Advancing Psychological Education for All
At one time, witchcraft was “ubiquitous,” and played a part in every activity of one’s life. If blight seized the groundnut crop, it was witchcraft; if the bush was vainly scoured for game, it was witchcraft; if women laboriously bale water out of a pool and were rewarded by but a few small fish, it … Continue reading
Death, darkness and horrible things lurked in the night. Some spirits here are created for vengeance, and in their fury lay on sore stroke. I hated the sight of blood. It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1890 that the evening twilight fell when a gnawing fear and tremendous sense of terror strangely domed Llanada Villa and the, deep, shadowy fruit orchards. The quite dread and portent produced strange noises that troubled the large mansion and fell on my ear. Curious noises they were sometimes. I could have sworn I heard a thin metallic voice laughing high in the Observational Tower. I darted an inquiring glance at my carpenter. He was white to the lips. “It is he—that is—it is no one; the door is locked,” was all he said, and we looked at each other for a full minute. The mansion began to fill with shadows, while the curious noises—the muffled footfalls and distant talking voices that had been perceptible seemed, no doubt to becoming more frequent and insistent. A rain of tears appeared on my cheeks. The carpenter began for the first time to show signs of hurry and impatience. He heaved a sigh of relief when his tools and notebooks were finally packed up and stowed away, and hurriedly beckoned a carriage. He turned to his companion. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.” The other man nodded and climbed into the carriage as the horses quickly galloped away. The moon had vanished behind a cloud. I was able to go over to the library, and for the rest of the evening tortured my brain with strange and terrible books drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from secure places of storage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
There were things in these books which simply could not be believed by those who had not seen the evidence. The more I reflected on these hellish diaries, the more I was inclined to believe in the Earth-threatening entity which, unknow to me, was the source of the curse. Rumors about “The Winchester Fortune,” were clearly sustained enough to reach the pages of The Oakland Tribune and be referred to as if they were common knowledge. The stories that surrounded The Winchester Fortune and my mansion were so persistent that inquirers were directed to an information sheet that was put together in 1889 to describe my family, legacy, and unique architecture of my home and fill in some of the “vast web of mythology [that] has formed around it.” After the information on provenance, the sheet told a loose variety of myths that around the purchase and construction of Llanada Villa, gesturing vaguely at the accidents, misfortunes and deaths said to have been suffered by carpenters, servants, and members of the Winchester family. It also spoke about the suit of armor—priceless relics, vast halls, tapestries evidenced throughout; strong, heavy, richly carved furniture everywhere. The time-defying walls, comfortable chairs, tea tables, and unusual architectural features were also of great curiosity. And of course, the curse that was principally attached to the fortune and mansion, or rather from whom the curse began its impressive path of contagion through. When disaster struck killing our infant daughter, and fifteen years later my husband, they were claimed to be subjects to the law of the recursive curse and were assumed to be victims. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
The popular account of Williams’s death is that, not believing in the malignant powers of the celebrated curse of The Winchester Fortune, he determined to make a slashing attack on the belied in the columns of the Connecticut Gazette of New Haven, and went to the Winchester Factory Castle, and sent his photographer there, to collect materials for that purpose; that he was then, although in perfect health, struck down mysteriously by some malady of which he died. The Gazette published his piece and also reported ghost stories about Llanada Villa with a studiously neutral air. Yet William’s death, widely mourned by his colleagues, was probably the impetus for an outline of the alleged curse that appeared in the Connecticut Magazine, which spoke of a “terrible story” that “will never be written in full; but some of its chapters may be told in a few words.” The essay was curiously signed pseudonymously and again the historical actors were replaced by initials. This report likely prompted an anonymous person to syndicate an article on the story, which flashed the rumour of The Curse of the Winchester Fortune around the World. The Correspondence files in the New Haven press, for instance, carried a cutting sent by someone from The Oakland Tribune, which screamed “Ghost of those Killed by the Winchester Rifle Haunt the Sizable Fortune.” A journalist who died investigating the hauntings, along with William and Annie were merely the frames of The Winchester Curse, but their deaths seemed to confirm that even testing the strength of the chain of rumour associated with the Winchester Fortune came with risks. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
Those who have often been so gay and vivacious, the delight of soirees, would become distant, and aloof, of serious mien, unsmiling after visiting my estate and succumbing to magical thinking, spooked by “the feeling of an unseen force, a fine net drawn around us with infinite skill and delicacy.” The atmospheric writing strained to evoke a liminal territory on the edge of American civilization where superstition merges into everyday experience. The allegedly rational solution to the deaths of my infant daughter and husband feeds into the formula for family curses, as Holmes solves the case through a proper understanding of heredity and threat of degeneracy within aristocratic bloodlines. “The deaths of Mr. William Winchester and infant daughter Annie Winchester was caused by demonic “elementals” guarding the land, because Mr. Winchester had expanded the family business and begun an investigation of the stories of “The Gun that Won the West’s” malevolence….I warned Mr. Winchester against concerning himself with the curse. He persisted, and his death proceeded the death of his infant daughter. He became engrossed in the subject, and wrote with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of skepticism there was none. I told him he was tempting fate by pursuing his inquiries, but he was fascinated and would not desist. Then his daughter was overtaken by illness six weeks after her birth by the mysterious childhood disease marasmus. And Mr. Winchester premature death was fifteen years later from tuberculosis, which added to Mrs. Winchester’s distress. However, this is the way in which the demonic “elementals” guiding the Winchester bloodline might act.” A statement by Weston St. Joyce of the Hellfire Club. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
One of Daisy’s reminiscences is striking for embroiling all the central figures of The Winchester story in occult: “I had attended at least two seances which my aunt had held at Llanada Villa…I had watched aunt Sarah put into a trance on an occasion when Bertha Haas had been present. It had been an eerie, not to say unpleasant, experience which had shaken me considerably…Suddenly she had started talking in an unknown tongue which, to everyone’s astonishment, Bertha Haas had pronounced as being Coptic…I remembered particularly one séance when Bertha has been placed in a trance.” Friday morning, the day was pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight, a cold shudder ran through me and visitors like, and every ear seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening. I knew that I had come upon the horror and its monstrous work, and trembled with the responsibility I felt to be mind. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the spirits really became restless. No material weapon would be of help. Having read William’s diaries, I knew painfully well what kind of manifestations to expect, but I did not add to the fright of the servants by giving any hints or clues. As the shadows gathered, the servants commenced to disperse homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the present evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. Whatever was in Llanada Villa was biding its time. A downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lighting shimmered, and then a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into my accursed mansion itself. They sky grew very dark, and watcher hoped that the storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a confused babel of voices sounded down the hall. Another moment brought to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting, and even whimpering hysterically. But in another minute, we were in a sitting-room of the house, a large, high chamber with a mahogany floor, full of moving shadows cast by a wood-fire that flickered in on the great hearth. Before lay a large folio, bound, perhaps, late in the seventeenth century, with the arms of Canon Alberic de Mauleon stamped in gold on the sides. There may have been a hundred and fifty leaves of paper in the book, and on almost every one of them was fastened a lead from an illuminated manuscript. Such a collection I had hardly dreamed of in my wildest moments. Here were ten leaves from a copy of Genesis, illustrated with pictures, which could not be later than A.D 700. Further on was a complete set of pictures from a Psalter, of English execution, of the very finest kind that the thirteenth century could produce; and, perhaps best of all, there were twenty leaves of uncial writing in Latin, which, as a few words seen here and there told me at once, must belong to some very early unknown patristic treatise. Could it possibly be a fragment of the copy of Papias “On the Words of Our Lord,” which was known to have existed as late as the twelfth century at Nimes? In any case, my mind was soon brought back to the chaos. The swishing, lapping sound of the bending trees and bushes caught my attention. And there was an awful stomping and splashing in the mud. However, I did not see anything at all, only just the bending of the trees and the underbrush. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
The I heard an awful creaking and straining. The servants were yelling and shrieking when something heavy struck the house—not lightning, nor anything, but something heavy and again, and again. It kept launching itself again and again, though I could not see anything. Lines of fright deepened on every face, we could hear a terrible crashing and a hall full of screaming. In the hall before us were grouped four carpenters, surrounding a crouching figure. A fifth carpenter lay dead on the floor, his neck distorted, and his eyeballs staring from his head. The four surrounding carpenters were looking at him. In their faces the sentiment of horror was intensified; they seemed, in fact, only restrained from flight by their implicit trust in me. All this terror was plainly excited by any words I could say. I absolutely refused to be alone for the rest of the evening, and for many nights I had not dared to put out my lights before going to sleep. All this time a growing feeling of discomfort had been creeping over me. Before my eyes appeared a mass of coarse, matted black hair, and this body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the muscles standing out like wires out of my mind. The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body, with long, coarse hairs, and hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils, and were fixed upon the ceiling with a look of beast-like hate. This appalling effigy inspired terror. With such intense physical fear and the most profound mental loathing, I grasped blindly at my silver crucifix, that I was conscious of a movement toward me on the part of the demon, and then it screamed with the voice of an animal in hideous pain. Hans and Robert, two sturdy little serving-men, who rushed in, saw nothing, but felt themselves thrust aside by something that passed out between then, and found me in a swoon. They sat up with me that night. The phases of Nature can be utterly forbidden, and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
The Winchester Mystery House
When The Winchester Mansion was opened after the passing of Mrs. Winchester in 1922, a carpenter made a small breach in the upper left-hand corner of the front doors, and put a candle through the hole: “At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment—an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by—I was struck dumb with amazement, and when the movers, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ It was all I could do to get out the words. ‘Yes, wonderful things.’” It took seven weeks to clear the mansion of its objects, each item laboriously documented, photographed and carried out to moving vans. This took place under the intense gaze of tourist crowds and the restless journalists from the World’s press. Beyond the door, the foyer was almost entirely filled with a shrine covered in gold leaf, and shrines within shrines that protected sacred objects. They found an open store, stuffed with golden statuary and guarded by an impressive Anubis figure.
Daisy recalled the “dazed, bewildered look” of the esteemed visitors invited inside. However, she also stated, “I cannot but think that some risks are run by breaking into the last rest of my beloved aunt Sarah whose mansion is specially and solemnly guarded, and robbing her of her possessions.” A statue of gold was removed from The Winchester Mansion. Tourists had allegedly become supplicants to the statue, holding séances. There was a photograph in which “a shadowy human face has come between the camera and the object which was being photographed.” In other anecdotes, paintings gasped at the movers and the mansion exuded “an unaccountable sense of apprehension.” The first movers not only got lost, but came down with various illnesses (ophthalmia and delirium). A news story of the suicide that claimed one of the movers was frequently heard to mutter “the curse of the Winchester Fortune,” as though this had prayed on his mind. An auctioneer was also incorporated into the unfolding curse (in fact he had been ill with cancer, a fate of several movers). These people knew that they were meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had done before them.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Oh, these were terrible thoughts. Did I not love Llanada Villa? Had I not pledged my soul? I was consumed with self-hatred and dread that the curse was controlling my life. These thoughts were too horrendous. They divided me from all that desired. I had to banish them from my mind. However, there was a … Continue reading
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire, who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms. Nine times the space that measures day and night to mortal men, he with his horrid crew lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf confounded though immortal: but his doom reserved him to more wrath; for … Continue reading
Although Dr. Freud has for many years paid little attention to the phenomenon of nonsexual aggression, Dr. Alfred Adler has put the tendencies in the center of his system. However, he deals with them not as sado-masochism, but as “inferiority feelings” and the “wish for power.” Dr. Adler sees only the rational side of these … Continue reading
No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Llanada Villa; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were … Continue reading
Many people in the United States of America recognize communism as an overwhelming threat to values, which have been central to their own lives and families. Values shape what men and women see as important in life, how priorities are to be established, and how they create their own places within a given historical context. … Continue reading
Whispers in the distance as a pale, vaporous moon lights the mansion. Shadows are deep. Then from across the hall came the sound of a shrill scream. A chair scraped and feet hit the floor of the corridor, walking away toward the sound of the scream. A door opened and closed. The room was illuminated … Continue reading
There was a strange melody echoing throughout Llanada Villa. I had known it, somehow, when I had awakened this morning. I knew it more surely now, staring out of the library windows into the early afternoon sunlight slanting down among the mansion to cast a pattern of light and shadow. I knew that soon, perhaps even today, something important was going to happen. Whether good or bad I did not know, but I darkly suspected. And with reason; there are few good things that may unexpectedly happen to a person, things, that is, of lasting importance. Disaster can strike from innumerable directions, in amazingly diverse ways. A voice said, “Hey, Mrs. Winchester,” and I turned away from the widow, slowly. That in itself was strange for it was not my manner to move slowly. However, this time something made me turn slowly from the window. Something upstairs moaned and scrabbled and I heard the screech of rent timber. As I walked across the room, there was a heavy scrape from above as something at the top of the house took its first step down to me. Puffs of plaster dust were shaken out of the library’s ceiling around its wooden supports. I walked over to the window, and stood looking out. The sun had moved hardly at all. Yet the shadow pattern inside was different. I strode from the window over to the desk and banged my fist down. That is when I heard a loud bestial roar of something surprised, maybe even hurt. There were more noises from above. The entire house seemed to screech and shudder. It shifted. Floors buckled and walls bellowed inward and outward with shock and repercussion. Noise came in savage and frenetic squalls and faded abruptly. Drafts erupted and rippled and were gone. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
The music, though, had entirely ceased. Its absence was unnerving in the house, in the fine, falling precipitation of dust. There was a rumble and a roar from a landing above. It was a cry of primeval triumph. Then something sauntered and crashed downwards. I thought I heard music again. Demonic mutterings of thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart the walls. The thud of hooves was imperious down the stairs. A great physical faintness had overwhelmed me. My arms, my legs, lay like dead things. My heart was fluttering weakly. The curtain billowed in the breeze, though I was sure I had closed the casement. And then suddenly I threw back my head and screamed! For a dark universe crashed and shuddered in pain and rage above my head. I made my way into the corridor. There were many doors in the gloom of its considerable length. However, there was light under only one of them. It was pale in a narrow strip and softly inviting. I needed to get my bearings and could not do so in the darkness. The door opened on to a parlor lit by opaque globes of glass suspended from the ceiling by electrical wires, the wires covered by black fabric woven into plaits. It was now night, because outside the narrow windows all was dark. Cold perspiration broke out on my forehead due to the abysmal horrors of my mansion. It was acutely uncanny, even when frightful and uncanny things were common to heard the rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Llanada Villa. This sound naturally stirred me. I walked up a flight of stairs, my footsteps echoing loudly in the stillness, and into a long, panelled room, much lighter than the one below. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
And where were my servants? The house seemed deathly quiet. Moonlight blazed over the dark bulk of the house, silvering the slates and spilling along hallways like pooled water. Shadows were threatening to overwhelm the house. However, my eye was drawn, most of all, to the mesmerizing orange glow coming from the fourth floor. I stood motionless for several seconds, or so it seemed. Torrential rain fell causing the light to dim. The extreme, almost nocturnal darkness of the sky caused me to stumble sadly, but I was guided by the frequent flashes of lighting. I felt suddenly too weak in spirit to go further. It was getting chilly. The stormy vigil caused me to reflect on my ghastly night. My mind turned to that odd question which had kept recurring since the deaths of my husband and daughter. Why had not the demons taken their victims in natural order? With what manner of far-reaching tentacles did it prey? In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to intensify them, there fell near by a terrific bolt of lightning followed by the sound of sliding Earth. At the same time the wolfish wind rose to demonic crescendos of ululation. I was sure that the Observational Tower had been struck again. As I went to inspect the damage, the rain howled deafeningly so. Clutching at the edge of the table, I stood there swaying. The events of the past few hours rose before me in all their horror now, and I could see the black significance of every detail. As I entered the Observational Tower, it was cloaked in gloom, and a narrow corridor stretched before me. The floor was littered with rubble and fallen masonry; the ceiling interlaced with a thousand cobwebs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Feeling the strange tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reaching into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time, I stumbled forward, my eyes quickly accustoming themselves to the half-light from the almost opaque windows. At the end of the corridor a second door barred my passage. I thrust it open—and stood swaying there on the sill staring inward. From the skylights, a sprinkling of stars was visible for some of the clouds had cleared. Beyond was a small room, barely ten feet square, with low-raftered ceiling. And by the light of the open door, I saw side by side in the center of the floor—two white wood coffins. How long I stood there leaning weakly against the stone all I do not know. There was an odor of an ancient grave drifting out the chamber. In one of the coffins lie my butler. Dieter Hulsmann, was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head, there was no longer a face. Once again, the thunderstorm starting brewing. I believed that my mind was partly unhinged by the evens, and I was in fear of opening the other coffin. That shock had done something to my brain, and I could think only of the quest for a horror now grown to a cataclysmic stature in my imagination. The scenes of this night would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary person. Baleful primal shadows of unholy size, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish nightmare; thunder, hushing the clawing wind, admitted but little rain. Beyond the coffins in the background, illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning, rose spirits. History had led me to build this mansion. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
I now believed that the lurking fear was no material thing, but ghosts that rode the midnight lightening. There came a seeming echo of howling, shrill, faint, and eerie. I walked unresistingly to the window sill. Behind e was the blackness of an unknown chamber. I was afraid, but hid my fear. As I raised my glance, I saw glistening in the distance two demonic reflections, two reflections glowing with a baneful and unmistakable effulgence, and provoking maddeningly nebulous memories. I stopped automatically, though lacking the brain to retreat. The eyes approached, yet of the thing that bore them I could distinguish only a claw. But what a claw! Then far overheard I heard a faint crashing. It was the wild thunder of the mountain, raised to hysteric fury, and those eyes still stared with vacuous viciousness. I ran, staggering. I blundered through the hallway and to the elevator. As I took the elevator down nine stories, I breathed deeply, fished out my handkerchief and mopped my face. My hand was quivering like a grass stalk in a breeze, as I experienced virtual convulsions of fright. As I came back to the main house, I stood looking up at the tower. It was a peaceful, Arcadian scene, but I knew there was something sinister lurking about. Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden powers. Through the precipitous abysses of my haunted mansion, I stumbled upon a passageway and with great determination, I was eager to reach the innermost secret of the fear, which I had once more come to deem definite, material, and organic. The moon no longer shone through the skylights and a bone chilling breeze blew out my candle and left me in stark blackness. Every second I was consumed with a mixture of fear and curiosity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
The apparition came abruptly, a demon, scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting stifled grunting, and burst through the wall—a loathsome night spawned flood or organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. God knows how many there were—there must have been hundreds. These demons were deformed, dwarfed, hairy devils. In spite of my daze of fright and disgust, I did not run. These ghoulish beasts where what was lurking in the walls of my home. They were the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning fear that lurk in the darkness. I am afraid I am not mad—I hoped at first that I might be, but I was not. I am not now. Llanada Villa is perplexing. It also produced a music which enchanted me for hours with strains I have never heard before; strains which must have been of its own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for this music was immortal. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality. Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to myself. Voices drifted down out of the darkness like gossip from another World. But to me in the night another voice was clearer, louder, more insistent—now like the striking of crystal cymbals, now like an elfin chuckling, always a breathless, never-ending whisper. I stood in the full moonlight, my face turned up to receive it, drinking in its brightness. It tingled in me like a draft from the things I had forgotten, in another World. It dissolved the dull ache of cold that was in my body and mind, that stiffened my swollen limbs, and lay like an icy nugget behind my eyes. It soaked into me, and into the World about me, so that every corner of my mansion shone with pale light, white and vaporous, as far as I could see. It was a strange World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
At Midnight, on the night of December 5th 1889, Mrs. Winchester and her niece Daisy made themselves comfortable on a third floor landing outside one of the haunted rooms and settled down for a all-night vigil. At 1am they heard the sound of bare feet running across the floor, then knocking sounds as if someone was rapping with their knuckles on the bare boards. Other noises followed in quick succession—a hallow cough and a rustling—suggesting that a presence was making itself known. By 3am, Mrs. Winchester assumed that the show was over and was planning to retire to bed leaving Daisy on the landing, but before she could do so Mrs. Winchester saw a sight that was to haunt her for the rest of her life. A closet door swung open and the figure of her husband, attired in a Navy suit, with his head inclining downwards, and one had pressed upon the chest as if in pain, strode slowly towards her. The specter advanced toward Mrs. Winchester, and passed right through her. Mrs. Winchester recollected nothing for several hours afterwards.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
A man’s family can be responsible for his success or his failure. Instead of tearing someone down, you should build them up. If you want something done, go to the busy man or woman, he or she will make time. I like those antique TV shows such as “Father Knows Best,” “The Bachelor Father,” “Dennis … Continue reading
Here is the thing. The Democrats’ real agenda is the one they will not talk about. It is the one they cannot talk about. It…
Some wonder whether humanity can ever recover the original innocence attributed to Adam and Eve — a state of unbroken trust, unmediated experience, and harmony…
If you are looking for a community that feels like home — fresh air, quiet mornings, safe streets, and a place where kids can actually…
It is in our unconscious repressed desires that we shall find the essence of our being, the clue to our neurosis (as long as reality…
