by Bob Curran
But the most persistent legend concerns Room 502. In 1928, with the tubercular fever raging at its height, a young nurse was found hanging from one of the beams. Why she took her own life is unknown, but she may have been unmarried and pregnant. Later, in 1932, another nurse supposedly jumped to her death from the roof of the building after spending some time in Room 502. Thos who have visited the room say that there is a definite air of depression within its walls, which has affected them greatly. It is as if a baleful presence lurks there, pushing those who enter there toward suicidal thoughts.
In 1983, there were plans to turn the hospital into a minimum security prison. It was bought by Clifford Todd for around $305,000 with the idea of developing it for those purposes, but it was swiftly dropped when the neighbors started protesting. Todd and his partner Milton Thompson then considered turning it into apartments, but that plan soon fell through as well. One of the problems that the developers experienced was finding night watchmen to remain in the building during hours of darkness. Few local men could be persuaded to keep watch there because of the voices and sounds that were allegedly heard, and the eerie feeling that many experienced there. Electrical equipment switched itself off and on and curious voices were heard on walkie-talkies carried by the guards—voices that didn’t sound completely sane. After a great deal of legal and financial wrangling the developers called it a day and sold the property on.
In 1996, its next buyer was the Christ the Redeemer Foundation who planned to turn it into a religious sanctuary with a statue of Jesus, which would rival the one on Corcovado Mountain above Rio de Janeiro. The main building would form a complex in which there would be a church, theater, and even a gift shop. Some work began, but once again, odd voices were heard, equipment went missing, and a number of small accidents occurred, suggesting ghostly goings-on. The idea that the place might be haunted had a direct affect on fund-raising for the project. In fact, funding fell away and in 1997, the enterprise was abandoned.
Since 2008, there have been plans to turn Waverly Hills into a hotel complex. At present, the site is closed off with guards and security cameras at various points. But the ghostly stories about it still circulate—particularly about the insane ghosts that are supposed to haunt its corridors. It was featured on the Fox Family Channel’s Scariest Places on Earth, on the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, and Zone Reality’s Creepy, as well as the Syfy Channel and the British Television series Most Haunted. There has even been a strip in a French comic book (Pandemonium by Christophe Bec) concerning supernatural goings-on in Waverly Hills.
Do the ghosts of the ill or insane still haunt the former hospital? If you were really interested, you could always travel to Louisville to find out. Only, for your own sanity, it’s perhaps best not to go at night!
Winchester Mystery House (San Jose, California)
“… I need only describe the spectre which had
haunted my midnight pillow.”
—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
A sad, strange woman, perpetually haunted by ghosts; an eerie house, the building of which has no end; the legacy of a violent weapon. All of these elements come together at the Winchester Mystery House. Is this bizarre building truly a monument to the dead, or simply the crazed fancy of a terrified woman who imagined herself hounded by forces from another world? Do phantoms really prowl its maze-like corridors or lurk in the furthest corners of its countless rooms? Or is it all simply fevered imagination and delusion?
In a sense, the history of the Winchester House in the Santa Clara Valley, is just as bizarre and intriguing as the building itself. It began in 1839 with the birth of a baby girl to Leonard and Sarah Pardee in New Haven, Connecticut, a child whom they named Sarah. The Pardees were wealthy people and Sarah grew up determined to become a young lady of society—a task which she set about with some success. She was soon the talk of New Haven society as a lady of charm, wit, and elegance. Diminutive in stature, she was nevertheless an exceptionally gifted musician and fluent in a number of languages. She had a number of suitors, most of whom proposed marriage, but she had her eye set on one man—William Wirt Winchester. William was another prominent New Haven figure and the son of a prosperous shirt manufacturer, Oliver Winchester. In 1857, he took over some assets from a firm that owed him money—the Volcanic Repeater Company, a weapons firm that made a rifle with a lever mechanism for loading bullets directly into the breach. This weapon was an improvement on other firearms of the day, but Winchester believed that it could be developed further. The new company, which bore his name developed the Henry Repeater Rifle in 1860, that attached a tubular magazine to the firing barrel, which made it easier and faster to reload. Sales of the new weapon boomed, but were aided by the advent of the American Civil War. Indeed, it became the weapon of choice for the Northern troops throughout the course of the conflict. Sarah and William were married in New Haven on September 30th, 1862, as the rifle went into full-scale production.
With the war ended and an immense fortune amassed, William and Sarah settled down into married life and began to think about a family. On July 15th, 1866, Sarah gave birth to a daughter named Annie Pardee Winchester. After she was born, she contracted a mysterious infant disease that caused her body to waste away. Doctors were baffled. The baby died on July 24th, leaving Sarah devastated. Always of a delicate disposition, she actually veered toward madness at the time, but she had the best medical attention and rallied to some extent. She shut herself away and refused to see anyone, including her own husband, spending some periods in institutions. She would remain this way for almost 10 years and would never have another child.
Shortly after she finally returned home, another tragedy struck. On March 7th, 1881, William, now the heir to the Winchester fortune, contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and died. Upon his death, Sarah became the sole beneficiary of the Winchester Company, inheriting in excess of $20 million, which was an unbelievable sum that would set her up for life. And from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, she received roughly $1,000 per day (non-taxable), which made her one of America’s richest women at the time.
But despite all her unimaginable wealth, Sarah continued to grieve both for her husband and her lost child. She sank further and further into depression and began to alarm both her friends and family—one of whom suggested that she should consult a spiritualist medium in order to make contact with those she loved. The medium gave her a chilling message. She was under a curse, as was her family, resulting from the creation of the Winchester Rifle and the money she had made from it. This took away both her daughter and her husband, who would never rest until reparations were made. The ghosts of those who had been killed by the weapon were now seeking vengeance, and soon she would be consumed by their curse as well. What could she do? She must sell all her property in New Haven and travel west into the setting sun. The spirits of her husband and daughter would act as her guides, and when she found a place in which she was to settle, she would recognize it. If these instructions were not carried out, she would die.
Sarah followed the instructions and sold up her property in New Haven, heading west toward California. In 1884, she reached the Santa Clara Valley where she found a large, six-bedroom house already under construction. It was being built by a Doctor Caldwell in order to house his large family. The land around it amounted to 162 acres, which gave a great deal of room for expansion. Sarah convinced the doctor to sell her both the house and the land. She then threw away all previous building plans and began on her own project, building wherever she wanted to. She employed local craftsmen and builders and they changed, altered, built, and rebuilt to Sarah’s own increasingly bizarre specifications. They demolished one section of the house, then rebuilt it, and then demolished it again. This went on for the next 36 years, during which time Sarah kept 22 carpenters at work in almost 24-hour service. They worked throughout both the day and night and the sound of sawing and hammering was to be heard at all hours.
A railway line was constr
ucted to bring materials and furniture to the house—money was no object to Sarah—and the building grew from six to 26 rooms as the construction work continued. Sarah claimed to be guided by the spirit of her late husband, whether it was directly or through dreams, and each morning would turn up with a hand-drawn map, which she presented to the building foreman, detailing her ideas for the day. Although she claimed to have no real plan, she showed a definite aptitude for planning and construction work. When the plans didn’t work out, Sarah just had the work demolished and began again. Rooms were added to and then turned into wings as the house grew and grew. Towers were added, and eventually, the house grew to a staggering seven stories. The interior was madness. There were 47 fireplaces in the rooms, but many could not be lit because the chimneys stopped short of the ceilings; cupboards opened into completely blank walls, staircases led nowhere or turned back on themselves, and three elevators were installed between floors, but only worked sporadically. Some of the doors leading out of the rooms dangerously opened into steep drops; corridors twisted in circles; skylights were arranged in doubles while some of the bathrooms and toilets had clear glass doors. The posts at the bottom of some of the staircases had been put in upside down and some of the grander doors were only ornamental and opened onto plastered walls.
There was a recurrent theme of the number 13 throughout the house, a number which Sarah considered to be mystical and important. There were, for example, 13 panes of glass in each window, wooden walls had 13 panels in each, many of the floors contained 13 sections. Nearly every staircase had 13 steps (one particular staircase had 42 steps—a multiple of 13—but each step was only 2 inches high—the staircase itself led nowhere); some of the rooms had 13 windows and the greenhouse had 13 cupolas.
What was Sarah’s plan behind such a bizarre dwelling? She believed that this house was being constructed as living quarters for all the ghosts that had been killed through the use of the Winchester Rifle and who were trying to take vengeance on her. Because the number of such phantoms seemed to be endless, so was the building of the house itself. Using some ancient Eastern logic, she deliberately designed the corridors and staircases in a haphazard and maze-like style to confuse the ghosts who she believed were always around her. She lived in one part of the building, well away from where she perceived these ghosts to be, seeing nobody except the servants and the workmen.
Still, the house grew, and by 1906, it had reached an amazing seven stories. Late at night, Sarah would throw all its windows open (presumably to let the spirits out into the wider world) and would return to play on a grand piano that she had brought to the mansion. She would often play all through the night and although some people complained, many found it rather beautiful, as she was an accomplished pianist.
In 1906, California was shaken by a great earthquake centring on the San Francisco region, with aftershocks for many days afterward in various parts of the state. Great portions of the bizarre house fell and were reduced to rubble. The three uppermost floors had collapsed into the gardens and would not be rebuilt. One of the bedrooms—where Sarah was actually sleeping—shifted and trapped her inside. Although rescued, she was now convinced that the earthquake was the work of the spirits who were furious that she was contemplating finishing the building of the place. She boarded up part of the house, which would not be completed, trapping (or so she believed) the spirits that were there inside. In order to confuse the vengeful spirits even further, she kept moving the place in which she lived around the remaining building, and in the end, nobody knew where she lived along the eerie corridors. In actual fact, the strange structure had fared much better in the earthquake than many of the houses around about and although it was a labor for the workmen to restore part of it, it was not as bad as it might have been. The expansion of the house began once more at a slightly brisker pace. Chimneys were built all over the place, although they appear to have served no purpose. Although, according to Sarah, the spirits came and went through them, entering and leaving the building by that route. The other thing she now forbade was for any mirrors to be installed in the mansion in case the spirits became trapped in their reflective surfaces. In the end, there were only two mirrors in the whole house.
Her behavior became wilder and wilder. It appeared that she seldom slept, but sat up all night, playing music on the piano or else wandering the twisting corridors and vacant rooms of the place talking to (or more likely shouting at) the spirits. On September 24th, 1922, she retired to bed in some remote part of the house and in the early hours of the following morning she died, at the age of 83. For many years, most of her business interests had been handled by her niece Frances Marriot, who became her main beneficiary as far as her house and possessions were concerned. It came as some surprise to find out that, despite her allegedly vast fortune, Sarah had been close to bankruptcy at the time of her death. This was partly due to the monies that she had squandered on the house, a series of bad investments, and outright stealing from her account by relatives (including Frances). There were rumors, however, that she herself had removed part of her money from bank accounts on the advice of the spirits, and that it was hidden somewhere in the house, together with a set of solid gold tableware, which she used for entertaining the spirits. Relatives, anxious for a share of the money, began to hunt everywhere, looking for secret cupboards where a fortune might have been stashed. They opened a number of concealed safes, but found nothing—just old newspaper reports concerning the death of her husband, underwear, several old photographs, a lock of Annie’s baby hair, old baler twine and fishing lines, and several pairs of shoes. If the fortune was there, it remains there to this day.
Everything that could be removed from the mysterious house was removed, and the building was sold by the family, still trying to make their money out of Sarah’s death. It was bought by a group of investors who wanted to turn it into a tourist attraction. One of the first people to enter the place was the American cartoonist and collector of the bizarre Robert LeRoy Ripley, famous for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. Ripley is believed to have bought some of Sarah’s possessions, which he briefly exhibited in his Odditorium in Hollywood together with a small plaque about their previous owner. He certainly wrote about the house and Sarah’s strange life in several of his newspaper columns. When it was put up for sale, the house was advertised as having 148 rooms, but no one could be sure (even to this day, nobody is sure exactly how many rooms it contains—each time they are counted, a different total comes up). Removal men got lost in the labyrinthine corridors, and it took several weeks just to get the furniture out of the place. Many spoke of hearing voices and whispers all through the place and nobody would work in the old house after dark. Footfalls echoed in seemingly empty rooms terrifying those who passed by, and presences were sensed along the twisting corridors and on the staircases. Today, the building is designated a California Historical Landmark and is the property of the State Parks Service whose literature simply describes it as having “an unknown number of rooms.” No mention is made of ghosts.
But do phantoms actually walk there or is the bizarre structure no more than a monument to madness, built by unimaginable wealth in insane hands? Mediums have come to the house and have declared that they can still sense ghosts in some of the rooms. Most of these claims have been dismissed, but according to some tourists there have been “eerie sensations” within the house and several people have described a mysterious and eerie figure passing along some of the corridors. This figure had been subsequently identified as Sarah Winchester herself, the viewers could not have known. There have also been stories of cold spots, of voices in some of the empty rooms, of artifacts that move of their own accord, and of doors that open and close by themselves. There is no doubt that the sheer scale and bizarre history of the house lends credence to such stories, but what if they’re true? What if the Winchester Mystery House is actually the biggest haunted house in the world? Perhaps it’s worth taking a visit to find out. However, be careful that y
ou don’t get lost amongst its myriad rooms! The spirits might be waiting for you!
Yumbulagang (Yarlung Valley, Tibet)
“‘Not that room.’ Miss Hammond clasped her lace-covered
hands together so tightly I feared that she would break her
skin and make them bleed. ‘Oh my God, not that room. Don’t
go in there, I entreat you.’”
—Mrs. J.E. Howard, The Shuttered Room
During the early 20th century nowhere was as mysterious or as mystical as distant Tibet. Shut away among the towering Himalayas, this remote country took on a certain mystique of its own. In isolated and almost inaccessible monasteries deep in the country were secrets older than the world itself, and here, lamas (priests and monks) regularly used powers that were beyond the scope of most mortals. The Communist Chinese invasion of Tibet on October 5th, 1950, and the closing of its borders only served to add to its mystery. During the late 1940s, the 1950s, and the mid-1960s, Tibet and its lamaseries often became a place of pilgrimage for those seeking mystical adventures and for the rebellious youth of the time. The so-called “hippy trail to the East” ended in the city of Kathmandu in the neighbouring country of Nepal, and many who came there also hoped that they might take the Old Lhasa Road to the capital of remote Tibet. Chinese border guards invariably thought otherwise. And yet, the tales that came to the west from this mysterious land only increased and grew wilder. As the 1960s/1970s discovered writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and other visionaries of the Cthulhu Mythos, many became even more convinced that extremely ancient secrets were concealed somewhere among the cloudy monasteries.
What more spectacular place to house such ancient mysteries than the Yumbulagang Monastery (Yumbu Lhakang), reputed to be Tibet’s oldest extant building? Perched on the top of a steep cliff and overlooking the Yarlung Valley, the Yumbulagang is every inch what a mysterious Tibetan monastery is supposed to look like. According to various and diverse traditions within the country, the monastery was built as a palace for Nyatri Tsenpo, who was the first king of Tibet of the so-called Yarlung Dynasty. He reigned around AD 127, and his name appears in both the Bon (a pre-Buddhist faith in Tibet that centered on the personality of a divine king, yet contained many Buddhist characteristics) and Buddhism. According to Bon legend, he descended from the Heavens by a golden rope onto Yalashangbo, a dome-shaped mountain in northwest Tibet, which was sacred to the surrounding people. The Tibetans welcomed him and made him their king. He had certain physical peculiarities—for example, his hands were webbed and his eyelids closed from the bottom of his eyes, not the top. This made the Tibetans also believe that he was a god, and they worshipped him as such. He was also immortal, but was brought up to Heaven once more by the same golden rope which had brought him to earth. He had also established a line of immortal kings, all of which were taken up into the clouds by various ropes—both gold and silver. His name reflects his inhuman ancestry and means “a sovereign enthroned from the neck” (in some versions of his legend, his neck is said to have included fish-like gills). They built the Yumbulagang in Southern Tibet as his Palace.
