A chilling undercurrent of voices seemed to through Llanada Villa’s pipework, and the hidden, dead spaces between the walls. In the Grand Ballroom the chandelier began to move by itself. Below their ghostly tinkling, I felt that my dormant fears my destroy me. A quartet of figures in hooded tabards raised their arms in supplication. I had been told…that it was common enough to see men who had died some times before, present themselves in a party, and sit down to table with persons of their acquaintance without saying anything: but that nodding to one of the party, he would infallibly die some days afterwards. This fact was confirmed by several persons, and amongst others by an old cure, who said he had seen more than one instance of it. Devil worship was believed to be a practice of medieval heretics and early-modern witches. It was alleged that at their gatherings the Devil or a demon would appear to receive the adoration of the unchristian sect. Somewhere near the top of my mansion, someone screamed for nearly a whole minute. Unearthly, lowering noises issued from the grounds, now heavily misted in night fog. There were sounds of strange beasts in pain, and vague echoes of something large and massy, moving sluggishly a though trapped in a tar pit. It was starlessly dark outside. Nearby, probably in the hall outside, someone howled like a dog until his voice gave out with an adenoidal squeak. Something thumped heavily and repeatedly on the floor above. Drum chants could be faintly heard. As though in the grip of an earthquake tremor, Llanada Villa shuddered. A chunk of the whorled plaster ceiling disengaged and smashed int chalky crumbles at my feet. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
My thoughts were obliterated by a thunderclap concussion of moving air as the oak door blew off its hinges and slapped the floor like a huge, wooden playing card. The French windows splintered outward in a shrieking hail of needle glass bits. The vacuum force of the moving air seemed to suck the breath from me. I screamed for the butler Adolf, soundlessly when small book with a black wooden covers and red-edged paper fell to the floor. It looked, more than anything, like an unusual hymnal, if a hymnal also contained chapters on selecting and preparing a diving rod, the proper times for calling on the spirits, and how to summon Lucifer, “protector of the souls of the damned.” It explained how one should correctly prepare oneself before engaging in ritual activity: by eating only twice a day, and then only at midday and midnight, and by abstaining. Only be scrupulously adhering to these and other instructions might one enter “dangerous battle and emerge the victor.” Adolf laboured toward the door, walking ponderously, like a trapper in a snowbank. Outside, the corridor was awash in stunning yellow light. A high-frequency keen knifed into his ears and numbed his brain. He heard his name being called over and over, coupled with a maniacal laugh that kept shifting speeds, accelerating and slowing. Through the shimmer and glare Adolf thought he could see stunted, withering shapes—various monsters struggling to be born to his mind. He stared them down and one by one they were absorbed back into the light that poured them, dissolving as through beaten progressively thinner with a mallet until the light shone through and disintegrated them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
In the hallway mirror, Adolf saw himself vaporize—hair popping aflame, shearing away, skin peeling back, skull rushing backward as sugary powder, blood and brains vanishing in a quick cloud of colour and foul odor. A ghoul breached the outside window and pounced on Adolf’s back, ripping and tearing. More rushed in like a typhoon devouring him organ by organ. Some nights these ghouls have killed ten. The halls of my mansion scatter north and south with their victims. But their victims! Ah, they have, so many of them, been waiting for murder so long, dreaming of it, touching it in the night, that his must be the basis of that acceptance which passes through them at the moment of impact. They have been looking, these victims, for an event so climatic that they will be able to cede responsibility for their lives and here, in the act of murder, have they at last that confirmation. Some of them embraced these ghouls with passion and they made their last strike. Others have opened to the in the fruit orchards and pointed at their vitals. For Llanada Villa or so I believe this now through my reflections, is based upon the omnipresence of death and to die is to become at last completely at one with the darkened hearts of Llanada Villa constructed for death. I become too philosophical. I will not attempt to justify myself further. For there is no justification. What happens, happens. The ghouls have taught me at least this much (along with so much else). It was all an illusion as I was. However, it is real now. How surprising to find that I have regained my nerve here, and now. When you dance as the inner cheoregrapher directs, you act without thinking, not in command of events but in harmony with them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
One must yield control, accepting the chance that a mistake might be part of the design. The inner choreographer is always right but often dangerous: giving up control means accepting the possibility of death. What I feared I have pursued right here to this moment in this room. Llanada Villa will keep my family corporeal. The half-mile walk to the Venetian Dining Room, with the upper wind shrieking by me vainly and savagely through halls was something one could only conceive in fantastic nightmare. The optical effect and the churning vapours lay monstrous tangle of dark towers. This infinite bizarrerie, endless variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism produce a brilliant shimmer of revelation impressing me afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid wood, and it not for my having built it, I would still doubt that such a thing could be. There are geometrical forms for which an Euclid can scarcely find a name—cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation; terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion; hallways with odd bulbous enlargements; columns in curious groups; and hidden pentagrams. Of orderly paths there seemed to be none, they only broad open swath being a mile to the left, where the secret passageways lie. As a whole, it is a complex of tangled and twisted lanes and alleys; all of them connecting to what seems like an infinite number of rooms, roofs, and towers. Deep masonry tunnels outspread below me. Llanada Villa looms like a dream-phantasy struggling to shine. And when for a moment the sun encounters a denser obstruction and plunges the scene into temporary shadow, the effect is subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
Even the faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind in the great open spaces takes on a wilder note of purposeful malignity. When at last I reached the first floor of the labyrinthine mansion, clambering over impossible tiny, zigzag stairs, and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and soaring height of omnipresent walls, my sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount of self-control I retained. However, this was the night I became aware that my butler Fritz Angerstein had been motivated to kill his wife and various other family members and employees by the Moses book when two shuffling corpses battered down the stairway door leading into the hallway. Their sightless, maggoty eye sockets, rotting flesh, dropping off their frames in clots. They hungered. There was a translucent horde of ghostly, humanoid leeches. The scuttling things advanced. Whilst elsewhere there was a subtle imaginary sound from some undefined point—a muffled musical piping, not unlike that of wind in mountain caves yet somehow disturbingly different. It gave me a touch of terrible subconsciousness certainty concerning the primal entities which dwell in Llanada Villa. As I proceeded through my maze of wood-shadowed twilight, though spacious and inviting, seemed like a bottomless abyss without visible means of descent. And when one has a chance to study the petrified wood, one is impressed by the fabulous antiquity implied in the discernible grain. This enchanted lumber came from the Black Forest in Germany. However, instead of terror locking my limbs, from the inward choreographer came a rush of warmth and energy into my muscles. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
Tonight we come upon Llanada Villa with undue haste; the ghouls had not been out for two nights previous, having burrowed deep into my mansion with a disinclination for pursuit, unavailable even to summons, but now at four in the morning of this coldest of all nights of winter, these ghouls are pounding the walls for release. Now the ghouls race down the halls and gallery, their breath a plume of fog. One comes upon a housemaid. He takes her from behind. She struggles in his grasp like an insect caught within a huge, indifferent hand, all legs and activity, grasping and groping, and he casually forces the valise from her hand, as he pulls her into a wall, her little hands and feet waving, and she is screaming in a way so dismal and hopeless that I know she will never be heard and she must know this as well. Our eyes meeting, I looked upon her with tenderness and infinite understanding knowing that I was helpless to save her and I thus am relieved of the responsibility but saddened too. I say in a small voice which she will never hear (because she exists no more), “I am sorry, I am sorry.” I know this, her eyes lighten with understanding, darken too, lighten and darken with the knowledge I have imparted. He snaps her throat, as the freezing colours of Llanada Villa descend, the scream stops. Small moans and pleas which had pieced out of the wall stop too and there is nothing more to be seen. This seems to have been one of the ghoul’s most satisfying victims. This all must have been a result of that evil book. My servants where in the habit of consulting alchemical manuscripts. There was a paper lying on the book, which seems to have followed me. It had some very odd writing on it in red and black—most carefully done—it looked to me more like Runic letters than anything else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
I was by the fire; it was cold and windy. I suppose the door blew open, thought I did not notice it: at any rate a gust—a frigid gust it was—came quite suddenly, took the paper and blew it directly into the fire: it was light, thin paper, and flared and went up the chimney in a single ash. I looked over the book again. It was no better than before, but the impression which it left this time on my mind was different. I knew it contained some Hebrew names for the divinity with magic—even harmful magic. It claimed that a “trinity triangle” would forge a mystical link between Heroldsbach and a pair of other pilgrimage sites and bring the Devil’s power on Earth to an end. This was being prevented by Satan, however, with the help of the French and the Jews. Later that night, when I was in bed, and all lights were out, when I was awoken by feeling a weight upon my feet. As I reached for a light and candle, I knocked over a glass, causing it to break. A chambermaid, sleeping in a room nearby, unlatched and opened the door. Suddenly, she gasped and said, “Mrs. Winchester! There’s somebody sitting upon your legs!”—and as I looked to the bottom of the bed, I saw someone get up from it, and then come round and stand over me. I felt somewhat alarmed, for the last few nights, the hallway had been disturbed by sounds as of heavy feet walking up and down; and as nobody could be seen, it was supposed among us that it was a specter, and fancying this that came up to my bed’s head might be the ghost I called out, “Who are you and what do you want?” #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
Emperor Lucifer, by the Talisman IIV, cause the fall of hail, thunder bolts, and stars of Heaven. I prey to Thee, to bless us with the ability to discover the most hidden secrets and enable us to penetrate everywhere unseen. By the figurative mystery of this holy vestment, I will clothe s with the armour of salvation in the strength of the dark prince. I invoke and conjure thee, O Lucifer, to show thyself unto us, here before this circle, in very attractive and fair human shape, with pleasant scents, and honest and caring personality, be of superior intelligence and possess all the powers of the cosmos. Destroy the system of enslavement and allow us to harness the power to create World change. Release this demonic force upon the World to serve the cause of counter creation. Lord of Darkness, I serve the cause of counter creation the liberation of mankind. Resurrect William, Sarah, and Annie Winchester. Allow us to rise up the fallen angels and claim their birth right as emanations of the power of unlimited possibility which has no use for rulers. Satan, please go forth and achieve the result we seek as one. Bless this Unholy Pact Power of the Midnight Coven Blook Moon. We have been enslaved over gold and other resources since before the beginning of recorded history. The path of this pact directly defiles the intentions of the desire to enslave. Transmute the nature of the soral metal making it a conductor for the powers of darkness. Allow prosperity to be funneled into this realty as a result of spiritual wisdom. Allow the physical emanations of that spiritual wisdom in physical matter, such as gold and other resources to be bestowed into our worthy hands. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
Allow us to prosses the higher consciousness and the Divs to act as vehicles for communication. We envoke the alchemical process and the venomous poisons of evil shall be transmuted into the nectar of immortal divinity through this operation of conjuration. Allow my spilled essence to act as the key which unlocks the gates of space and time ad bring forth the presence of the powers of darkness to stand before me in this temple. I open the doorway of Hell for you to stand before me, that we may receive your infernal blessing in the darkest eternal moment beyond the limits of the sands of time. Lucifer, some forth! Expand the mundane consciousness, produce a much improved intellectual capacity in this corporal plane. Increase the rate at which our neurons fire off in the physical brain. Allow us to enter the minds of other so we can directly usurp information from them so that it can be used for our own benefit. I canst the limits of the garb of flesh into the refining black flames of Hell to be clothed with the powers of divine darkness eternal. May Ahriman devour all including the limits of himself for the sake of evolution and become through the powers of the Druj Nasu in order to reveal the truth of all who lie unto the Dark Apostles! In the name of Zohak, the first man turned Div; I offer the limits of self unto the Druj through the mouth of Arezura to be clothed with the garb of Ahriman which is divine darkness eternal. Druj-Nasu hear my call and be stirred now to this place! Devour the flesh of this vehicle of power and as you do devour my human weakness. Come forth now and receive this offering made by me! Druj-Nasu come! Meratsav tadad oybugird miy a iaruha acmerhtashx iadzam hsuehgna mananahtoayhs ohgnanam adzad hsuehgnav acah tictasha hsutar ahta oyriav uha ahtay x7. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
Some ghosts cannot be laid to rests. Wherever they are taken they are allowed to move back to the site of their haunting at the pace of one “cock-stride” each year. It is believed in some regions that the best method of exorcising a ghost is to throw graveyard Earth at it. Earth from a graveyard is believed to be potent because it can dissolve human flesh. It is also believed that ghost have an aversion to iron. It is merely stating the obvious to observe that the caretakers at The Winchester Mystery House believe in the reality of what they have seen or experienced. Whether you will have a supernatural experience is another matter.
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Randolph Harris Research and Development 