Tea at Trianon: The Bizarre Case Of Sarah Winchester

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, March 16, 2018

The Bizarre Case Of Sarah Winchester

From Spirit Daily:

You have perhaps heard of Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester gun fortune and a woman who built what was at one time the biggest house in the United States, this in the San Jose area. There’s currently a major movie about it. We’re talking here of about 161 rooms. It’s thought through the years she actually had workmen construct — and periodically tear down — on the order of four to six hundred rooms, which she built to house angry spirits of the deceased: those who, she was told (by a medium), had been killed by the guns her husband’s family manufactured. Carpenters and other workmen labored in shifts that went on at the sprawling house for twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, over the course of thirty-eight years. It was seven stories tall.

And if that isn’t unusual enough, consider that some of the doors in the home led to nowhere — opened only to reveal a blank wall, or a drop to the ground — and there was a stairway that led only to the ceiling: little steps also to nowhere. It was a series of mazes. This, she explained, was to confuse spirits who might be after her. She changed bedrooms every night. Understandably, many thought that Sarah was wildly eccentric. In fact the board of the Winchester Repeater company even sent a psychiatrist to evaluate Sarah for a week at her weird residence. (Read more.)