Catherine Price Read Free Page B

clearly a large, erect penis. And Grandma has spread her legs open to the sea, positioned so that she’s caressed by every wave that hits the shore.
    When you see the rocks, you will probably wonder whether people in Thailand have a very different relationship with their grandparents from what we have in America. Perhaps, but in this particular case, the nickname comes from a legend—Ta Kreng and Yai Riem, an elderly couple, were on their way to try to procure a bride for their grandson from a family to the north when their boat got caught in a storm. They drowned. And then, as so often befalls seafaring grandparents, they were turned into rocks representing their respective naughty bits.
    These days, it’s probably best not to bother visiting unless you enjoy fighting your way through street vendors selling phallic souvenir T-shirts just so that you get a picture of yourself perched on Grandma’s thigh. The beach isn’t particularly good for swimming, and you’ll be surrounded by people who decided that, of the many attractions Thailand has to offer, all they really wanted to see was a granite penis.

    Grandpa
    Benjamin Thomas

    Grandma
    Sigrid Georgescu and Alex Falls

Chapter 9 The Winchester Mystery House
    S ome people might argue that San Jose, California, is itself a place not worth visiting before you die. Fair enough. But if you do find yourself driving its wide, traffic-clogged streets, you may be tempted to stop at the Winchester Mystery House. It’s impossible to drive in or out of San Jose without coming across a billboard advertising the bizarre 160-room mansion built by Sarah Winchester, heiress to the fortune of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.
    But please, resist the urge.
    The story of the Winchester Mystery House—or, rather, the legend—is as follows: after her infant daughter and husband passed away, Sarah Winchester visited a psychic who told her that her loved ones’ deaths were caused by the souls of the people who had been killed by the Winchester repeating rifle (tagline: “The Gun That Won the West”). If she didn’t take drastic action, said the psychic, Sarah Winchester could be next. The psychic supposedly told her that the only way to appease the angry spirits was to go west and build a house—not too difficult a task for a woman who had an income of about $1,000 a day in the late 1800s. But there was one catch: the house could never be completed. If construction ever stopped, the spirits would seek their revenge once more.
    And so Sarah Winchester moved from Connecticut to San Jose, bought an unfinished eight-room farmhouse, and started construction. She hired shifts of men to work around the clock, seven days a week, 365 days a year. From the day she began until her death thirty-eight years later, the workers never stopped. Every evening, legend has it, Sarah Winchester would retreat to a special séance room in the middle of the house to commune with lost souls and, while she was at it, figure out the next day’s construction plans.
    The result is a sprawling mansion that gives a sense of what happens when a multimillion-dollar fortune and a belief in the paranormal are combined in a woman with no architectural training. There are stairs that lead to the ceiling, chimneys that stop a foot and a half short of the roof, cabinets that are actually passageways, and a second-story “door to nowhere” that opens fifteen feet above the ground outside. Throughout the house are touches of grandeur—hand-inlayed floors, Tiffany glass windows—and bizarre architectural elements, like custom-designed window panes in the shape of spider webs and a preoccupation with the number thirteen.
    The house has been open to the public, in one form or another, since soon after Winchester’s death in 1922. But unfortunately for anyone intrigued by her story, its legend is more interesting than the tour itself. Part of the problem is that Winchester left all of her furniture, household goods,