Randolph Harris II International Institute

As Mr. Keynes once remarked, “In the long run we are all dead,” and, as the line in the ballad says, everything is born to die. Repeated shocks will give you anxiety, and anxiety is the enemy of identity, and without identity there is no serenity. Some people can make money in the market by … Continue reading →

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December 5, 2023 11:14 am

In the second half of the fifteenth century, ambitious monarchs coming to power in France, England, and Spain sought social order and political stability in their kingdoms. Louis XI in France, Henry VII in England, Isabella of Castile, and Ferdinand of Aragon all created armies and bureaucratic state machinery strong enough to quell internal conflict, … Continue reading →

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December 1, 2023 6:17 am

In the American colonies, people gathered in three main places: churches, courthouses, and taverns. Of the three, taverns attracted people on the daily basis, especially in towns, whereas churchgoing was a weekly duty and courthouse-going was customarily a monthly affair. Taverns were centers of social, political, economic and judicial activity. Following militia musters, men of all ages would mingle at the local tavern. Local political meetings, as well as state dinners, would meet at the public houses, as taverns were called. Merchants and retailers would gather at taverns to cut deals, settle bills, and even hold slave auctions. Local courts met quarterly in taverns in an era where courthouses had often not yet been built. Anyone wishing to see a traveler or visitor knew exactly where to find him—at the local tavern, for the public houses were also the eighteenth-century equivalent of today’s hotels and motels. Every ordinary craftsman and farmer knew that by frequenting the closet tavern, he could put himself in touch with the World beyond his immediate neighbourhood. Seeking heat and light as well as alcoholic beverages and sociability, people of every colonial community repaired to the nearest tavern. In most towns, they did not have to go far. In Boston, for example, at least 177 taverns dispensed cheer by 1737—one tavern for every 20 adult males. In other cities, where the regulation of tavernkeepers was more lax, one could find one tavern for every ten adult males. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

As centers of ritual and recreational life and as modes of communication, taverns were instrumental in promoting face-to-face contact, though mainly for men. When the community gathered in churches, the people assembled formally to listen and pray. By contrast, people gathering in taverns engaged in informal fellowships, which blurred the lines of social hierarchy as people of different occupations and status exchanged local news, gossiped, traded rumor, told tales, loosened their tongues and inhibitions, and exhibited their manliness and aggressiveness. Colonial minister railed against tavern-haunting and excessive drinking, but most colonial Americas were sermon-proof when it came to limiting their tavern-going. Along the way, they began to erode the lines of authority that they had inherited from England. In the coming of the American Revolution, the taverns were a vital part of a silent current that was converting ordinary people from postures of defence to postures of defiance. It was in taverns, especially in the cities, where the Revolution was spawned, that ordinary men learned to shed customary restraints on their political behaviour. Lubricated rum, ale, and other spirits, ordinary town dwellers heard the local news read aloud from newspapers, argued over English policies, and fortified their willingness to criticize, ridicule, and even plot against leaders to whom they have earlier deferred. War by Calculation [or miscalculation]. By this, we refer to the possibility that after due study, a nation might decide that going to war would be the least undesirable of its choices, either in the form of a preventative war, or a pre-emptive war. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The case of the pre-emptive war or “anticipatory retaliation” is not really a decision to attack. One side would strike only because it is convinced that the other side is ready to attack. This is clearly a situation in which each side has nothing to fear but fear, yet the knowledge that the other side is afraid fully justifies that fear. Many things could touch off a reciprocal fear of surprise-attack situation. Escalation. Part of the strategy of the general view f deterrence is that it allows limited war to take place without fear that the limits will be violated—since both sides could then destroy each other. However, under the stress of an actual crisis or limited war, accident or miscalculation might at any time trigger a full-scale cataclysm. This could occur either because the limits of a limited war are not being observed, or because more parties are being drawn into it, or because the issues themselves become fraught with significances that did not initially exist, or because of some unauthorized or accidental behaviour by subordinates. It is difficult to supply a plausible reason for escalation, when it is to everybody’s interest to control things, yet almost everybody considers that it can and perhaps will happen. Catalytic War. By this last possibility, we refer to either an ambitious third nation, or a desperate third nation which might force one of the two main powers who themselves do not want war to make an attack nevertheless. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

The type of catalytic war which is much more likely and important than one resulting from the schemes of an ambition nation may occurs when a desperate third nation thinks it has a problem which can be solved only by war. Let us imagine a war between India and China which the Indians are losing. The Indians might also feel that if they induced the United States of America to strike at China and Russia, this would solve their problem, and any method they used to achieve this end was as good as any other. Conversely, let us imagine a situation in which the Chinese felt hard pressed (possibly over Formosa) and told the Russians, “We are going to strike the United States of America tomorrow, and you might as well come along with us, for they will undoubtedly strike you, even if you do not do so.” As stated, the situation may seem somewhat implausible. One may wish to broaden the definition of catalytic war. Any method by which a nation uses military or diplomatic power to embroil larger nations or increase the scope of the conflict could be called catalytic. By this definition, World War I was a catalytic war, set off by Serbia and Austria, which also had some overtones of reciprocal fear of surprise attack and self-fulfilling prophecy, because the side which mobilized first was likely to win. It meant that even a defensive mobilization (by the Russians) touched off a defensive-offensive mobilization (by the Germans) in much the same way some believe that a badly designed, quick-reacting force can be touched off by defensive moves by the other side. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

The various possibilities mentioned here are all possibilities of war not provoked by the wish or the will of either of the two main power blocs to start an all-out nuclear war. Evern with only two nuclear powers and four nuclear nations in the World, there is a finite chance that all-out nuclear war could be triggered accidentally. This could be brought about as the result of either mechanical or human failure. No machine is perfect. No human being is free from the possibility of making errors of judgment. Already, for example, there have been several accidents involving American aircraft carrying nuclear bombs. Yet it is quite clear that very situation of two powers prepared to destroy each other, if and when necessary, creates a considerable probability for the decision to start a war by either side, even though both would refer to avoid it. The crucial point in these considerations lies in the fact that, once given certain constellations, the most conscientious and rational of military leaders on both sides will be forced to start an attack in spite of the fact that they do not want a war. With each new generation of weapons, the war nobody wants becomes more terrible in prospect, for the logic of deterrence demands continual build-up to be sure that no matter how many bombs the enemy sends, we will have some left to destroy him. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

There is also a possibility that a nation might wish to base it deterrence on a Doomsday Machine which would threaten to blow up the World along with the aggressor. Our normal military forces are frightening enough and they are improving rapidly. The most spectacular thing about the arms race is that it is a race and one that is being run with some celerity. Considering the sober and conservative assumptions which have been confirmed by many other sources, it would seem clear that the expectation that even a stable deterrent protects us from nuclear war is at best a hope or a guess, but by no means the kind of sage prediction which the general public takes it to be. There have been attempts by experts, especially those representing the Army and Navy to work out weapons systems that would eliminate or hold to a minimum the dangers of accident or miscalculation. These attempts are based on two assumptions. One is that danger of accident or pushing buttons too hastily can be minimized by an “invulnerable” deterrent, one which would survive no matter how strong the first strike might be; therefore there would be no ultimate advantage to surprise attack. The Polaris submarine missile system might serve this purpose, especially if Russia were also to have a similar deterrent. An effective invulnerable deterrent would be composed of atomic submarines and airplanes, which being mobile could not be destroyed by one surprise attack. If both sides adopt the Oceanic System, the most curious consequence is that both parties gain together: in making their deterrence effective they protect themselves against accidental war by enabling the opponents to verify signals of attack and to filter out the false one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Clear, an invulnerable force does not have to rise immediately when a signal of attack, which may be only a false alarm, is accepted as real. Even if the signal is true the retaliation can be spaced out over time giving all the favourable possibilities mentioned earlier. It is imperative for invulnerable deterrence strategy that each side know that the other is depending solely upon weapons designed for this strategy; that is, weapons of great destructiveness but relatively low accuracy, capable of destroying cities but not of pinpointing arms installations and holding undestroyed cities as hostages. If Russia, say, believes that we also have “counterforce” weapons and therefore the capacity to strike first, they will doubt our professions of purely punitive intent. In situations of tension they may fear that we will take the initiative, and so take it themselves—knowing that we can answer with our invulnerable city-buster but preferring to bank on their civil defense rather than on our good intentions. Thus, if the invulnerable deterrent is to deter, we must give up all accurate first-strike missilery, all intelligence activity that locates enemy missile bases (id est the weapons and activities championed by the Air Force), and even hold our invulnerable deterrence capacity down to a level where it cannot be used in large masses to make up for its inaccuracy so as to destroy missile bases as well as cities. For example, it is estimated that is we have more than forty-five Polaris submarines we are no longer convincingly incapable of destroying an enemy’s second-strike capacity, even with the uncertainties of aiming from a submarine. It is likely that in the coming all-out arms race we will voluntarily limit ourselves in this manner? And even if we do, how can we convince Russians that we have? #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

We could not show the Russians our military instillations to prove that we had only weapons of the “invulnerable” type, because the weapons, to be invulnerable, must have secret locations. Another assumption necessary for the invulnerable deterrent to work is that both sides act coolly and rationally, always aware of what the other side’s power is at any given time, and always waiting in a tense situation in other to make sure. A small fraction of people believe unilateral disarmament is the best deterrent to war. However, there is widely held fear in the United States of America, that Russia is out to conquer the World for communism and that, if the United States of America disarmed, Russia and other countries would be all the more eager to achieve their wishes for World domination. With Russian, for instance, this idea of Russian intensions is based on an erroneous appreciation of the nature of the president-day Russia. It is true that under Mr. Lenin and Mr. Trotsky the Russian Revolution was aimed at conquering the capitalistic World (or at least, Europe) for communis, partly because the communist leaders were convinced that there was no possibility of success for communist Russia unless the highly industrialized states of Europe (or at least Germany) joined their system, and partly because they were prompted by the belief that the victory of the communist revolution in the World would bring about the fulfillment of their secular-messianic hopes. The failure of these hopes and the ensuring victory of Mr. Stalin brought about a complete change in the nature of Soviet Communism. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The annihilation of almost all the old Bolsheviks was only a symbolic act for the destruction of the old revolutionary idea. Mr. Stalin’s slogan of “socialism in one country” covered one simple aim—the rapid industrialization of Russia, which the Czarist system had not accomplished. Russia repeated the same process of accumulating capital which Western capitalism had gone through in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The essential difference is that, while in these centuries in the West the sanctions were purely economic, the Stalinist system now developed political sanctions of direct terror; in addition, it employed socialist ideology to sugar-coat the exploitation of the masses. The Stalinist system was neither a socialist nor a revolutionary system, but a state-capitalism based on ruthless methods of planning and economic centralization. The period of Khruschevism is characterized by the fact that capital accumulation has succeeded to a point where the population can enjoy a great deal more consumption and less forced to make sacrifices; as a result, the political terror can be greatly reduced. However, Khrushchevims has by no means changed the basic character of Soviet society in one essential respect: it is not a revolutionary nor a socialist regime, but one of the most conservative, class-ridden regimes anywhere in the Western World, humanly coercive, economically effective. While the aim of democratic socialism was the emancipation of man, the overcoming of his alienation, and the eventual abolition of the state, the “socialist” slogans used in Soviet Russia reflect empty ideologies, and the social reality is the very opposite of true socialism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

The ruling class of the Soviet Union is no more revolutionary than the Renaissance popes were followers of the teachings of Christ. To try to explain Mr. Khrushchev by quoting Mr. Marx, Mr. Lenin, or Mr. Trotzky shows an utter failure to understand the historical development which has taken place in the Soviet Union and an incapacity to appreciate the difference between facts and ideologies. It should be added that our attitude is the best propaganda service the Russians could wish for. Against the fact, they try to convince the workers of Western Europe and the peasants in Asia that they represent the ideas of socialism, of a classless society, et cetera. The Western attitude, of falling for this propaganda, does exactly what the Russians want: to confirm these claims. (Unfortunately very few people except democratic socialist have sufficient knowledge of the difference between socialism and its distorted and corrupt form which calls itself Soviet socialism.) The role of Russia is still more emphasized by the fact that Russia feels threatened by a potentially expansionist China. Russia one day might be in the same position with regard to China as we believe we are in relation to Russia. If the threat to Russia from the United States of America were to disappear, Russia could devote her energy to coping with the threat from China, unless by universal disarmament this threat would cease to exist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The above-mentioned considerations indicate that the dangers which might arise if Russian were not to give up its armaments are more remote than they seem to many. Would the Soviet Union use her military superiority to try to occupy the United States of America or Western Europe? Aside from that fact that it would be exceedingly difficult, to say the least, for Russian’s agents to run the economic and political machines of the United States of America or Western Europe, and aside from the fact that there is no vital need for Russia to conquer these territories, it would be most inconvenient to try to do so—and for a reason which is generally not sufficiently appreciated. Even the procommunist workers in the West have no idea of the degree of coercion to which they would have to submit under a Soviet system. They, as well as noncommunist workers, would oppose the new authorities, who would be forced to use tanks and machine guns against the protesting workers. This would encourage revolutionary tendencies in the satellite states, or even within the Soviet Union, and be most undesirable to the Soviet rulers; it would especially endanger President Putin’s policy of liberalization, and hence his whole political position. Eventually Russian might try to exploit its military superiority for the penetration of Asia and Africa. This is doubtful whether the United States of America would really be willing to start a thermonuclear war in order to prevent the Russians from gaining certain advantages in the World outside of Europe and the America. As we see with the war in Ukraine, America is sending billions of dollars in aid, but otherwise staying out of it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

There are some who are totally devoted to death, and these are insane. There are others who are entirely devoted to life, and these strike us as having accomplished the highest aim of which man is capable. In many, both the biophilous and the necrophilous trends are present, but in various blends. What matters here, as always in living phenomena, is which trend is the stronger, so that it determines man’s behaviour—not the complete absence or presence of one of the two orientations. Literally, “necrophilia” means “love of the dead” (as “biophilia” means “love of life”). The term is customarily used to denote a sexual perversion, namely the desire to possess the dead body (of an individual) for purposes of pleasures of the flesh, or a morbid desire to be in the presence of a dead body. However, as often the case, a sexual perversion presents only the more overt and clear picture of an orientation which is to be found without sexual admixture in many people. The person with the necrophilous orientation is one who is attracted to and fascinated by all that is not alive, all that is dead; corpses, decay, feces, dirt. Necrophiles are those people who love to talk about sickness, about burials, about death. They come to life precisely when they can talk about death. A clear example of the pure necrophilous type is Mr. Hitler. He was fascinated by destruction, and the smell of death was sweet to him. While in the years of his success it may have appeared that he wanted to destroy only those whom he considered his enemies, the days of the Gotterdammerung at the end showed that his deepest satisfaction lay in witnessing total and absolute destruction: that of the German people, of those around him, and himself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

A report from the First World War, while not proved, makes a good sense: a solider saw Mr. Hitler standing in a trancelike mood, gazing at a decayed corpse and unwilling to move away. The necrophilous dwell in the past, never in the future. Their feelings are eseentially sentimental, that is, they nurse the memory of feelings which they had yesterday—or believe that they had. They are cold, distant, devotees of “law and order.” Their values are precisely the reverse of the values we connect with normal life: not life, but death excites and satisfies them. Characteristic for the necrophile is his or her attitude toward force. Force is the capacity to transform a man or woman into a corpse. Just as sexuality can create life, force can destroy it. All force is, in the last analysis, based on the power to kill. I may not kill a person but only deprive one of one’s freedom; I may want only to humiliate one or to take away one’s possessions—but whatever I do, behind all these actions stands my capacity to kill and my willingness to kill. The lover of death necessarily loves force. For one the greatest achievement of man is not to give life, but to destroy it; they use of force is not a transitory action forced upon one by circumstances—it is a way of life. This explains why the necrophile is truly enamored of force. Just as the lover of life the fundamental polarity in man is that between male and female, for the necrophile there exists another and very different polarity: that between those who have the power to kill and those who lack this power. For one there are only two “genders”: the powerful and the powerless; the killers and the killed. One is in love with the killers and despises those who are killed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Not rarely this “being in love with the killers” is to be taken literally; they are one’s objects of sexual attraction and fantasies, only less drastically so than in the perversion mentioned above or in the perversion of necrophagia (the desire to eat a corpse) a desire which can be found not rarely in the dreams of necrophilous persons. I know of a number of dreams of necrophilous persons in which they have sexual intercourse with elderly people by whom they are in no way physically attracted, but whom they fear and admire for their power and destructiveness. The influence of men like Mr. Hitler or Mr. Stalin lies precisely in their unlimited capacity and willingness to kill. For this they were loved by the necrophiles. Of the rest, many were afraid of them, and preferred to admire, rather than to be aware of their fear; many others did not sense the necrophilous quality of these leaders, and saw in them the builders, saviors, good fathers. If the necrophilous leaders had not pretended that they were builders and protectors, the number of people attacked to them would hardly have been sufficient to help them to seize power, and the number of those repelled by them would probably soon have led to their downfall. While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic life into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living person were things. All living processes, feelings, and thoughts are transformed into things. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Memory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object—a flower or a person—only if one possesses it; hence a threat to one’s passion is a threat to oneself; if one loses possession, one loses contact with the World. That is why we find the paradoxical reaction that one would rather lose life than possession, even though by losing life one who possesses has ceased to exist. One loves control, and in the act of controlling one kills life. One is deeply afraid of life, because it is disorderly and uncontrollable by its very nature. The woman who wrongly claims to be the mother of the child in the story of Solomon’s judgment is typical for this tendency; she would rather have a properly divided dead children than lose a living one. To the necrophilous person justice means correct division, and they are willing to kill or die for the sake of what they call justice. “Law and order” for them are idols-everything that threatens law and order is felt as a satanic attack against their supreme values. There are physical, soulish and spiritual “feelings.” Evil spirits can inject feeling into any of these departments. Their aim is to move the human by “feelings”—to substitute these for the actions of one’s mind, so that the believer is governed by the deceiving spirits through his or her feelings. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

The necrophilous person is attracted to darkness and night. In mythology and poetry one is attacked to caves, or to the depth of the ocean, or depicted as being blind. (the trolls in Mr. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt are a good example; they are blind, they live in caves, their only value is the narcissistic one of something “home brewed” or homemade.) All that is away from or directed against life attracts one. One wants to return to the darkness of the womb, and to the past of inorganic or animal existence. One is essentially oriented to the past, not to the future which one hates and is afraid of. Related to this is one’s craving for certainty. However, life is never certain never predictable, never controllable; in order to make life controllable it must be transformed into death; death, indeed, is the only certainty in life. The necrophilous tendencies are usually more clearly exhibited in a person’s dreams. These deal with murder, blood, corpses, skulls, feces; sometimes also with humans transformed into machines or acting like machines. An occasional dream of this type may occur in many people without indicating necrophilia. In the necrophilous person dreams of this type are frequently and sometimes repetitive. Also, one tends to substitute feelings for the conscience in its recognition of right and wrong. Then if one “feels” they can do a thing, they will do it without asking whether it be right or wrong—if it is not visibly sinful. So for victory over the deceitful enemy, it is essential that the children of God cease to be guided by “feelings” in their actions. Some believers in God also think that is they do some action that the devil wants them to do, that they will “feel condemned” at once, but they overlook the fact that Satan can give pleasant feelings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

There are innumerable varieties of feelings caused by evil spirits; also countless sorts of attacks and false suggestions. These call forth all the spiritual discernment of the believer, and one’s understanding of spiritual things, in order to recognize them. No doubt, anyone who is truthful in that bold and ultimate sense presupposed by faith in science thereby affirms a World other than that of life, nature, and history; and insofar as one affirms this “other World,” must one not precisely thereby deny its counterpart, this World, our World? You will of course have grasped that it is still a metaphysical faith on which our faith in science rests—that even we knowing ones today, we godless ones and antimetaphysicians, still also take our fire from the flame ignited by a faith thousands of years old, that Christian faith that also was Mr. Plato’s faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine…However, what if just this were to become ever more unbelievable, if nothing else were ever to prove itself divine, only error, blindness, lie—if God Himself proved to be our longest lie? The notion of history is inseparably linked to the concept of time. Time is one of the ontological categories, a characteristic stamped on every finite being, but it is verified differently in different dimension of life. Thus, time remains time in the whole realm of finitude; but the time of the amoeba and the time of history are different. The common element which gives time its identity is the element of “after-each-otherness.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The flow of “after-each-other-ness” is one-way traffic; it cannot be reversed, for there is no such thing as an exactly identical repetition. In the spiritual dimension, “after-each-other-ness” is manifest as the creation of new meaning. Historical time supplies the added element of direction, so that it is defined as “time running toward fulfilment.” Historical time does not return, nor repeat itself: it runs forward; it is always unique; it ever creates the new. There is within it a drive toward an end, unknown, never to be reached in time itself, always intended and ever fleeing. Time runs toward the “future eternal.” The aim of history is fulfilment and decision, that is, an unconditional, unambiguous fulfilment achieved through freedom, and free decision that ends in unconditional fulfilment. The goal of history, therefore, is transcendent to the ambiguities of time. Clock time is not historical time, for the ultimate stand equally close to and equally distant from each moment of history. Certain consequences follow from this transcendent quality of history: The meaning of history is untouched by the modes of past and future, by birth and death. Transcendence, therefore, can be defined neither as the beginning of time nor as the end of time, nor as the negation of time. It can be indicated only by the symbolic concepts of origin and ultimate, which do no mean either the first or the last moment of time, but something transcendent to which all modes of time are equally related. What this means in the concrete is that the theological symbols of creation and last judgement have nothing to do with the beginning and end of clock time. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

And the beginning of history is not the birth of the Universe, but the moment in which existence is experienced as unfulfilled and in which the drive toward fulfillment starts. In what sense can the march of historical time be called “progress”? Since every creative act is a step beyond the potential, history is progressive in the sense that it is in motion, always seeking to approach the ultimately new. However, some interpreters of history have made of progress a symbol for the very meaning of history. According to them, progress means either an ever-lengthening line between the fixed points of a temporal beginning and end or an infinitely ascending line that constitutes progress and end or an infinitely ascending line that constitutes progress itself the goal of history. Progress in certain areas—for example, ethical content, education, technology, and science are all relevant. However, at the core of man’s spiritual functions—the moral act of self-integration, the cultural act of creativity, and the religious act of self-transcendence—lies freedom, and freedom is the leap in which history transgresses the realm of pure being and creates meaning. The movement, then, of historical time is by unpredictable leaps rather than by a measured mounting of the steps of progress. Thou who art the breath of life, who didst create all humans alike in dignity, thy power is manifest in the destiny of nations. Thou makest nations great; Thou bringest nations low; thou givest freedom even unto the beast and winged fowl; Thy will it is that all humankind be free. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

The Winchester Mystery House

Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester said that in 1888, she was riding in her carriage to Llanada Villa. After crossing a small stream, her horses began to walk on very fast. It was between the hours of eight and nine o’clock in the morning. Besides her driver, Mrs. Winchester was alone it her carriage. It was a clear day. She entered a lane adjoining to her estate. Her horses suddenly wheel at a portion of the gate, looked at the mansion, and neighed very loud. Mrs. Winchester and her driver then saw Mr. William Wirt Winchester coming toward them, in the same apparel she had seen him in his lifetime: he had on a navy-blazer. Just before they came to the gate, Mr. Winchester varied to the right and vanished. About the first of December following, Mrs. Winchester was walking about her garden, about three miles from the mansion. About Dusk, Mr. Winchester came walking alongside of her, and walked with her about two hundred yards. He was dressed as when first seen. He made a halt about two steps from his wife. A farmer was ploughing the fields came riding up, and Mrs. Winchester lost sight of the ghost of her husband. She was much alarmed: not a word was spoke. The farmer did not see Mr. Winchester. The sight of her husband prayed upon her minds so.

Some time after Mrs. Winchester was lying in bed, about midnight, when she heard Mr. Winchester groan; it was like the groan he gave before he expired. Mrs. Winchester heard the groan. She got up and searched the mansion, but after many hours found nothing. Some time after, when in bed, and a great firelight in the room, Mrs. Winchester saw a shadow on the wall, and at the same time she felt gentle brush of her hair, and knew it was her husband comforting here. About the middle of April, Mrs. Winchester was sitting in the Hall of Fires, enjoying the heat when Mr. Winchester appeared, dressed in his navy blazer. He extended his arms around her and hugged her. She does not know how long she remained in this situation. She was much alarmed. In May, about twilight in the morning, she saw Mr. Winchester about a hundred yards from the mansion; he walked fast and disappeared: there was nothing between them to obstruct the view. On the same day, Mr. Winchester appeared again to Mrs. Winchester and their niece Daisy in the garden. Mrs. Winchester asked, “Do you not see your uncle William?” They advanced toward Mr. Winchester. Mrs. Winchester spoke to her husband, as Daisy watched. They walked off together about five hundred yards; a conversation took place as they walked. However, Mrs. Winchester has not the conversation in her memory. She could not understand Mr. Winchester’s, his voice was so low.

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November 30, 2023 6:49 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Winchester Mystery House

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

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November 27, 2023 2:30 am