The Winchester Widow
David Seidman art
The Winchester Widow with art by David Seidman
The gun that won the West saw countless lives lost. Some called it the repeating rifle, others simply the Winchester. Sarah called it Death incarnate. It blasted souls into the underworld during the American Indian War, Japanese invasion of Taiwan, Russo-Turkish War, Boxer Rebellion, Mexican Revolution, both World Wars, and more. Each conflict read aloud sounded like a gunshot bark to Sarah. The sound of men falling. The sound of children caught in the crossfire. The sound of genocide.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Everytime Sarah closed her eyes, it would echo in her thoughts. Her family had built, sold and shipped Winchesters around the globe and built a fortune in the process. A fortune resting on foundations of blood. So, when the souls of those killed by her family’s gun finally came to haunt Sarah for real, she shouldn’t have been surprised. Yet every ghost shocked Sarah to the core. Every spirit’s whisper was like hot lead tearing through her mind.
She had to be rid of them.
Yet you can’t kill a ghost. No amount of repeating action can keep a soul in the ground. Sarah consulted mystics. She hired psychics. She burnt warding sage by the bushel. Still nothing worked. Until, one day a woman found the answer. Sarah couldn’t dispel these dead, but she could avoid them. If she built a mansion with countless rooms to house those countless souls, they might let her rest. Sarah had money, that was sure. She could build and build using her blood fortune and never run out.
And so, Sarah built.
Ten rooms, twenty rooms, thirty rooms, sprawling out on her estate like fingers reaching in the dark. Sarah stayed in a different room each night to confuse her relentless stalkers. She made up beds on opposite sides of the house, hoping they’d sleep there and forget how they’d died. Sarah created spiderweb windows to catch new souls trying to creep through the walls. Patterns of 13 repeated through the spaces - another trap to disorient the dead.
But still, some made it through.
There was the little girl called Ella, who cried that her little Teddy had been shot through the heart as she hugged it to her own bleeding chest. There was the gentleman barkeep who doffed his cap every time he saw Sarah, revealing the gorey mess of his forehead. There was little Sammy Shadows, who didn’t say much except “why didn’t mumma stop them?”. A question Sarah could never answer.
The worst though, was the Widow.
That ghost looked just like Sarah, staring back from mirrors. She’d killed herself from insanity, after her husband had died in the war. To banish her, Sarah took all the mirrors from upstairs and hid them in the basements. The Widow would always return though, on polished surfaces, stainless steel pots and in the shining blades of knives. In desperation Sarah built ballrooms to see if a dance for the spirits would help give the Widow something else to do. It never, ever worked.
Sarah was driven truly mad.
Servants would watch the real widow walk from room to room at night, screaming at nothing, crying at open doors, hammering her fists against windows, repeating stop, stop, stop. No other person ever saw the ghosts. They all lived in Sarah’s mind. There was no escape if that’s where they were. No way to kill them, unless she blew her brains out. But Sarah refused to give that repeating rifle yet another victim. When Sarah’s heart did finally fail her, she continued to stalk the halls - the only true apparition of Winchester House who brought the rest of the dead to life. The Winchester Widow in her hopeless home. The mother of the fallen.
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This story was inspired by the epic art of David Seidman and the true story of Winchester House.
To follow David’s amazing work, find him on Instagram here.