How to Survive a Killer Seance (7 page)

“Yeah, fine,” Brad grumbled.

If bumps on the head portended bumps in the night, I had a feeling we’d just received our first “warning.”

“Sarah Winchester never slept in the same bedroom two nights in a row, to confuse the evil spirits. This is the bedroom where Sarah Winchester passed away from heart failure, on September 4, 1922, at the age of eighty-three,” Mia said, nodding reverently toward the heavy dark-wood bed on the intricate parquet floor. In fact, everything about the room was heavy—the lavender velvet drapes, the needlepoint-cushioned chairs, the woven Oriental rug. “She’d just had a session in the séance room with her psychic.”

We’d spent the last thirty minutes winding our way through the hundred-and-sixty-room mansion, which had more twists and turns than Lombard Street in San Francisco, also known as the “crookedest street in the world.” Mia had led us past hidden rooms, up low-rising staircases, and through secret passageways that Nancy Drew would have loved. Mother leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Some people call this the ‘Dead Room.’ ”

“It’s true,” Mia said, who’d apparently overheard her.

“Have there been any . . . ghost sightings?” Mother asked. A longtime fan of the occult, she’d been obsessed with the reincarnation recordings of Bridey Murphy, the predictions of Edgar Cayce, the hypnotizing techniques of Anton Mesmer, and films like
The Haunting
.

“I mean,” Mother continued, “if there are such things as ghosts, this would be the place to see one, right?” She glanced around, no doubt looking for floating white sheets, flickering candles, or fiery red eyes.

Mia smiled indulgently. “A few strange events have been reported. As you can imagine, lots of psychics tour the place and, of course, they’re always convinced that spirits still wander aimlessly around the mansion. Some of our tour guides claim they’ve heard footsteps, banging doors, whispered voices, strange lights, doors that close by themselves or creak when they open—the usual. Some even say they’ve seen the ghost of Sarah Winchester.”

“Awesome!” Jonathan nearly shouted with excitement. “That’ll add to the atmosphere of the party we’re planning.”

“I hate to disillusion you,” Mia continued, “but nothing’s ever been documented. We mostly leave it up to the imaginations of our visitors.”

“How did she die?” Brad asked, scanning the room. No doubt he was imagining the cleanup involved.

“Nothing too dramatic. She died quietly in her sleep, in spite of the continual construction.” Mia paused dramatically, then said in a lighter tone, “If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you the séance room.”

“How did she sleep through all that noise?” Mother whispered to me. I shrugged, then lingered a few moments after everyone left the bedroom to see if I could get a sense of the woman who had lived—and died—here. But all I felt was sadness for her obsessive-compulsive disorder and superstitious nature. I caught up with the others as they turned another corner.

“What was Sarah Winchester like?” I asked, curious about the enigmatic woman.

We shuffled up a narrow stairway, all the while keeping an eye out for lost spirits. “From early newspaper reports,” Mia replied, “she appeared to be quite pretty, in spite of being only four feet ten inches tall. Men found her charming, quite the belle of the ball.” I reflected on the only surviving picture of Sarah Winchester that hung in Mia’s office, taken by a gardener who would have surely been fired on the spot if he’d been caught. That snapshot was of an elderly, wizened woman—nothing like the “belle of the ball” Mia had just described.

“She had money and social position,” Mia continued, “and eventually married William Winchester, the son of the wealthy rifle manufacturer . . .”

Mia fell into her tour-guide mode, repeating a speech about the Winchester rifle that she’d obviously given hundreds of times in the past. My mind drifted as I imagined what Sarah’s life must have been like back in the mid-1800s. Piano recitals. Ballroom dances. Elegant parties . . .

“. . . four years later she gave birth to a daughter, Annie,” I caught Mia saying, “but the baby became ill with a disease called marasmus and died nine days later.”

“How sad,” my mother said softly.

Mia nodded. “And worse, she lost her husband to tuberculosis in 1881. At that point she was a forty-two-year-old widow with a twenty-million-dollar inheritance and nearly fifty-percent ownership in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. That gave her an income of about a thousand dollars a day.”

“Holy crap,” Brad said.

“Yes, a lot of money at that time—even today,” Mia confirmed. “But it didn’t do much to ease her pain.”

I shivered. Must have been a draft in the room we’d just entered. Mother moved closer to me and tucked her arm in mine.

“This is . . . the séance room,” Mia said, with a sweep of her arm.

The area was so small, I had a feeling you couldn’t swing a dead cat, let alone a dead body, without hitting something. It felt crowded even though there were only five of us. I looked up to see sprinkler pipes webbing the ceiling. On one side of the room was an unfinished closet, with wood slats and remaining bits of plaster—and no floor. Not much in the room suggested “Ghosts meet here.”

I pulled out my iPhone and snapped a couple of pictures to use as a guide for party decorations—although there was no way we could fit many guests in the tiny room.

“We’re at the very center of the house, where Mrs. Winchester regularly met with a medium to commune with the spirits and contact her deceased husband. And receive guidance for constructing the house.”

“She seriously believed in this stuff?” Brad said.

“Oh yes,” Mia replied. “Spiritualism was very popular during that time. People held regular séances claiming they were another form of scientific inquiry. Even Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House in hopes of contacting her own dead child.”

Mother tightened her hold on my arm. “Losing a child . . .” she started to say. I saw tears rimming her eyes.

“She often came up here,” Mia continued, pointing toward a wall behind us, “using that secret doorway. If you look down through the opening there, you can see how she spied on her servants working in the kitchen below.” Mia indicated the spot and we took turns peering out of Sarah’s lookout point. “She used secret passages much the same way, not only to escape the spirits, but to spy on her help. There are hidey-holes all over the place.”

“She spied on her servants?” Mother asked, shaking her head at the idea.

Mia smiled, enjoying Mother’s reaction. “Not only did she watch them, but she also listened in on their conversations throughout the house.”

“She’d have made a great spy. How’d she do it?” Jonathan asked, obviously intrigued.

“She’d had listening tubes installed.”

“Listening tubes? Never heard of them,” Brad said.

That surprised me. I thought he’d heard of everything having to do with espionage.

Mia pointed out what looked like one of the plumbing pipes that was exposed on the ceiling. But this one was narrower, and part of it ran halfway down the corner of the room. “Initially they were added so Mrs. Winchester could call her servants from wherever she happened to be. But she also used them to listen in on her servants’ conversations.”

“Paranoid, eh?” Brad summarized.

Mia shrugged. “She was a frail old woman, alone in the house except for her servants—and her spirits. I’m sure she just wanted to protect herself. No doubt the servants found her eccentric, and perhaps not all of them were completely honest.”

“The same could be said for many other types of employees,” Jonathan said.

I shot a look at him. Was he speaking of his own employee George Wells?

Mia continued. “Now, follow me to the Daisy Room, the second-most-famous room in the house after the séance room.”

We did as she instructed, trailing behind her up some stairs she called “Goofy Stairs” because of the way they wound back and forth on tiny steps. Mia explained the “easy risers” were built because of Sarah’s severe arthritis. After several dozen steps, we found ourselves in a brightly lit, cheery room filled with colorful stained-glass windows with daisy motifs. I had a feeling the windows were magnificent when the sun shone through them, but since it was dark out, I could only imagine them lit up.

“What a lovely room,” Mother said, admiring the detail in one of the windows.

“You might not think so if you’d been here the night of April 18, 1906.”

“The earthquake?” Mother’s eyes went wide.

“Yes, indeed,” Mia said. “Sarah Winchester was sleeping in this very bedroom when the earthquake struck, a little after five in the morning. She found herself trapped here for several hours, unable to get out. The rest of the house suffered major damage. The top three floors had collapsed, and this room essentially shifted, blocking her exit. She was lucky to be alive, but she was terrified, as you can imagine, certain this was a sign from the spirits who supposedly suspected she was nearly finished building the house.”

“Poor woman,” Mother said. Most of us native Californians just roll with the occasional quakes. But Mother was terrified of them, having experienced several over the years. She glanced around the room. “How did she get out?”

“At first the servants had trouble finding her because, like I said, she tended to sleep in a different bedroom every night, in an attempt to escape the spirits,” Mia said. “They finally heard her screams and were able to clear the rubble and debris. They got her out, but it took hours, and she never really recovered from the scare. She boarded up the front thirty rooms in an attempt to trap the spirits forever. Then she added more bedrooms, more chimneys, and continued new construction.”

I shivered again. Granted the house was chilly with no heat and I had my black leather jacket on, but this room in particular creeped me out, in spite of the bright and colorful windows. I was also feeling a little claustrophobic. Time to wrap up the tour, I thought, and made a show of checking my watch.

“Well, I’ve seen enough,” I said. “What do you think, Jonathan?”

Jonathan looked lost in thought. “What happened to her fortune after she died?”

It figured. He was all about the money.

“Sarah had spent a good deal of it by then, with the continuous construction. There were rumors that she’d hidden a fortune in a secret vault, but when it was opened, all they found were mementos from her life, including a lock of her baby’s hair.”

“How sad,” Mother said, still focused on the death of the baby. We followed Mia out of the Daisy Room and down the stairs.

“But the property? Surely that must have been worth a fortune,” Jonathan said.

“Most everything was sold off—furniture, personal belongings, even materials from the house itself. Then some investors bought it and turned it into one of the most popular tourist attractions in the state. It’s been declared a California Historical Landmark and it’s registered with the National Park Service.”

“Boy, they must really rake it in,” Jonathan said. I could practically see his eyes rolling dollar signs like Scrooge McDuck.

We found ourselves back in the gift shop at the end of Mia’s tour. While Mother shopped for souvenirs and Brad snooped around, Jonathan and I chatted with Mia.

“So,” Jonathan said, straightening his tie, “what’s it going to cost me to put on a séance here? Name your price, Ms. Thiele.”

She did.

I tried not to gasp.

Jonathan barely blinked. “Great! I’ll write up a contract and have it sent here tomorrow.” He turned to me. “One for you too, Presley. I’d like to set the date. How about four weeks from Saturday. Are you in?”

Sweat broke out on my forehead. How could I possibly host a Séance Party—something I’d never done before—in that tiny room, for a bunch of bigwigs—in just a month?

“I’ll need to check my calendar—I have some other events coming up—if the date is clear, I suppose that would work.” Then I named my ludicrous price, with the stipulation that an additional ten percent be donated to a worthy cause. Raising money to support research and cure diseases was the main reason I’d gotten into this business.

“Do you mind if I choose where the donation goes?”

I didn’t have anything currently in mind. I’d already raised money for the Alzheimer’s Association and for Autism. “I suppose . . .”

“How about the American Stroke Association?” Jonathan suggested. “In honor of my father.”

“Of course,” I agreed instantly.

Jonathan reached out to shake my hand.

I took his hand, wondering if this whole thing would come back to haunt me, and we sealed the deal.