A Visit to the Winchester Mystery House with LS Delorme #ParanormalMystery #HIstorical


When my kids were just toddlers, we lived in San Jose, California. About a year after my youngest was born, we visited the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. This is a historic mansion known for its size, architectural weirdness, the mystery surrounding its construction, and its reputation for hauntings.




The backstory of the house is that it was built by Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Wirt Winchester, who was the treasurer of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Yes, that’s Winchester, as in Winchester rifles. When Sarah’s husband died in 1881, she inherited about half of the company, which was a huge fortune. She moved from Boston to California and, in 1884, started construction on the house. This construction continued 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until she died in 1922. This resulted in a house that was a giant, sprawling maze.

Sarah was a strong believer in spiritualism and thought that the dead regularly communicated with the living. As an offshoot of this belief system, she thought she was haunted by the ghosts of people who had been killed by Winchester rifles, so she built a house that she thought would “confuse” and “trap” spirits. Apparently, she consulted with spiritualists who told her that she had to keep building the house to “appease” these spirits. She built a “séance room” in the house, called the “blue room,” so that she could better communicate with the spirits, who apparently had specific and ongoing building instructions.

Over the years, the house garnered a reputation for hauntings and strange occurrences. There have been numerous sightings of a man in overalls and a cap. He is often seen repairing the fireplace or pushing a wheelbarrow. Some people have claimed to see Sarah herself, wandering around and supervising ongoing construction. There have also been reports of ghostly voices, unexplained footsteps, and faint sounds of hammers and other construction noises.

When we visited, the whole place reminded me of an abandoned funhouse. There were staircases that led to nowhere, doors that opened into walls, and windows that looked into other rooms. They told us that there were around 160 rooms in the house, 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms, 47 fireplaces, 10,000 panes of glass, and, just for kicks, 2 basements… because one can never have too many creepy basements. We didn’t see any spirits or anything like that, but we did experience another phenomenon associated with the house. We were in one of the rooms, not the séance room or any of the more “famous” rooms; it was just a random room. Suddenly, it got really cold. It was like someone turned the air conditioner on and we were in the draft. We walked around the room to see if we could find the source of some sort of vent or something, but we didn’t. Afterwards, we read that lots of people experience sudden drops in temperature in the house. Another odd thing was that my son, who was in a stroller, was completely calm and silent while we were walking through the house. He normally hated to be confined to the stroller, but when we were there, he just stared around him with interest. They say that young children see things that adults can’t.

I must remember to go ask him if he remembers anything about this place.


Fanning Fireflies
Limerent Series
Book Three
LS Delorme

Genre: Romantic Historical Paranormal Mystery 
Publisher: Limerent Publishing
Date of Publication: April 19, 2024
ISBN:979-8-9874880-4-1
ASIN: B0CYCQ6XCF
Number of pages: 230
Word Count: 97000
Cover Artist: Brittany Wilson

Tagline: In 1944 Harrisville, Veronica’s dangerous love ignites a flame that reveals dark secrets, awakens ghosts and threatens to destroy all she loves.

Book Description: 

There is something rotten in Harrisville.

It’s 1944 and Veronica works tirelessly just so she can afford to eat. Maybe one day she will save enough to own the home her family is living in, but for now, she doesn’t have time for fanciful thoughts, or much else.  She doesn’t have time for the fire whispering to her, the ghosts trying to talk to her and the son of her boss, who can’t stop staring at her.  She definitely doesn’t have time to think about Lazlo, the handsome black soldier that she processed at the draft office, but she can’t seem to stop herself. As her ability to ignore Lazlo evaporates, so does her self-imposed ignorance about her hometown. There is, and always has been, something rotten in Harrisville. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, Veronica works in the cigarette factory, where corpses hide in the tobacco with the roaches. 

It’s 1944 and Veronica works tirelessly just so she can afford to eat. She doesn’t have time for fanciful thoughts, or much else.  She doesn’t have time for the fire whispering to her, the ghosts trying to talk to her and the son of her boss, who can’t stop staring at her.  She definitely doesn’t have time for love, even less for dangerous love. You see there is, and always has been, something rotten in Harrisville. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. 

After all, Veronica works in the cigarette factory, where corpses hide in the tobacco.


Excerpt:

Veronica froze.

Lazlo began walking the very same path she had walked minutes earlier, although he looked much more graceful than she must have looked. His gate was long and easy. His eyes were down, staring at the track as he walked. Veronica sat as still as she could, terrified that he might see her, equally terrified that he wouldn’t.

As he came to the spot where she was sitting, he didn’t look up. He walked right past her, as if he hadn’t seen her. Veronica felt a stab in her heart. Before she could stop herself, she called out.

“Aren’t you Lazlo Fox?”

He turned quickly.

“That’s me,” he said, and a grin lit up his face.

Now that he was here, Veronica realized that she hadn’t planned what she would say if she saw him. For a second, she considered saying that the draft office needed more information about him, but she realized that was both stupid and an obvious lie.

“I have an extra biscuit, if you’re hungry,” was what she managed to squeak out.”

She had hoped to be able to speak with him for a just a moment. She knew that it would be dangerous for him to even be seen with her, but as he walked toward her, she held the biscuit out for him. She knew that he would have to climb up to her to get it, and despite the danger, this is what she wanted.

Instead of scrambling up the broken concrete, as she had done, he gracefully jumped from one to the next, balancing on the ball of one foot as he landed on each one. In less than a minute he was standing on the rock next to her. She expected him to take the biscuit and leave, but she wanted him to stay… how badly she wanted him to stay.

Lazlo smiled and took the proffered biscuit bag gently from her, but his eyes were on her face, not on the bag. For a moment, he paused, and then he sat down next to her. He wasn’t so close that she might accidentally touch him but his feet dangling over the edge of the rock next to hers felt weirdly intimate.  He opened the bag and pulled out the biscuit. Veronica looked down at her biscuit and took a tiny bite, pretending to be engrossed in eating but her heart was racing so hard, she almost choked on the bread.

“Lazlo, that’s an unusual name, is it a family name or something?” she asked.

Lazlo turned and smiled at her. She was suddenly afraid that she had said something wrong or stupid, although she couldn’t for the life of her think what it was.

Lazlo’s eyes suddenly got wide.

“Well, my mama named me that cause she’s a witch,” he said quickly, and then winced and shook his head.

“That sounded awful,” he said quickly. “I’m not talking bad about my mama. She’s actually a witch, so she thinks like attracts like. And if she gives me a rich-sounding name that will draw money to me.”

Lazlo then laughed and shook his head.

“I can’t believe I just told you that,” he said. “I never told anyone that before. Probably because—”

Then he stopped.

Veronica’s heart felt like it had grown to take up the whole of her chest. She was frightened of what Lazlo would see if she looked at him, so she took another bite of her biscuit. When she did look up, he was looking at her with eyes that were hopeful and wary in equal measure.

“It sounds like your mother really cares about you,” was what she finally said. And that was all.

Looking at Lazlo’s guarded yet hopeful eyes, Veronica desperately wanted to tell him that none of this stuff mattered. She wanted to say that they could be friends, or even more. Inside, her crazy heart said that they could just run away together. She longed to say this out loud, but she knew it wasn’t true. Neither of them could outrun their class or caste. Lazlo was a colored man.

She was the poor white daughter of a single mother. If he was an untouchable, she was barely one step above that. Her brain told her that, even if her heart argued otherwise.

About the Author: 

Lexy is the Author of the Limerent novel universe.  The first two books in this universe were Caio and Bright Midnights. They are two of the three foundation books of the Limerent Series, and as such can be read in any order. 

Bright Midnights was picked as an Editor’s Choice by Booklife and received a Golden Wizard award in the UK in the category of YA.  

Lexy has also been a travel writer and author of The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland Hong Kong and An Expat Mom’s Unofficial Guide to Disneyland Paris. She is an ex rock musician, ex science grad, recovering attorney and now an expat writer.  Her love of writing stems from an eclectic life.  As a navy brat, she grew up in various states across the U.S. until her father retired to North Carolina when she was a teenager.   

As an adult, she has continued this tumbleweed life, having since lived in 3 countries, 9 US States, and 21 cities around the world. But, through all this change, her love of writing has been the one constant. Writing the Limerent Series allows her to use her unusual past to help create new worlds.  

Lexy now lives in Paris with her husband and two very cool sons.  
 
“Writing fiction gives you a place where you can put all the attractions that you probably shouldn’t feel, all the thoughts you are afraid of saying out loud, and all the rage that you can’t vent because you would kill people.  While we live, these moments stay with us, but when we die, they die too. When you put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, you put these things out there in the world where they can be read by others.  This means that they have a life outside of you and outside of your own head, and that’s something that is really compelling to me. I like the idea that these amazing moments that I’ve had in life don’t disappear when I disappear.”  - LS Delorme 
 
“For me, writing is like therapy…just cheaper.  As most writers are not really individuals but a collection of individuals trying to find a way to live together in one brain, fiction allows them to make a home for all these people who live rent free inside their heads.  It’s also place that you can capture unique moments in life that impact you or that make you feel deeply.”  - LS Delorme  









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