lose consciousness but to lose strength]; and several of the afflicted fell into fits, and some of them cried out, Oh! her spirit is gone to prison to her sister Nurse.” The bench then turned to the case of Elizabeth Procter. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
“Elizabeth Procter, you understand whereof you are charged, viz. to be guilty of sundry acts of witchcraft; what say you to it? Speak the truth. And so you that are afflicted, you must speak the truth, as you will answer it before God another day. Mary Walcott, doth this woman hurt you?” “I never saw her so as to be hurt by her.” “Mercy Lewis, does she hurt you?” Her mouth was stopped. “Ann Putnam, does she hurt you?” She could no speak. “Abigail Williams, does she hurt you?” her hand was thrust in her own mouth. “John (Indian), does this woman hurt you?” “This is the woman that came in her shift and choked me.” “Did she ever bring the book?” “Yes sir.” “What to do?” “To write.” “What, this woman?” “Yes, sir.” “Are you sure of it?” “Yes sir.” Again Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam were spoke to by the court, but neither of them could make any answer, by reason of dumbness or other fits. “What do you say, Goody Proctor, to these things?” “I take God in Heaven to be my witness that I know nothing of it, no more than the child unborn.” Then bench returned to questioning the girls, and this time they were able to answer. Yes, Goody Procter had afflicted them, and many times. Upon this she looked at them, and they fell into fits. When they recovered they were asked, had she brought the book o them to sign? Yes, and boasted that her maid, Mary Warren, had signed it. When Abigail Williams asked her to face whether she had not told her that Mary Warren had signed the book, Elizabeth Proctor answered, “Dear child, it is not so. There is another judgment, dear child.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Abigail’s reply was to fall again into fits, in which Ann Putnam joined her, and soon both were crying out that they saw Goodwife Procter’s apparition perched above the spectators on a beam. Soon they were crying out of John Procter as well, saying he was a wizard, and at this “many, if not all of the bewitched had grievous fits.” Then they saw Procter’s apparition. Abigail Williams called out, “There is Goodman Procter going to Mrs. Pope,” and immediately Goodwife Pope fell into a fit. “There is Goodman Procter going to hurt Good Bibber,” and immediately Goodwife Bibber fell into a fit. Elizabeth Procter’s demeanor had been as meek and as Christian as that of Rebecca Nurse, but how many would remember it after such a horrendous display of fits and such graphic hallucinations? Certainly Samuel Sewall did not. His brief diary entry for April 11 reads: Went o Salem, where, in the Meeting-house, the persons accused of witchcraft were examined; was a very great assembly; ‘twas awful to see how the afflicted persons were agitated. Mr. Noyes prayed at the beginning, and Mr. Higginson concluded. Indeed, the outcry against John Procter was so terrible that he was committed with his wife, and the following day the Proctors, with Sarah Cloyse, Rebecca Nurse, Martha Corey, and Sarah Good were sent o Boston jail. The accusation that Mary Warren, the Procters’ maidservant, had signed the Devil’s book had a special significance, because she had previously been one of the afflicted girls. However, lately she had taken to denying both her own testimony and that of others. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The girls’ evidence was false, she said; they “did but dissemble.” By this she did not mean that they were simply lying. She meant that they were living in two different Worlds of experience—that of their fits, and that of normal perception—and the World of their fits was false. She told several people that “the magistrates might as well examine Keysar’s daughter that had been distracted many years and take notice of what she said as well as any of the afflicted persons. For,” said Mary Warren, “when I was afflicted I thought I saw the apparitions of a hundred persons” (for she said her head was distempered [so] that she could not tell what she said). And when she was well again she could not say that she saw any of the apparitions aforesaid. One of the other girls, Mercy Lewis, was also capable at this time of distinguishing between the hallucinations of her fits and the World of ordinary perceptions. A young man named Ephraim Sheldon testified that “I, this deponent, being at the house of lieutenant Ingersoll when Mercy Lewis was in one of her fits, I heard her cry out of Goodwife Cloyse. And when she came to herself she was asked who she saw. She answered, she saw nobody. They demanded of her whether or no she did not see Goodwife Nurse, or Goodwife Cloyse, or Goodwife Corey. She answered, she saw nobody. But Mercy Lewis was seldom asked to choose between her hallucinations and her ordinary perceptions. She was a maid in the household of Thomas Putnam, whose daughter, Anne Putnam, Jr. was one of the most violently afflicted girls and one of the most ready in making accusations, and whose wife, Ann Putnam, Sr. was not far behind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The Putnam household was in fact a much a center for hysterical fits and accusations as the Parris household, and given such a home environment it is scarcely surprising that Mercy Lewis never reached the point that Mary Warren achieved, of denying the general validity of her hallucinations. However, the Procter household was a very different matter. John Procter may, as has been suggested, have beaten Mary Warren out of some of her fit. Certainly he often threatened her with beating, and with worse; on one occasion he threated to burn her out of her fit with a pair of hot tongs. Another time he threatened to drown her. In her fits she had tried to run into the fire and into water, and he had prevented her, but he told her once that if it happened again he would let her destroy herself. Once he was in the room while she was in a fi and said to her, “If you are afflicted, I wish you were more afflicted.” Indeed, he added, he wished all the afflicted persons were worse afflicted. “Master,” she asked, “what makes you say so?” “Because,” said John Procter, “you go to bring out innocent persons.” Mary Warren answered that “that could not be.” However, her hysteria was vulnerable to his persistent skepticism, or to his threats, or to his violence, or to a combination of the three. She did return to sanity, and she did deny the validity of her hallucinations. This is another of those points at which the course of Salem witchcraft might have changed. If Cotton Mather, who had shown himself in Boston more interested in curing the Goodwin children than in catching witches, had been present then Mary Warren would probably have retained her sanity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
If Samuel Willard had been present, who at Groton had seized on and explored every contradiction in the testimony of Elizabeth Knap, she might also have remained sane. However, Mather and William were not present, and the magistrates and ministers of Salem and of Sale Village were not interested in the fact that Mary Warren had recovered from her fits and was, correctly, calling them insanity. They were interested in the fact that Mary Warrens specter was now engaged in tormenting the other afflicted persons. They were not instantly sure of themselves; Mary Warren was accused of singing the Devil’s book on April 11, and she was not examined until the nineteenth. However, by that date the magistrates had plainly made up with minds. “You were a little while ago an afflicted person,” said Hathorne. “Now you are an afflicter. How comes this to pass?” “I look up to God,” said Mary Warren, “and take it to be a great mercy of God.” “What!” said Hathorne, “Do you take it to be a great mercy to afflict others?” The afflicted persons had begun having fits as soon as Mary Warren approached the bar; shortly they were all in fits. Hysteria is communicable, and Mary Warren had previously been subject to it. Shortly Mary Warren fell into a fit, and some of the afflicted cried out that she was going to confess, but Goody Corey and Procter and his wife came in, in their apparition, and struck her down and said she should tell nothing. Mary Warren continued a good space in a fit [so] that she did neither see, nor hear, nor speak. Afterwards she started up and said, “I will speak,” and cried out “Oh! I am sorry for it, I am sorry for it,” and wringed her hands, and fell a little while into a fit again, and them came to speak, but immediately her teeth were set. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
And then she fell into a violent fit and cried out, “Oh Lord help me! Oh good Lord save me!” And then afterwards cried again, “I will tell, I will tell,” and then fell into a dead fit again. And afterwards cried, “I will tell! They did! They did! They did!” and then fell into a violent fit again. After a little recovery she cried, “I will tell! They brought me to it!” and then fell into a fit again, which fits continuing she was ordered to be had out…When Mary Warren had been returned to prison she again recovered her sanity and again denied the validity of what she saw and said in her fits. The magistrates continued to examine her—sometimes in prison and sometimes in public—for the next three weeks, continually refusing to accept her denials and continually demanding that she confess. By the end of the process she had incriminated herself, her mistress, and finally her master. Once, she said, she had caught at an apparition that looked like Goody Corey, but pulling it down into her lap had found it to be John Procter. By the time she gave up her denials she was having fits so violent that her legs could not be uncrossed without breaking them. The primary characteristic of Satan, aside from his hubris and despair, is his ability to cast evil suggestions into men, women, children, animals, and nature. Evil has been defined as taking pleasure in the intentional inflicting of harm on innocent others, and 70 percent of people believe Satan is real. Satan is a Dark Lord, and is arguably the most powerful entity in existence, with God and Death as the only others that come close to matching his power. Satan is insanely cruel and barbaric. #RandolphHarris 11 of 194
Even by demon standards, Satan is extremely monstrous, finding it fun and relaxing to inflict suffering onto others. In recent decades, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of the supernatural in a Victorian context. Studied on the nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism, magic, and folklore have highlighted that the Victorian era was ridden with specters and learned warlocks and witches. After Oliver Fisher Winchester passed away, he left his deluxe pair of ivory-gripped Volcanic Navy pistols, serial numbers 1401 and 1507—the only firearms known to have been owned by Mr. Winchester himself, to family members. T.G. Bennett, who joined Winchester in 1870, among other things, received a God Tiffany & Co. watch. These artifacts are directly associated with the two driving forces in Winchester history. Order, privilege, and property in abundant proportions have always been associated with the Winchester name. The Winchester rifle kept the family from perishing in the September massacres, and they allowed enslaved people to fight for their freedom. The Winchester family had wonderful rotations on the wheel of Fate of that dreadful time. William Wirt Winchester, the son of Oliver Winchester, was a handsome young fellow, frank, high-spirited, and of a brisk and happy temperament; which, however, modified by the many misfortunes he had undergone, was not permanently changed. William Winchester was married to Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862. In 1866, they had a daughter, Anne Winchester who is rumored to have died six weeks after birth from being fed on by vampire. Vampire entities have been recorded in most cultures; the term vampire was popularized in Western Europe after reports of an 18th century mass hysteria of a pre-existing folk belief in the Balkans and Eastern Europe that, in some cases, resulted in corpses being staked and people being accused of vampirism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The Ark was a 400-ton English merchant ship hired in 1633 by Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore to bring roughly 140 English colonists and their equipment and supplies to the new colony and Province of Maryland, one of the original thirteen colonies of British North America on the Atlantic Ocean seaboard. At the age of 22 John Winchester I (1611 – 1694) of Cranbrook, Kent England, an ancestor of William Winchester, made the historic journey to America on the Ark. On 22 November 1633, The Ark was accompanied by the smaller 40-ton pinnace Dove. The two ships, Ark and Dove, sailed from the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England. Three days later a storm in the English Channel separated Ark from Dove. When Dove disappeared from view, she was flying distress lanterns, and those aboard Ark assumed she had sunk in the storm. A second more violent storm hit Ark on 29 November 1633 and lasted three days, finally subsiding on 1 December. In the midst of the storm, the mainsail was split in half and the crew was forced to tie down the tiler and whipstaff so the ship lay ahull, keeping her bow to the wind and waves as she drifted. This was the last bad weather Ark encountered on the trans-Atlantic voyage. On 25 December 1633, wine was passed out to celebrate Christmas. The following day, 30 colonists fell ill with a fever allegedly brought on by excessive drinking and 12 died, but legend has it that Vampire twins boarded the dove, killing everyone on board, then joined the crew and woke from the short hibernation nearly a month after the Dove vanished, feeding on the crew. John Winchester survived the attack, although he was bitten. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
On 24 February 1633, the Ark arrived at Point Comfort (now called Old Point Comfort) at the mouths of the James, Nansemon, and Elizabeth rivers, which formed the great harbor of Hampton Roads in Virginia This ended the ocean voyage which had lasted slightly over three months, of which 66 days were actually spent at sea. None the less, John Winchester wrote in his journal about being attacked by beast who moved so fast he could barely see them, and being left weakened and unable to properly digest food nor could he tolerate prolong sun exposure. The journal was passed down several generations, and this was actually the catalyst that inspired Oliver Winchester to mean the Winchester Repeating Rife. William Winchester had plenty of capacity for enjoyment in him; and as his position in the Winchester company was very isolated, his mind had become enlightened on social and political matters. His wife Sarah Winchester was wonderfully well educated, and surprisingly beautiful. Not too tall to offend the taste of her compatriots, and not too short to be dignified and graceful, she had a symmetrical figure, and a small, well-poised head, whose profuse, shining, silken dark-brown hair she wore as nature intended, in a shower of curls, never touched by the hand of the coiffeur—curls which clustered over her brow, and fell far down on her shapely neck. Her features were fine; the eyes very dark, and the mouth very red; the complexion clear and rather pale, and the style of the face and its expression lofty. When Mrs. Sarah Winchester were a child, people were accustomed to say she was pretty and refined enough to belong to the aristocracy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Mrs. Winchester was deeply impressed with the sense of her supreme importance to her husband William Winchester, and fully comprehended that he would be influenced by and through her when all other persuasion or argument would be unavailing. Of course, Mr. Winchester was handsome, elegant, engaging, with all the external advantages, and devoid of the vice, errors, and hopelessness infatuated unscrupulousness other possessed; he had naturally quikc intelligence, and some real knowledge and comprehension of life had been knocked into him by the hard-hitting blows to Fate. Unfortunately Oliver Winchester passed away 10 December 1880, and his son William shortly after on 7 March 1881 from “tuberculosis,” but many also suspected Oliver and William had succumbed to a vampire attack. In fac, the New England vampire panic was the reaction to an outbreak of tuberculosis in the 19th throughout Rhode Island, Eastern Connecticut, Vermont, and other parts of New England. Tuberculosis was thought to be caused by the decreased consuming the life of their surviving relatives. Bodies were exhumed and internal organs ritually burned to stop the “vampire” from attacking the local population and to prevent the spread of the disease. As the story goes, Sarah felt she was cursed, inherited a fortune, and moved to San Jose, California USA; she purchased an 18-room farmhouse and built an extensive, lofty mansion with handsome rooms. Her bedroom was splendid. Her bed was made of black oak, elaborately carved. The curtains were contrived to hang from the ceiling. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Mrs. Winchester’s niece’s bedroom had a high folding screen of black-and-gold Japanese pattern, also a relic of the grand old times, which stood about six feet on the outside of the rails that shut in her bed. The floor was of shining oak, testifying to the conscientious and successful labourers; and on the spot where the railing of the alcove opened by a prey quaint device sundering the intertwined arms of a pair of very chubby cherub, a square space in the floor was richly carved. After Mrs. Winchester passed away in 1922, the finding of hidden treasure was not the first discovery in the mansion. The movers who were hired to auction off her furniture in San Francisco also has a keen scent and an unleasable thirst for the blood of aristocrats. Without receiving the instructions of what to do with the 19th casket, silver gilt casket by Alderman Abel Heywood they found burned beneath the floor boards, the movers knew they had to get it out of the house at once, unseen by the servants who were at supper. They took the casket from its hiding-place. It was heavy, though not large. They managed it, however, and, the brief preparation completed, the moment of parting arrived. The young male mover and his betrothed were standing on the spot whence they had taken the casket; the craved rail with the heavy curtains might have been the outer sanctuary of an alter, and the bride and bridegroom before it, with earnest, loving faces, and clasped hands. “Farewell, Dennis,” said Rachel; “promise me once more, in this the moment of our parting, that you will come to me again, if you re alive, when the danger is passed.” “Whether I am living or dead, Rachel,” said Dennis Diderot, strongly moved by some sudden inexplicable instinct, “I will come to you again.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Dennis amassed a good deal of money from being engaged in this very lucrative job. This was the construction of several steep descents. Meanwhile, Rachel had decided to move into the Winchester mansion after it was vacant. She and her new husband had left some furniture behind so they could occupy a small part of the mansion until it was sold. The moon was high in the dark sky, and Rachel’s beams were flung across the oak floor of her bedroom, through the great window with the balcony, when the girl has gone to sleep with her lover’s name upon her lips in prayer, awoke with a sudden start, and sat up in her bed. An unbearable dread was upon her; and yet she was unable to utter a cry, she was unable to make another movement. Had she heard a voice? No, no one had spoken, nor did she fancy that she heard any sound. However, within her, somewhere inside her heaving bosom, something said, “Rachel!” And she listened and knew what it was. And it spoke, and said: “I promised you that, living or dead, I would come to you again, And I have some to you; but no living.” She was quite awake. Even in the agony of her fear she looked around, and tried to move her hands, to feel her dress and the bedclothes, and to fix her eyes on some familiar object, that she might satisfy herself, before this racing and beating, this whirling and yet icy chilliness of her blood should kill her outright, that she was really awake. “I have come to you; but not living.” What an awful thing that voice speaking within her was! She tried to rise her head and to look towards the place where the moonbeams marked bright lines upon the polished floor, which lost themselves at the foot of the Japanese screen. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
She forced herself to this effort, and lifted her eyes, wild and haggard with fear, and there, the moonbeams at his feet, the tall black screen behind him, she saw Dennis Diderot. She saw him; she looked at him quite steadily; she rose, slowly, with a mechanical movement, and stood upright beside her bed, clasping her forehead with her hands, and gazing at him. He stood motionless, in the dress he had worn when he took leave of her, the light-coloured riding-coat of the period, with a short cape, and a large white cravat tucked into the double breast. The white muslin was flecked, and the front of the riding-coat was deeply stained, with blood. He looked at her, and she took a step froward—another—then, with a desperate effort, she dashed open the railing and flung herself on her knees before him, with her arms stretched out as if to clasp him. However, he was no longer there; the moonbeams fell clear and cold upon the polished floor, and lost themselves where Rachel lay, at the foot of the screen, her head upon the ground, and every sign of life was gone from her. And in Spain the corpse of a young man who had suffered a violent death was discovered. He was attired in a light-coloured riding-coast, and had been stabbed through the heart. At least Rachel did not have to mourn her lover who had kept his promise, and come back to her. And once, every year, on certain summer night, two ghostly figures are seen in the Winchester mansion, by any who have courage and patience to watch for the, gliding along the floors of the mansion. Therefore, do not destroy the World. I have only nibbled the grasses of my lover’s meadow. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
I hope nothing bad happens to you. Do not. Do not destroy the World. The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, long forbearing, and abundant in kindness. The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works. All Thy works shall praise Thee, O Lord, and Thy faithful ones shall bless Thee. They shall declare the glory of thy Kingdom, and talk of Thy might; to make known to the sons of men His mighty acts, and the glorious majesty of His Kingdom. Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and Thy dominion endureth throughout all generations. The Lord upholdeth all who fall, and raiseth up all who are bowed down. The eyes of all look hopefully to Thee, and Thou givest them their food in due season. Thou openest Thy hand, and satisfiest every living thing with favour. The Lord is righteous in all His ways, and gracious in all His works. The Lord is near unto all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of the that revere Him; He will also hear their cry, and will save them. The Lord preserveth all them that love Him; but all the wicked will He bring low. My mouth shall speak the praise of the Lord; let all humans bless His holy name for ever and ever. We will bless the Lord from this time forth, and forevermore. Hallelujah. Perhaps Mrs. Winchester did not keep her valuables in a safe? Maybe she stored them somewhere no one would think to look? The World will never know the contents of the casket, nor what happened to it. All we do know is nothing of value was found in the actual safe after her death. Perhaps just a few clues? In the search for riches, we often lose what matters most. The day will come when all you will have is what you have given to God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
winchestermysteryhouse
Skies are clear and the sun is shining this weekend. The perfect weather to visit Winchester Mystery House.
Sunday: ☀️
Monday: ☀️
Tuesday: ☀️
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More Often than Not, You Will Find in Your Cell What You Lost in the Streets!
We denounce bigotry of the past, unlike our own. However, if we encounter a race totally different from our own, are we doomed to repeat that past? Peering down into those mysterious depths of the “I” which are far deeper than its human and bestial layers, one will come to a region where personality becomes essence. The psychoanalyst cannot reach it by one’s intellectual and hypnotic methods, but the mystic, by one’s intuitive and contemplatives ones, can. The Soul has its chance to have its voice heard also when the conscious self it too fatigued by the troubles of life to offer resistance. If one understands that the origin of these spiritual moments is one’s own best self, one will understand too that the shortest and quickest way to recapture them is to go directly to that self, while the surest way to keep their happiness for life is to keep constantly aware of the self. Only when the heart has been utterly emptied of all its ties can the divine presence come into it. If you can empty it only for a few moments, do not lament in despair when the visit of the presence comes to an end after a few moments. Sometimes one is lifted up by the beauty of Nature’s forms or man’s arts, sometimes by the discipline of moral experience or religious worship, sometimes by the personal impact of a great soul. Some people have even felt this calmness, which precedes and follows a glimpse, in a warm-water bath; while enjoying or luxuriating in its comfort, they have half-given themselves up to a half-drowsy half-emptiness of mind. Some self-actualized are able to pass from this calmness to the deeper stage, or state, of the glimpse itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
If one understands the process where by one arrived at illumination, one will know how to recover it if and when it fades away. However, if arrived at it by an unconscious process, then when one loses it one will not know how to help oneself. Is it possible, if the Divine is formless, motionless, voiceless, and matterless, to recognize It when the quest brings us to a glimpse of It? The answer is Yes! but either intuition well-developed or intelligence well-instructed is needed: otherwise it happens by faith. Whether it be a mountain scene or a peaceful meadow, a distinguished poem or an impressive opera, the particular source of an unaccustomed exaltation is not the most important thing. Such a visitation can also have its origin in no outside source but within oneself. It should be remembered that whatever kind of prayer is adopted, the glimpse which comes from it comes because we have provided the right condition for its appearance, not because our own doing makes the glimpse appear. For it comes from the realm of timelessness with which we come into some sort of harmony through the intuitive nature. What we do is in the realm of time, and it can only produce effects of a like nature. It contracting the Overself, one does not really sense a bigger “I.” One senses SOMETHING which is. This is first achieved by forgetting the ego, the personality, the “I.” However, at a later stage, there is nothing to forget for then one finds that the ego, the personality, and the “I” are of the same stuff as this SOMETHING. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Who does not seek transitory joy? Who does not occupy oneself with the World? We all do. However, the one who has a good conscience, serves all tentacles to attachment, mediates on divine and salutary things—one has the one who places one’s whole hope in Go. One has the one who sails one’s yacht on a sea of calm. No one can ascend to Heavenly Consolation. That is because there is no sure stair. One solid step, though, is our heart’s True Sorrow. And where else can this sorrow be found but in one’s cubicle. There you can shut out the hubbub of the World. “In your cubicles, on your cots, work out your sorrowful contrition,” said the Psalmist (4.4). More often than not, you will find in your cell what you lost in the streets. A cell that is much prayed in is a pleasant spot. A cell that is rarely prayed in is a forbidding place. That makes sense, does it not? In the first blush of your conversion you cultivated the solitude of your cell, and guarded against all invasion of your quietude. Now you find it warming, welcoming, like a Victorian mansion or a cottage in the forest. In quiet and silence the faithful soul makes progress, the hidden meanings of the Scriptures become clear, and the eyes weep with devotion every night. Even as one learns to grow still, one draws closer to the Creator and farther from the hurly-burly of the World. As one divests oneself of one set of friends and acquaintances, one’s visited by another, God and His Holy Angeles. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Two courses of action. Better, to lie still in one’s cubicle and worry about one’s spiritual welfare. Worse, to roam the streets a wonder-worker for others to the neglect of one’s own spiritual life. Laudable it is for the Religious to go to market only rarely. Laudable too is that, even when one does go, one refrains from meeting the eyes of others; from one’s very mien they know that one lives in another World. Why do you want to go out and see what you really should not need to see? “The World passes, as does its concupiscence,” wrote John the Evangelist in his First Letter (2.17). Our sensual desires promise us a promenade, but deliver us only a dragonnade. A sprightly step in the forenoon turns into a draggled tail in the afternoon. All-nighters of roister-doistery lead only to mornings of hugger-muggery, that is to say, of sickness and sadness. Need I ask? Every carnal joy begins with a caress, or so the Proverb goes (32.31-32), but in the end curls up into a furry ball and dies. I ask the question again. What can you see outside the monastery walls that you cannot see inside? Behold Heaven and Earth and all the elements; from these all things are made. What can you see on the outside that will survive the Sun? That was the sort of question the Ancient Preacher in Ecclesiastes asked (2.11). What is your answer? Perhaps you can find satisfaction somewhere out there, but truth to tell, you still cannot reach out to touch it. If you were to see all the things in all the World crammed into one still life, no matter how large the canvas, you would still be no better off. “Raise your eyes to God in the highest,” said the Psalmist (123.1). #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Pray for your own sins and negligences. Forgive the vain things vain people have done to you. Look to the precepts God gave you. “Shut he door behind you,” wrote the Evangelist Matthew (6.6). Call Jesus, your Beloved Friend, to join you. Remain with Him in your cell. Why? You will no find peace like this anywhere else in the World. If you had not gone outside the walls, you would not have heard the disturbing rumors; better for you to have stayed inside in blissful ignorance. From which it follows that you may delight in hearing the latest news on the strand, but you will surely have to deal with the terrible dislocation that results. In January 1950, just as the second half of the twentieth century opened, a gangling twenty-two-year-old with a newly minted university diploma took a long bus ride through the night into what he regarded as the central reality of our time. With his girl friend at his side and a pasteboard suitcase filled with books under the seat, he watched a gunmetal dawn come up as the factories of the American Middlewest slid endlessly past the rain-swept window. America was the heartland of the World. The region ringing the Great Lakes was the industrial heartland of America. And the factory was the throbbing core of this heart of hearts: steel mills, aluminum foundries, tool and die shops, oil refineries, auto plans, mile after mils of dingy buildings vibrating with huge machines for tamping, punching, drilling, bending, welding, forging, and casting metal. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
The factory was the symbol of the entire industrial era and, to a boy raised in a semi-comfortable lower-middle-class home, after four years of Plato and T.S. Eliot, of art history and abstract social theory, the World it represented was as exotic as Tashkent or Tierra del Fuego. I spent five years in those factories, not as a clerk or personnel assistant but as an assembly hand, a millwright, a welder, a forklift driver, a punch press operator—stamping out fans, fixing machines in a foundry, building giant dust-control machines for African mines, finishing the metal on light trucks as they sped clattering and screeching past on the assembly line. I learned firsthand how factory workers struggled to earn a living in the industrial age. I swallowed the dust the sweat and smoke on the foundry. My ears were split by the hiss of steam, the clank of chains, the roar of pug mills. I felt the heat as the white-hot steel poured. Acetylene sparks left burn marks on my legs. I turned out thousands of pieces a shift on a press, repeating identical movements until my mind and muscles shrieked. I watched the managers who kept the workers in their place, white-shirted men themselves endlessly pursued and harried by higher-ups. I helped lift a sixty-five-year-old woman out of the bloody machine that had just torn four finger off her hand, and I still hear her cries—“Jesus and Mary, I won’ be able to work again!” The factory. Lone live the factory! Today, even as new factories are being built, the civilization that made the factory into a cathedral is dying. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
And somewhere, right now, other young men and women are driving through the night into the heart of the emergent Third Wave civilization. Our task from here on will be to join, as it were, their quest for tomorrow. If we could pursue them to their destinations, where would we arrive? In the launching stations that hurl flaming vehicles and fragments of human consciousness into outer space? In oceanographic laboratories? In communal families? In teams working on artificial intelligence? In passionate religious sects? Are they living in voluntary simplicity? Are they climbing the corporate ladder? Are they running guns to terrorists? Where is the future being forged? If we ourselves were planning a similar expedition into the future, how would we prepare our maps? It is easy to say the future begins in the present. However, which present? Our present is exploding with paradox. Our children are supersophisticated about contraband, pleasures of the flesh, space shots; some know far more about computers than their parents. Yet educational test scores plummet. Divorce rates continue their climb—but so do remarriage rates. Counterfeminists arise at the exact same time that women win rights even the counterfeminists endorse. Gays demand their rights and come charging out of the closet—only to find Anita Bryant, Tim Wildmon and the spirit of Jerry Falwell Sr. waiting for them. Intractable inflation gripped all the Second Wave nations, yet unemployment continued to deepen, contradicting all our classical theories. At the very same time, in defiance of the logic of supply and demand, millions are were demanding not merely jobs but work that was creative, psychologically fulfilling, or socially responsible. Economic contradictions multiplied. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
In politics, parties lose the allegiance of their members at the precise moment when key issues—technology, for example—are becoming more politicized than ever. Meanwhile, over vast reaches of the Earth, nationalist movements gain power—at the exact instant that the nation-state comes under intensifying attack in the name of globalism or planetary consciousness. Faced with such contradictions, how might we see behind the trends and countertrends? No one, alas, has any magic answer to that question. Despite all the computer printouts, cluster diagrams, and mathematical models and matrices that futurist researchers use, our attempts to peer into tomorrow—or even to make sense of today—remains, as they must, more an art than a science. Systematic research can teach us much. However, in the end we must embrace—not dismiss—paradox and contradiction, hunch, imagination, and daring (though tentative) synthesis. In probing the future in the pages that follow, therefore, we must do more than identify major trends. Difficult as it may be, we must resist the temptation to be seduced by straight lines. Most people—including many futurists—conceive of tomorrow as a mere extension of today, forgetting that trends, no matter how seemingly powerful, do not merely continue in a linear fashion. They reach tipping points at which they explode into new phenomena. They are reverse direction. They stop and start. Because something is happening now, or has been happening for three hundred years, is no guarantee that it will continue. We shall, in the pages ahead, watch for precisely those contradictions, conflicts, turnabouts, and breakpoints that make the future a continuing surprise. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
More important, we will search out the hidden connections among events that on the surface seem unrelated. It does little good to forecast the future of semiconductors or energy, or the future of the family (even one’s own family), if the forecast springs from the premise that everything else will remain unchanged. For nothing will remain unchanged. The future is fluid, not frozen. It is constructed by our shifting and changing daily decisions, and each event influences all others. There is a growing use of Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) devices that are being used to improve and maintain health of machines and people. MEMS technology supports motion sensors that detect, report, and collect information on anything that moves. The data these sensors generate are applied to many aspects of our daily lives, ranging from necessary and practical safety standards to augmented reality entertainment. There are three sensors that detect specific types of motion: accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. An accelerometer sense, title, acceleration, vibration, and impact. With calculations and sampled measurements, acceleration measurements can be used to determine speed. A gyroscope senses rotation relative to an axis. A magnetometer detects magnetic fields on Earth. Like a compass, which also responds to magnetic fields, a magnetometer indicates which way is North. These components are often used together either on a board or integrated in an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). AN IMU may comprise two or three sensors. For example, a 6-axis IMU contains a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis gyroscope; adding a 3-axis magnetometer create a 9-axis IMU. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
This technology is applied in many ways that can enhance our daily lives. These devices can revolutionize things like automotive repair and health care. These MEMS are as small as a grain of coffee, but they are tiny computers that can be embedded into a vehicle and made to make engine repairs. Only one our as many as a group of 30 can be used to do the repair without harming the system. An accelerometer is part of many safety devices. It is often used to trigger an alarm when abrupt acceleration occurs, helping prevent physical damage. Accelerometer are also used for maintenance. With ongoing stress of motion, when moving parts eventually become worn or misaligned a new vibration occurs. By monitoring active machinery, accelerometers detect such vibrations at an early stage, long before you can feel or see the effects of wear and tear. This capability of detecting this minute beginning of wear and tear allows lower-cost maintenance to be performed, long before significant and expensive damage occurs. MEMS are used to monitor the health and wellness of people. They can also monitor the body from the inside and make getting blood test and checks of vitals unnecessary. Biosensors also have Early Warning System (EWS). They constantly monitor the body from the inside and send codes to make the necessary adjustments to the system. Additionally, vital signs are transmitted from the patient to the EWS. The information is processed with advanced algorithms that provide caregivers with the status of a patient’s current condition. When medical intervention is needed, the EWS sends an alert. They can also be used to perform surgery. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Many people are personally interested in maintaining and improving their health. Imagine if these MEMS could detect how much sugar, fats, salt and water and other nutrients is needed that day to keep you at optimal health. And could also tell you how much exercise you needed that day to gain or lose with or maintain weight, and come up with a healthy program for that day. MEMS can also provide enhanced self-care a step further by reminding a person when medication is necessary. Second Wave civilization placed an extremely heavy emphasis on our ability to dismantle problems into their components; it rewarded us less often for the ability to put the pieces back together again. Most people are culturally more skilled as analysts than synthesists. This is one reason why our images of future (and of our selves in that future) are so fragmentary, haphazard—and wrong. Our job here will be to think like generalists, not specialists. Today I believe we stand on the edge of a new synthesis. In all intellectual fields, from the hard sciences to sociology, psychology, and economics—especially economics—we are likely to see a return to large-scale thinking, to general theory, to the putting of the pieces back together again. For it is beginning to dawn on us that our obsessive emphasis on quantified detail without context, on progressively finer and finer measurement of smaller and smaller problems, leaves us knowing more and more about less and less. Our approach in what follows, therefore, will be to look for those streams of change that are shaking our lives, to reveal the underground connections among them, not simply because of these is important in itself, but because of the way these streams of change run together to form even larger, deeper, swifter rivers of change that, in turn, flow into something till larger: the Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Like that young man who set out in mid-century to find the heart of the present, we now begin our search for the future. This search may be the most important of our lives. The negative attacks on the suburbs was short-lived. Events on the national and international scene soon shifted elsewhere. The outbreak of urban riots in central cities, the focus on the War on Poverty, and growing protests regarding the continuing wars in other counties all contributed to attention sharply shifting away from suburbs lacking rootedness and maturation. The focus of researchers, politicians, and citizens now was on the inner city. The pressing needs of the city eclipsed other urban activities. The emphasis was on “relevancy,” and suburban patterns and concerns were not judged to meet the test. With all the inner-city problems, why “waste” attention on suburbs? By the late 1970s, terms “urban research” and “urban studies” had all but become synonymous with the study of central-city problems such as poverty, racial conflict, crime, and drugs. Suburbs continued to rapidly expand, but there was only minimal interest by researchers and funding agencies in carrying out new suburban-based research. As a result, new suburban-oriented research came to a virtual halt. There were a few exceptions to the general fixation on inner cities. One of the most promising was the emergence of emergence of urban history as a distinct and viable area of historical research. City residents emphasized the importance of location, while suburbanites ranked the quality of house and the characteristics of neighbours ahead of location. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Another sign of our growing understanding of suburbs was the comparative examination of suburbanization in different settings. The higher-density garden apartment and high-rise, mid-level rise, and low-rise buildings of the suburbs in Sweden were built both to be self-contained and to have easy access to the city by public transportation. By contrast, the dispersed American pattern of detached single-family homes provides less social support and access to the larger area for groups such as woman and children. The 1980s saw the study of suburbanization experience a mild revival. Suburbia was losing it solely residential character. Looking toward the future of multicentered metropolises. The 1990s was the rise of the Mc Mansions and gated communities. These larger than average homes, nearly the size of mansions, and some actually legally are mansions, made suburban research fully come into its own. They were called Mc Mansions because they were not mansions like those produced in the gilded ages, but they were more like baby mansion track homes with custom features and oversized rooms, which caused a lot of people to envy products of new money. They were grander than the typical homes produced, and came with butler’s panty’s, walk in pantries, floor to ceiling windows, vaulted ceilings, zero-threshold showers, wider door openings, wider hallways, backing for future grab bars, lowered light switches, upstairs lobbies, workshops, sever patio areas, California Rooms, Florida Rooms, and there was a reemergence of formal dining rooms. These changes made it increasingly clearly recognized that the outer cities are not an aberration from, or extension of, the old core-periphery model. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Rather, outer cities (suburbs) represent a new organizational model. The increasing ethnic diversity in suburbs also is beginning to receive major attention. It is now apparent that for North America, the twenty-first century will be suburban dominated. This represents a major departure from how we have for centuries viewed our urban places. Overlapping but somewhat separate from the question of suburban lifestyles is that of a unique suburban ideology. By ideology we mean the set of belief that provide a symbolic rendering of social reality. Community ideologies not only provide shared views of the World as it is perceived to be, they also provide a community moral landscape of what is identified at the “good life.” In the case of suburbs, the mass postwar migration was for many the pursuit of the “American Dream.” This was he belief that there was something about living in lower-density, single-family homes outside the city that produced new forms of community. This is what was discussed earlier as the “myth of suburbia.” Here, when we discuss ideology, as was the case with lifestyles, the focus is on the ideology of upper-middle and middle-class residential suburbs. We definitely are not speaking of older industrial suburbs such as Cudahy, Wisconsin; Calumet City, Illinois; or Hamtramck, Michigan. In fact, our image of what a suburb looks like who lives there, and how they view themselves does not at all fit these old, working-class, industrial communities. If not antagonistic, Americans continue to have an ideology that is largely ambivalent about great cities. There is nothing particularly recent about this ambivalence. Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, Americas have been pouring into the cities while idealizing the country. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The writings of Thomas Jefferson are typically American in equating the city with evils and corruption of the old order while having the yeoman farmer and his wife and children typify wholesome virtue. As expressed by Jefferson in a letter to his friend and neighbour James Madison: “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant land in many parts of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” The image of the Jeffersonian self-sufficient yeoman working the Earth as the real genuine American as opposed to someone associated with the pomp, artifice, and degeneracy of the city still resonates today. The anti-Washington ideology of recent political campaign certainly is, in some respects, a lineal descendant of Jefferson’s views as to the corrupting effect of urban life. American ideology for two hundred years has viewed individualism and self-reliance as more compatible with rural than urban habits. The frontiersman clearing the wilderness or the cowboy riding he range have been glorified into American myths. Immigrant factory workers or less affluent women garment workers slaving in sweatshops are somehow less laudable. In practice, we behave as if we consider the history of our urban ancestors as somewhat discreditable and, thus, best forgotten. Henry David Thoreau, sitting in rural solitude at eventide at Walden Pond, is ideologically acceptable. Mr. Thoreau sitting on this front stoop in Boston during the evening rush hour creates a less acceptable image. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Surveys clear demonstrate the abiding strength of antiurban images and ideologies in American life. In fact, in a 2021 survey, 40 percent said they plan to move out of San Francisco, California USA because of increasing crime and homelessness. Some 43 percent of Boston residents, 48 percent of those living in Los Angeles, and a full 60 percent of those living in New York City say if they could leave, they would. The extent of suburban disconnection is apparent among New York’s suburbanites over half (53 percent) visited the city for nonbusiness purposes fewer than five times a year; 25 percent of the suburbanites totally avoided the city, and 75 percent felt their lives unaffected by what occurred in the city. However, most disconcerting to those believing the Big Apple is the essential center of the Universe was that over half (54 percent) the New York suburbanites felt they did not even belong to the New York area. They did no want to be thought of as New Yorkers. Ideologically, they had disassociated themselves from the city. At the same time we denigrate urban living, we idealize rural life. The mental construct of “rural” living continues to enjoy an existence that is antithetical to reality. This can be clearly seen when American are polled on the basic question of where they desire to live. The reality is that America counts over half its population living in metropolitan areas of a million or more, while less than two percent of the population still resides on farms. Americans nonetheless, show a considerable gap between where they say they want to live and where they actually live. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Put in simplest terms, Americans live in cities and metropolitan suburbs, but they say they prefer farms and small towns. With the cost of affordable housing becoming hard to find, and major cities becoming less desirable, many people are turning to the website Instagram and looking at site like old_house_life, and www.cheapoldhouses.com to find Victorian houses in small towns that are often between 3,000 to 5,000 square feet and priced between $100,000.00 to $250,000.00, often times with acers of land that need restoration, and choosing to buy them. There is also another site on Instagram called syrlandbank. They have many Victorian houses in Syracuse, New York that are for sale for between $2,000.00 to $10,000.00, but need approximately $100,000.00 in renovation. The Home Ownership Choice program allows someone to purchase the home, as long as they show proof of funds in the amount of purchase price and renovation costs, and sometimes they require that the home remains owner-occupied. Essentially, one can buy a house for approximately $100,000.00. Nonetheless, three quarters (77 percent) of Americans live in metropolitan areas of over 100,000 persons, but slightly less than a quarter (23 percent) say they want to live in metropolitan areas that large. Polls over the years have contined to demonstrate the lure of rural and smaller places. Today only 2 percent of the population still live on a farm, but 17 percent of the population express the wish to live on a farm, and an additional 8 percent would like to live in a rural area but not on a farm. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Rural images and supposed rural values continue to hold popular appeal (often while simultaneously being judged to be dull and confining). In seems to make no difference that our ideas of what constitutes rural life and the nature of rural values come to us largely from the urban-based mass media. For most of us, our image of small-town life comes to us from television productions written in New York or Los Angeles and produced in Hollywood, California; Atlanta, Georgia; and Toronto, Canada. Commercials also play to our yearning for open spaces and honest relationships. Advertisements for everything from cereal to cars rely heavily on Norman Rockwell nostalgia filled with friendly “down-home” folks. The manipulative use of vintage cars and trucks, farmhouses, and verandas with porch swings fills out the essentially ideal images of rural life. How much of this glorification of rural and small-town life is nostalgia for a World that is now gone, and that most Americans alive today never knew, is difficult to day. There is also considerable expressed support for small-town living. Nonetheless, it is clear that among those expressed support for small-town living. Nonetheless, it is clear that among those saying they want to move out to rural areas, there is no real desire to isolate themselves from urban advantages. Research continues to indicate that the bulk of those seeking to live within 30 miles of a big city. Are greatest achievements do more than heal the sick, and give strength to the weak. They also lead us to a place of hope and light. With each new generation, hopes of a brighter future are rekindled, but until we shrug off the shackles, we will remain prisoners of our own ignorance. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Attacks on the idea that we are self-made people—that thanks to our free will we are independently capable of righteousness—have come not only from determinist but also from several theological masterminds, among them Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonatan Edwards. Together they remind us that our conception of human responsibility must not deny three attributes of God: foreknowledge, sovereignty, and grace. Scripture portrays the selling of Joseph into slavery, the evil acts of Pharaoh, Peter’s denial, Judas’s betrayal of Christ, and the crucifixion as all the result of human choices that God anticipates. Such evidence moved Luther to conclude, “If we believe it to be true that God foreknows and foreordains all things; that He cannot be deceived or obstructed in His foreknowledge and predestination; and that nothing happens but at His will (which reason itself is compelled to grant); then, no reason’s own testimony, there can be no “free-will” in man, or Angel, or in any creature. God’s foreknowledge need not imply divine determinism. Surely, God is unbound by time and therefore able to see out past, present, and future. Consider, however, the implication of God’s sovereignty and grace: John Edwards would not give so much as an inch to human free will, because to the extent that human will is indeterminant—spontaneous and free—God’s plans become dependent on our decisions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
However, this said Edwards, would necessitate God’s “constantly changing his mind and intentions” in order to achieve His purposes. “They who thus plead for man’s liberty, advance principles which destroy the freedom of God Himself,” the sovereign God of whom Jesus Chris said not even a sparrow falls to the ground apart from His will. Nor is human will added to God’s will such that the two together equal 100 percent. Rather, agreed Augustine, “Our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which is certain to God.” God is working in and through our lives, our choices. Spirit that hears each one of us, hears all that is—listens, listens, hears us out—please inspire us now! Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s heart, and also there within the flowered ground beneath our feet, and— please teach us to listen! We can hear it in water, in wood, and even in stone. We are Earth of this Earth, as we are bone of its bone. This is a prayer I sing, for we have forgotten this and so the Earth is perishing. However, happy are they that dwell in Thy house; they will ever praise Thee. Happy is the people who thus fare; yea, happy is the people whose God is the Lord. I will extol Thee, my God, O King, and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever. Every day will I bless Thee, and I will praise Thy name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised; His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall laud Thy works to another, and shall declare Thy might acts. On the majestic glory of Thy splendor, and on Thy wondrous deeds will I meditate. And humans shall proclaim the might of Thy tremendous acts; and I will recount Thy greatness. They shall make known the fame of Thy great goodness, and shall exult in Thy righteousness. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 