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Korner's Folly photo by Kala Ambrose

Unlike the Winchester Mystery Mansion in San Jose, California, the Korner’s Folly home in Kernersville, North Carolina was deliberately designed with style in mind. At the Winchester House, Sarah Winchester, upon the advice of a psychic, had carpenters build new rooms in her house twenty-four hours a day until her death. This ongoing construction was supposed to confuse and trick the angry spirits who had been killed by Winchester rifles from locating Sarah Winchester in her home and haunting her.

Inside the Winchester home, doors open to several- story drops below and staircases lead to the ceiling, going nowhere. The entire house winds around like a maze and by the time you’ve walked through it, you’ve walked over a mile. The effect is eerie, confusing and at times maddening.  While Korner’s Folly also has a variety of unique rooms and twists and turns, the effect feels very different; it’s charming and each rooms pulls you into an experience for the senses.

Jule created Korner’s Folly for an entirely different reason and ghosts were the furthest things from his mind.  A talented artist, Korner wanted the house to be a showplace for his work, both artistically in size and scale and to give prospective clients an idea of the various types of interior design that he could create in their homes and buildings.    The house has twenty-two rooms and there’s no easy way to describe them. Each room is unique; some fit for royalty, palatial in scale. There are trap doors, over fifteen different styles of fireplaces, cubbyholes to tuck away in, murals, and a library.

Science has explained to us that all matter is energy and with hauntings, we often see land and homes that hold the emotional energy of the occupants who lived in a home for a long period of time. We can “feel” a sad house, or a happy home and sense the energy in a building or on the land.  When something very unsettling and negative occurs, such as a battle, the emotional energy of this event stays on the land for a long time. Likewise, when a family has lived in a home for a long time where children played and great joy and love was radiated for years, it can be felt as well.

When energy, negative or positive is expressed in one area for a long period of time, it leaves an energy imprint and objects in the home like furniture can hold the emotional energy in the home. With over seventy-five percent of the furniture in Korner’s Folly being original to the home, the energy of the Korner family is felt throughout the rooms and around the property. Read the rest of this entry »

Beekman Arms Rhinebeck New York

The Beekman Arms Inn located in Rhinebeck, New York, was established in 1766 and is recognized as the oldest operating Inn in the country. A gentile piece of history, the Inn allowed the 4th Regiment of the Continental Army to practice on its front lawn in preparation for the American Revolution. Over the years, the Inn has seen its share of action and honored guests, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benedict Arnold, William Jennings Bryan, and Franklin Roosevelt have all slept here and all of the above have enjoyed a drink at the Inn’s Tavern, including most recently Bill Clinton.

Located in the center of the Village of Rhinebeck, the Inn is charming and inviting and as an added treat, has been updated to accommodate modern amenities. The result is pleasing and comfortable and welcoming to any traveler and the Inn continues to provide hospitality with the grace and allure of the old traditions.

On a recent journey to Rhinebeck, I stayed at the Beekman in the Townsend House. The room was spacious, comfortable and to my surprise, included a fireplace, a writing desk, two wing back chairs and a decanter of sherry waiting to warm me from the evening air. The room also had an enormous walk in closet, so large that it included a sink, a mini fridge and enough room to store 10 to 12 suitcases or trunks.

Settling in to sleep that evening, I woke at 3:30 am to the sounds of hearing heavy boots stomping across the floor in the room. Alarmed, I sat up and turned on the light next to the bed, as I assumed that the sound was coming from my husband, who must be up and moving something around in the closet. As I turned the light on and sat up in bed, the noise stopped. Calling out to my husband, I heard a snorting next to me and turned to see that he was deeply asleep next to me in bed. Fully awake at this time, I sat up for a few minutes, thinking that I must have been dreaming and that the sound I had heard had come from a dream.

This further perplexed me, as I am a person who has been able to remember at least three dreams every night of my life since I was a young girl and I teach about dreams and dream interpretations. I wake each morning and review my dreams and categorize them into dreams that are teaching me something, dreams from the other side communicating with me, and dreams from my subconscious that help me to work out what is going on in my life. There are also dreams that mean nothing, that occur when one is not feeling well or ate something too heavy before going to bed.

As I sat in bed thinking about how I woke up, what troubled me was that I remembered the dream that I had been having, and it had nothing to do with a man stomping around and walking. That noise, had actually entered into my consciousness and interrupted my dream and woke me up, with the feeling that someone was in the room. Taking a sip of water, I looked at the clock which now read 3:45am and I resigned myself to going back to bed, as tomorrow was an early day. As I turned off the lights and prepared myself for bed, the stomping of the boots began again! This time, I knew it wasn’t a dream. Read the rest of this entry »

Window in the middle of the floor at the Winchester Mystery House. photo by Kala Ambrose

“The tender word forgotten, The letter you did not write, The flower you might have sent, dear, Are your haunting ghosts tonight” – Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

You’ve heard of haunted houses, but what about a house designed by the haunted to keep the ghosts at bay?

In San Jose, California, a house just of this nature exists. It all began back in 1862, when Sarah Pardee married William Wirt Winchester, the manufacturer of the infamous Winchester repeating rifle. Sarah gave birth to a daughter Annie, who soon died from marasmus at only 42 days old. This fact is intriguing, as marasmus is caused by a lack of nutrients, displayed as energy deficiency (wasting away). Could the haunting of Sarah by spirits, already been around her at this time, depleting her energy and resources while pregnant? Her husband William later died from tuberculosis. Alone and grief stricken after losing her only child and husband, Sarah journeyed to Boston to speak with a spiritualist medium, seeking advice on why her life had been filled with such great misfortune.

The spiritualist medium reportedly told Sarah that she was haunted by the spirits of hundreds of ghosts, the spirits of those who had been killed by a Winchester repeating rifle. These spirits included soldiers from the Civil War, Native Americans and cowboys in the Wild West.

The medium went on to explain that in order to escape the continued hauntings, Sarah would need to move out west and to build a house. The house would not be an normal type of house, rather the construction must never cease. According to the medium, as long as construction was ongoing in the home, it would keep the angry spirits disoriented, while providing a place for the good spirits to commune with Sarah and protect her from further danger. In addition, the architectural design was meant to be complicated and confusing in order to vex and confuse the angry spirits, which would distract them from finding and further haunting Sarah. Sarah took this advice to heart and moved from Connecticut to San Jose, California and bought over 160 acres of land, where she began and continued construction on a home, which is now referred to as the Winchester Mystery House.

After her husband’s death, Sarah received twenty million dollars along with shares of stock in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. It is reported that the dividends that she received averaged about one thousand dollars a day, along with her millions in the bank. This was in the late 1800′s, into 1900′s, when there was no income tax and the average rate of pay was less than a dollar a day. Read the rest of this entry »

Why we never talk about the miracles that come during suffering

Dec. 2011

by Julia Finley

Think what you must — they are “delusions” brought on by stress; “strands” let out by a strained mind — but truth be told, our dismissals are how we avoid touching the areas of life we do not understand, not coming anywhere near it.

The observer is stumped too, but without the luxury of these easy dismissals.  After catching a glimpse of the unknown — the part of reality that exists beyond the veil, peaking out for a moment to smile warmly, then everything returns as it was — the observer is left to wonder what to do with a miracle.

“Witnessing” is largely out of the question.  If they do “witness”, it has to be what people want to hear; if the observer insists on naked honesty, it is signed ‘anonymous’.  I remember two “witnesses” that were nakedly honest, but only because I was in a position where I had earned their trust.

The first was an old nurse turned teacher, somewhere during my interest in a medical profession.  The topic “Dealing with Loss & Suffering” had come up in our class, but the lecture soon turned to intimate feeling and experiences.  Twenty minutes in, the teacher confessed an amazing personal experience with loss and suffering:

“Some years ago, my dad was really sick in the hospital.  It was incredibly hard on me because dad and I were close.  Then one night, when I came home from the hospital, I sat in my bed and something happened.  I looked up and saw clouds opening, right in the ceiling, and light shined down upon me.  I heard a voice which told me not to cry and worry; everything is all right.  Then it told me that my father was going to die, and that my mom would pick up the body on Tuesday.  My father passed away that very weekend, and my mother did arrive to take the body on Tuesday.”

The story she recounted made a large impression on my views and assumptions.  How can we be so ignorant?  Doesn’t anyone know more about this?  How do I learn, without being regarded as crazy?  I began to recognize how many mechanisms exist in society, to sensor spiritual experiences.

In another, my own dear family member was going through her medical crisis; during a stroke, she witnessed:

“Shortly after my hospital bed was wheeled into an elevator, I had a stroke just before reaching the 6th floor.  I couldn’t move.  Four ladies around my gurney told me to stop struggling; what I needed to do was calm down.  I wanted to speak to my daughter, so I kept struggling.  One of the women told me she was watching over me, do not worry.  She was shaped like a pear — I don’t remember extremities, just her pear shape.  When I spoke about the four ladies later with my daughter, she informed me there were only two persons on the elevator.”

Now I understand something.  Our closed minds close off supernatural encounters, and foil the mission of their occurrence: impact.  Again, these stories left profound impact on me.  They arrive at trying times, not as products of stress, but as reassurance that life is still beautiful, even when it rains.  The best thing a listener can do with these amazing recollections, is to contemplate the timing and purpose of the higher power.  It could be that they arrive at that time on purpose, when we most need intervention, when it could change our views of life and reality  forever.

Images: “Abundance” & “Breathe” [masthead]  by Aaron Paquette

Have you ever wondered what happened to Viorrey, the little Manx girl, who had the world’s most mysterious friend?

by Walter McGraw

ONCE UPON a time, on a tiny little island, in a tiny little house, there
lived a tiny little animal named Gef who made wee-wee on a great big psychical investigator and screamed: “Go away, clear to hell! We don’t want you here.”

Not true, you think? Let me warn you that in the 1930′s one R. S. Lambert,
then of the British Broadcasting Company, investigated Gef and said, “It is impossible to deny  that there is serious evidence . . . for Gef’s reality . . .” And Lambert was called “crazy” but after lengthy proceedings a British court awarded him 7,000 pounds damages, in effect  acknowledging there indeed was good reason to believe in the existence of a talking mongoose on the Isle of Man. Read the rest of this entry »

Even baboons believe in ghosts.

October 1999

by John Keel

African farmers are often plagued by tribes of baboons who mess with their crops and raise general havoc because of their often mean disposition. You would not want a group of them in your own backyard. But how do you get rid of a mob of baboons humanely?

The African colonists once adopted an ancient system of anti-baboonery. They would trap one of the creatures, paint it from head to toe with harmless whitewash, and send it scrambling back to its tribal area. Its mates would then take one look at this eerie white intruder, start howling, and run away as fast as possible. They would keep running, leaving him far Read the rest of this entry »

My Proof of Survival about friendship beyond the grave.

February 2000

by Don M. Johnson

Dr. Lora G. Anderson was my best friend and metaphysical cohort. For nearly twenty years, I stepped outside of my profession of architecture and managed our mutual business in Lewiston, Idaho. In the early 1980s we moved to Southern California and affiliated with a metaphysical church in Woodland Hills—The Sanctuary of Revelations, Inc. Dr. Barry Lane, founder and current minister of the Sanctuary, is an enlightened teacher, as well as a psychic and trance medium. Read the rest of this entry »