Secret Life
The secret-life ghost is a ghost whose secrets trapped them in the afterlife. Death arrived before the person had a chance to confess the lies or make amends for the past. These ghosts seek for a way to clear their conscience. The secret-life ghost returns searching for forgiveness and understanding.
An example might be a person who was playing with matches and started a fire that killed people. When they were asked if they knew anything about the cause of the fire, the person denied involvement and lied about what they were doing at the time. These deeds and lies eat away at a person’s soul, tormenting them in life and in death.
This ghost believes that if it can find a way to free itself from the mistakes of the past, it can find forgiveness and move onto another existence. By taking responsibility for their own actions, they are trying to do the right thing, but it’s too late. The time to make amends for the misdeeds of life has slipped away from them.
Many ghosts seem to fall into the same pattern of mistakes. The ghost desperately wants to fix life’s mistakes in the spiritual world. A deep regret ends up controlling the ghost. Worrying constantly about lies and mistakes are heavy weights for a soul to endure. It is a constant circle of errors – people often believe that ghosts are haunting the living but in many circumstances the ghosts are haunting themselves.
Story of a Secret Life
In San Jose, California, there is a mysterious mansion called the Winchester Mansion. The Victorian-style mansion consists of one hundred and sixty rooms, ten thousand windows, two basements, forty-seven fireplaces and forty staircases. Over twenty thousand gallons of paint were required to paint the entire mansion.
Construction on the mansion started in 1884 by the wealthy widow Sarah Winchester who was heir to the Winchester fortune. The Winchesters became extremely rich by inventing a rifle that loaded bullets with a lever mechanism. The Winchester Repeating Rifle was the gun of the Old West. It was an easy-to-use weapon responsible for thousands of deaths.
After the untimely deaths of Sarah’s child and husband, a psychic told Sarah that the Winchester family was cursed for the misery that their guns had caused. Sarah was told to move toward the setting sun and start building a house. Sarah moved to California and started to build her mansion. The mansion was built from plans that Sarah would bring to the foreman every morning. They were drawn on paper or tablecloths. The bizarre design of the mansion was to keep control over the evil spirits and ghosts.
To the average person, the Winchester Mansion was a labyrinth of insanity. Staircases were built leading to nowhere. Doors would open to long drop-offs into the yard. Tiny doorways were built too small for people to fit through. Cupboards were built with only a half an inch of space. Rooms were built around other rooms. There were secret passageways and trap doors hidden throughout the mansion.
Sarah believed that the ghosts of men killed by the Winchester Repeating Rifle were still after her so she continued to build the house larger and larger. Before a massive earthquake, the house stood seven stories high. The earthquake was so powerful that it twisted the room in which Sarah was sleeping, trapping her inside. It took servants several hours to find her since Sarah slept in a different room each night to throw off the ghosts.
The bell in the bell tower was rung every night precisely at midnight to summon the ghosts and then again at two a.m. to signal the ghosts to depart. Sarah believed that there were numerous ghosts throughout the house who wanted revenge against the Winchesters. Visitors believed that the mansion was haunted. Guests would hear strange footsteps, whispering and the slamming of doors when no one else was around.
Sarah died inside the Winchester Mansion in 1922. Many people believe that her ghost haunts the maze-like mansion. There have been witnesses who claim to have seen Sarah’s ghost wandering through the rooms or seated at her favorite pipe organ in the parlor room. The house is open for public tours. Both visitors and employees have reported strange encounters with supernatural entities.