Haunted Houses

by Nancy Roberts

  Farnham was uneasy. It was not just that the expensive brougham was attracting attention in an unsavory neighborhood; it was the appearance of the woman who had opened the door. There was something evil about her. More than an hour passed, and his two passengers were still inside the house. He was tempted to go up and ring the bell to be certain that they were all right, but he didn’t really dare, not yet. Restlessly he pulled out a cigarette. What were they doing inside that house all this time? He watched a fine, light drizzle of rain beginning to spatter the shiny black of the carriage.

  It was getting dark and still the lights hadn’t gone on inside. Why didn’t the Raven woman light a lamp? He had almost gathered up his courage to check and see if madam and her niece were all right when the front door opened. Miss Margaret came out first and her aunt, Sarah Winchester, followed. Mrs. Winchester turned back toward the darkness of the doorway to speak to someone he assumed was Mrs. Raven. Since the death of William Wirt Winchester, son of Oliver Winchester, the “rifle king,” Mrs. Winchester’s sole companion had been Margaret.

  This was the first of many trips Farnham was to make during the winter of 1884 from the Winchester mansion in Hartford, Connecticut, to the shabby street in Boston. Sometimes Margaret would accompany her aunt; on other occasions Sarah Pardee Winchester would go alone. She never seemed herself after a trip to the Witch’s Palace, as Farnham had begun to call the mustard-colored house in his own mind. After the last visit, Mrs. Winchester appeared extremely frightened. She clutched Margaret’s arm and talked hysterically.

  “Do you know what she says, Margaret? She says the money William left me has a curse on it!”

  “Why would she say that?”

  “She says the spirits of all those men and women that were killed by the Winchester are haunting my fortune and that they mean to harm me.”

  “But there were lots of people killed by the rifle,” Margaret protested reasonably. “Soldiers, Indians . . .”

  “Oh! Don’t say the word Indians. According to Mrs. Raven they will be the worst haunters, and there is just one way to keep them from getting me!”

  “And what way is that, Auntie?”

  “She says it can be done only by my getting a larger house that will attract good spirits. The good spirits will keep the evil ones away and the house must be fixed up according to their wishes.”

  “But how will you know their wishes, Auntie?”

  “Mrs. Raven will guide me as to what to do.”

  Farnham, who was doing his best to hear the conversation, shook his head. People said her husband had left her twenty million dollars. It was hard for him even to imagine how much money that was. But despite her wealth, he had begun to feel sorry for Mrs. Winchester. Poor woman, the death of her husband must have affected her mind.

  On their last trip to the house in Boston, just as they were about to get into the carriage, something huge and white flew past them and Mrs. Winchester screamed. Farnham thought it could have been a large owl startled by their lights, and he and Margaret tried to soothe Sarah Winchester. She almost collapsed in front of Mrs. Raven’s house, and it took his and her niece’s combined efforts to get her into the back seat of the carriage.

  The next day, to everyone’s surprise, Mrs. Winchester announced that she was moving to California. Farnham overheard her tell Miss Margaret that she believed the owl had been a warning to her that they must leave Hartford immediately. “From now on, the spirits themselves will lead me.” Of the staff given the opportunity to move, none accepted but Farnham, who was unmarried at the time.

  Once in San Jose, Sarah Winchester bought an eighteen-room house. Her first move was to hire twenty-two carpenters to immediately commence adding a wing to the house. Landscape gardeners were the next to arrive and they began to plant a towering hedge that shut off any view of the house from the road. Then seven Japanese gardeners were hired to fertilize and prune the hedge so that no one could possibly see through it.

  Before they had left Hartford, Mrs. Winchester used to talk with Farnham occasionally. Now she never spoke to him or to any of the other servants. All instructions for everyone had to come through Miss Margaret, her niece and secretary. The veil Mrs. Winchester put on for mourning was never removed except in the presence of the Chinese butler who served her dinner. Farnham began to find that he could scarcely remember Mrs. Winchester’s features. Once, years later, Farnham asked Won Lee what Mrs. Winchester looked like now.

  “She little old lady,” replied the butler, shrugging. “Look like shriveled plum.”

  From the time of her arrival in the San Jose house, carpenters and masons were at work seven days a week. There seemed to be no hurry about completing many of the projects, and the workmen wondered why they were asked to be there on Sundays, holidays, and even Christmas Day. They had no idea of the warning a Boston spiritualist had given Mrs. Winchester.

  “As long as hammers ring out day and night, nothing bad will ever happen to you. Only then will the good spirits keep the bad spirits away.” And so the hammers continued to ring out.

  Sarah Winchester was holding séances alone now in the séance room, sitting for hours with her pen poised to write down the spirits’ instructions for her life. The message she believed she was receiving through Mrs. Raven was that she must accomplish two tasks. The first was to keep out low and depraved spirits who would try their utmost to harm her. The second was to please the good spirits whom she would one day join when she moved on to the next world. Both tasks were very expensive. The good spirits could be pleased only by the most lavish furnishings, and therefore every room had to be furnished like a royal palace.

  It was vital that none of the evil spirits should ever get into the small, bare-walled séance room, which no living person but she could enter until after her death. If anyone did, they might contain a depraved spirit that could contaminate the room and prevent her from reaching “heaven.” Therefore her way of getting to the séance room was a secret one through a labyrinth of passages and rooms. To elude and frustrate the evil spirits whom she believed sought to follow her, she spent hours planning unusual and unexpected construction tricks for the carpenters to execute.

  Once these tricks were completed, she could, for example, push a button, that would make a wall panel recede, and she could step swiftly from one apartment to another. Then she could open a window and climb out, not onto a roof, but to the top of a flight of steps that would take her down one story to meet another flight that would bring her back up to the original level. The theory was that this maze of stairs would trick and confuse the spirits of the Indian ghosts.

  In addition to stairs that led nowhere, she had the carpenters build a huge room full of nothing but balconies. These balconies were of all sorts and sizes. Here the bewildered spirit might dash around a corner only to find that a balcony had suddenly shrunk from being three feet wide and was now only three inches! One balcony led to a door that, once closed, would not open from inside. Mrs. Winchester believed this would force the spirit to find another escape route. Of course everything was only temporary, a way to delay for a few minutes the evil spirits that hurried after her.

  After at least half an hour of maneuvering to be certain that she had eluded her last ghostly pursuer, Mrs. Winchester would arrive at last in front of a piece of furniture resembling a large wardrobe with drawers in the bottom of it. But like almost everything else in Sarah Winchester’s house, it was just another deception, for one door was not a wardrobe door at all. It really led into the séance room. Once through this door, she would emerge safely into the secret room on the other side of the wall, finally attaining her objective. The walls were painted blue, for it is widely believed among superstitious people that this color frightens away evil spirits. In the room was a cabinet, a comfortable armchair, and, in front of the latter, a table with paper and pencil for automatic writing and a planchette board to receive the spirit messages. There are spots on the floor of this room where the varnish has been
worn away by the constant tread of her slippers.

  Today, there are few people left alive who remember Sarah Winchester. One of the last was Maria. An old woman herself when speaking to the author, she still shivered about an experience she had as a girl when she worked in the Winchester house.

  It all started quite accidentally. Maria had been employed there for only a month and was hurrying to leave to prepare for a date that night with her young man. She took a wrong turn as she left the wing of the house in which she worked, and within minutes she was hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of connecting passages between the (by then) almost 150 rooms.

  At one point she was sure she was near one of the passages to the outside world; instead, Maria found herself on a stairway with seven separate flights. Breathless, she reached a door and managed to open it, only to find that the wall behind it was solid. Panic stricken, she attempted to retrace her steps but discovered she was on a sun porch that she had never seen—and it had a skylight in the floor! The next room she entered was also unfamiliar. She turned to go back out, only to realize in a panic that the door to this room did not open from the inside. Finally she found another way out.

  Her experience was assuming all the qualities of a nightmare, except that it was real. She walked along a balcony and, seeing an open window, stepped through it; but in a moment she found that she was back on another part of the same balcony. By now she was hysterical. On she hurried up one flight of steps and down another.

  Finally she opened a door and stumbled into a small, windowless cell of a room. There, seated at a table, was a little old lady glaring at her with an expression of unspeakable rage. It was Mrs. Winchester. “You have disturbed the spirits!” she shouted.

  Maria had never really seen her employer, for she was always heavily veiled, and all the servants knew that no one was ever permitted to see her face. The combination of the forbidden sight and the anger she saw there caused the poor girl to faint. The ending of this story is told in Maria’s own words.

  “When I woke up, I was lying on a bed in the servants’ quarters and within minutes was hustled out of the house and driven home. When I got out, the chauffeur gave me an envelope and told me I was never to come to work again. In the envelope there was my notice from Miss Margaret and six months’ salary. Even if I had not been fired, I could not have returned to that house.”

  Are there ghosts or spirits in the Winchester house?

  “I really don’t know. But one thing I’m sure of is that the medium who said Mrs. Winchester’s fortune was haunted by spirits that would harm her was evil. She took advantage of a woman’s grief after the death of her husband and told her lies that destroyed her.”

  For the rest of her life all Mrs. Winchester’s energy and money was spent on protecting herself from her strange imaginings.

  Mrs. Winchester was convinced by a spiritualist medium that the lives of her husband and baby daughter had been taken by spirits of those killed by the Gun That Won the West. She, too, would share their fate unless she never stopped building a mansion for the spirits. She would live only for as long as she continued to build. She built for almost thirty-eight years. The lavish, 160-room mansion, with forty-seven fireplaces, thirteen bathrooms, and endless spiritualistic symbols sprawls over six acres and is a California Historical Landmark. Now known as the Winchester Mystery House, it is located at 525 South Winchester Boulevard in San Jose, and is open for tours daily. For more information, visit winchestermysteryhouse.com or call (408) 247-2000. Also be sure to check out the 2018 fictional portrayal starring Helen Mirren.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are purely fictitious and a product of the author’s imagination. In no way does this story reflect on the present fine management of the Winchester Mystery House, which has been offering guided tours of this unique mansion on a daily basis since 1923.

  A PLEA FROM THE GRAVE

  CEDARHURST MANSION, HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA

  Someone is in need of help at Cedarhurst mansion—but who?

  There was food—champagne, caviar, paper-thin slices of Smithfield ham, canapés, smoked turkey, and more. A band played ragtime, jazz, the strident notes of “Somebody Stole My Gal,” and then the romantic ballad “Roses Are Blooming in Tripoli,” which started many of the guests reminiscing. The musicians played until shortly after midnight, and it was almost one o’clock before everyone had left.

  Stephen Scott, of Germantown, Pennsylvania, along with several others, had been invited to Cedarhurst Mansion in Huntsville, Alabama, for the weekend. Stephen was enormously pleased when he saw Cedarhurst for the first time, for it was just the sort of home that he had always envisioned Southerners living in.

  It wasn’t quite as sumptuous as the houses in Gone With the Wind, Stephen thought as he dressed for the party, but it was still a magnificent place. He was amazed at the architecture—the rooms were immense, the ceilings high, the walls fifteen inches thick. That was why his room was pleasantly cool.

  There was so much history here. In the early years families had lived close to each other, and the afternoon of the big party, Stephen had visited the family cemetery of the Ewings. Stephen S. Ewing had purchased land here in 1823 from Ebenezer Titus. (What an odd name Ebenezer was, Stephen mused. Were people ever named that anymore? It had some Biblical meaning, he thought.) Stephen had visited many of the Ewings that afternoon—not in the flesh, but at their graves. During the almost half a century that the family had lived in Cedarhurst Mansion, those who had passed on to the next world were buried out there in the cemetery.

  Stephen rather enjoyed looking at the carved marble flowers and reading the inscriptions on the stones. Some of the epitaphs were admittedly flowery, but others had real feeling in them. These days a few words, or simply a name and date, suffice to characterize the deceased or the sentiments of those left behind. Were feelings deeper in the past, Stephen wondered, or were some of these epitaphs simply the custom of the period?

  The next morning, he slept late. It was nine-thirty when he made his appearance at the breakfast table. His host and hostess were already having their coffee, and soon the cook appeared, carrying covered silver serving dishes from which rose the steam of scrambled eggs, grits, country ham, fried chicken, and hot biscuits. With the exception of the grits, which he considered tasteless, Stephen found everything delicious.

  Stephen’s life as a young stockbroker at a major Philadelphia firm was reasonably pleasant, and, even though his salary was a modest one, his parents had left him a comfortable income. Stephen had never been seriously interested in any woman and was quite content to return alone, night after night, to the family home. Nellie, the same lady who had helped his mother, still came each Monday and Thursday, as she had done for years. She would straighten the house, change the sheets, and see that “Mr. Stephen” had an ample supply of clean attire. On the first of October, Nellie put the down comforter on his bed; on the last day of March, she removed it and tucked the lightweight summer blankets under the crocheted spread that his mother had made.

  Back in his room at Cedarhurst Mansion that night, Stephen reflected on the day’s events before going to bed. He liked people and fancied that he understood their feelings. Someday, when he retired, he thought he would write. The contribution he would make to literature would be stories about people he had known, stories filled with fresh, clever insights. He might even attempt a novel of manners mixed with humor, something that savored of Aldous Huxley. In any case, the novel would be pleasantly predictable, a tale with no violence and no disorderly, tragic lives with all their loose ends. The unpredictable gave Stephen indigestion, and he judged most people to be like himself: They simply didn’t need another book to disturb them. Why couldn’t more writers understand that?

  He might start his writing career simply by doing an article now and then, perhaps a story about Cedarhurst. This was a delightful place, and such a story would give other Philadelphians an opportunity to experience v
icariously a taste of what the Old South had really been like. He was sure that he could convey its gracious ambience in a manner that would arouse his friends’ envy.

  Stephen’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of distant thunder. The sheer white curtains at the open windows rippled as wind rushed through the trees. A summer shower was on the way, and that would cool things off nicely for tomorrow’s activities with the other guests. Stephen fell asleep contentedly.

  When he awoke, it was to the sight of one brilliant flash of lightning after another. Each sharp, explosive clap of accompanying thunder was followed by a succession of gradually receding rumbles. Stephen had been responsible for supplies at an ordnance department during World War II, and he recalled some explosives going off like that. The lightning and thunder continued, sounding uncomfortably close.

  In his childhood, when he would visit his great-aunt and there was an electrical storm, the white-haired old lady and the little boy would retreat to her big bed for safety. Piling feather pillows all around them, she would hug him and reassure him that the pillows would keep the lightning from striking. The curtains at Cedarhurst were now standing almost straight out, and gusts of rain had begun to pour through the windows onto the beautiful, wide-plank floors. Stephen thought of closing the curtains, but at that moment there came a crash of thunder so loud and so close that he felt it must surely have split the house asunder.

  Sitting bolt upright in the big four-poster bed, he felt like dashing out into the hall to get away from the lightning. Instead, he closed his eyes and braced himself for the next detonation, but it did not come. It was passing over, he thought, and he opened his eyes.

  Then he closed them tight, and next he blinked, but it did no good—for a girl in a long white dress was standing near the windows.