Psychic News - July 2017 issue

 HELEN MIRREN stars as wealthy Spiritualist in new movie

Misty wrote:

 HELEN MIRREN stars as wealthy Spiritualist in new movie

What's the movie called kk? and what's it about?  Anything with Helen Mirren in it is worth watching.

Few will have heard of Sarah Winchester, but her name is infamous in paranormal circles. The heiress of an enormously profitable firearms company in Connecticut, Winchester reportedly believed herself to be cursed. Deciding to consult a psychic for advice, she was told that she was in fact being haunted by the spirits of all of those who have been killed by the guns manufactured by her late husband.

The news sent Winchester into something of a mad spiral, and she ended up moving into an elaborate mansion in San Jose, California to harbour the ghosts. She also believed that the mansion needed to be constantly renovated in order to keep the ghosts at bay, with construction work continuing on the house day in and day out for the next 38 years until her death in 1922.

But a lack of actual construction plans rendered the house a strange, surreal place, full of spiral staircases and doors that lead to nowhere, windows looking out onto brick walls, and neglected damage from a 1906 earthquake. The house has 160 rooms; 2,000 doors; 10,000 windows; nine kitchens; 13 bathrooms; and 47 stairways and fireplaces. It is currently (and somewhat inevitably) a popular tourist attraction.

Winchester also had an odd fixation on the number 13, which explains the house's 13 bathrooms, its windows with 13 panes, and the fact that she ultimately wrote her will in 13 sections and signed it 13 times.

Helen Mirren is playing the real-life kook in next year's Winchester, with Jason Clarke as a sceptical paranormal expert who begins to suspect Mirren's heiress might not be so wacky after all.
Currently in production in California, Winchester will be released in the UK in early 2018.

Since her death in 1922, Sarah Winchester has been perceived as a mysterious, haunted figure. After inheriting a vast fortune upon the death of her husband in 1881, Sarah purchased a simple farmhouse in San José, California. She began building additions to the house and continued construction on it for the next twenty years. A hostile press cast Sarah as the conscience of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company - a widow shouldering responsibility for the many deaths caused by the rifle that brought her riches. She was accused of being a ghost-obsessed spiritualist, and to this day it is largely believed that the extensive construction she executed on her San José house was done to appease the ghouls around her. But was she really as guilt-ridden and superstitious as history remembers her? When Winchester's home was purchased after her death, it was transformed into a tourist attraction. The bizarre, sprawling mansion and the enigmatic nature of Winchester's life were exaggerated by the new owners to generate publicity for their business. But as the mansion has become more widely known, the person of Winchester has receded from reality, and she is only remembered for squandering her riches to ward off disturbed spirits. Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune demystifies the life of this unique American. In the first full-length biography of Winchester, author and historian Mary Jo Ignoffo unearths the truth about this notorious eccentric, revealing that she was not a maddened spiritualist driven by remorse but an intelligent, articulate woman who sought to protect her private life amidst the chaos of her public existence. The author takes readers through Winchester's several homes, explores her private life, and, by excerpting from personal correspondence, gives the heiress a voice for the first time since her death. Ignoffo's research reveals that Winchester's true financial priority was not dissipating her fortune on the mansion in San José but investing it for a philanthropic legacy. For too long Sarah Winchester has existed as a ghost herself - a woman whose existence lies somewhere between the facts of her life and a set of sensationalized recollections of who she may have been. Captive of the Labyrinth finally puts to rest the myths about this remarkable woman, and, in the process, uncovers the legacy she intended to leave behind.