Fruitful Year

Dedicated to my dear friend Jay for her bIRTHdAY which is October 31st !!



She's an awesome person, with creative talents!
Feel free to drop by her gallery to see.

Dear Jay.
Thanks always for being a sweetheart. Thanks for sharing your creativity here on dA. I wish you the best with your arts, always. May your birthday be wonderful like you, but may your year be fruitful the whole way through. I wish you the best in all things. You're a great person!
Your Friend, Tea

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These berry bushes were a part of the garden scenery at the Winchester Mystery House.

To see the whole series/project, see the Photojournalism subgallery here: [link]



I've always been fascinated with the Winchester Mystery House, located in San Jose, California.

My parents took me there a couple times as a child, and then I went again a couple more times as an adult... all times were daytime adventures [tours], each time I grew more and more fascinated. [I like things like this... ]

One thing became clear, and that was, that someday I wanted to do the nighttime flashlight tour that they hold every Friday the 13th and every weekend of October.

I finally did this, one Saturday just this past October, and it was very exciting for me.

It also prompted me to want to share in a Photo Journalistic kind of way.

Sarah Pardee moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, on guidance from a Spiritual Medium, to build and build and continue to build forever on a house that would serve to be sort of a monument to, as well as confuse any angry spirits who had been killed by the Winchester rifles, which her late husband William Wirt Winchester had been in charge of and acquired the fortune from, and then left to his wife Sarah.

She believed that those who had died by the hand of her husbands weapons were out to "get her" and that she was supposed to continually build upon a mansion that would be bizarre and confusing to these spirits in order to protect herself from them.

This is such a brief sketch of Sarah's whole story, but if you find any of this at all interesting, please feel free to click on the link at the far bottom to read more about this amazing story in history which has turned into quite a legend.

Whether anyone believes in ghosts or not, or that this location was or is still haunted [and many still do] the story of Sarah and architecture of the mansion, are stunning enough themselves!


Excerpt from the info. included in the very good and informative web page, I've included below:

<sup>"There is no question that we can regard the place as one of the world’s "largest haunted houses", based on nothing more than the legend of the place alone. Is this a case where we need to draw the line between what is a real haunted spot .... and what is a really great story?

Is the Winchester Mansion really haunted? You will have to decide that for yourself, although some people have already made up their minds.....


.....In the years that the house has been open to the public, employees and visitors alike have had unusual encounters here. There have been footsteps; banging doors; mysterious voices; windows that bang so hard they shatter; cold spots; strange moving lights; doorknobs that turn by themselves.... and don’t forget the scores of psychics who have their own claims of phenomena to report.

Obviously, these are all of the standard reports of a haunted house... but are the stories merely wishful thinking? Reports of ghosts and spirits to continue the tradition of Sarah Winchester’s bizarre legacy? Or could the stories be true? Was the house really built as a monument to the dead? Do phantoms still lurk in the maze-like corridors of the Winchester Mystery House?

I urge you to visit the house if you should ever get the chance. Perhaps that would be the best time to answer the questions that I have just posed to you. I can promise that you will find not another piece of American architecture like the Winchester mansion....

And who knows what else you might find while you’re there."</sup></b>

For more info., - a great historical account, description of the house, timeline, and what Sarah Winchester went through, feel free to read the following link. I think you will find it interesting.

[link]


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Respect (c) Tea Photography.
See BOTTOM of front Journal page here: [link]
for the full Copyright Disclosures,
on All work in contained in Tea Photography galleries here at Deviant Art, and for All of Tea Photography's work, where also there are more details on ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Thank You.</b>