Walter Winston

WALTER WINSTON

Walter Winston (deceased 1934) of Winston Pharmaceuticals, a company that had made its wealth during the war. Walter seemed the decent sort and spent some of the money on hospitals, especially after 1924. He wasn’t much of a public figure, but did show his face for charity events and such, until around 1926, after which he slowly faded from the public eye, eventually disappearing from print altogether by 1930. The old man had died in July of this year, making his daughter, Janet Winston-Rogers, the sole heiress to the Winston fortune, her mother having already passed away in 32.

His daughter told us how he had travelled the world studying folklore, which had led him to develop an interest in the occult. She said her father was bent on battling something, but Walter wouldn’t tell them exactly what it was. In ‘24 he spent most of the year away from home saying that he was on the trail of some “bad people”, as he called them. When he wasn’t traveling, he was having secret meetings with people he wasn’t in business with; other dabblers in the occult.

In August of 1924 Winston and his group battled a cult who were undergoing heretic rituals. He returned home rattled and unravelling. He didn’t have any more secret meetings after that. He stopped traveling. He saw a psychiatrist for a few years. He burned his books. He hardly ate. He jumped at shadows, insisted he was being watched. He was never the same. He claimed that "nothing mattered anymore". When his wife died, in ‘32, he hardly grieved. After that, he became only more paranoid and frustrated, until he finally passed away, early in '34, as a shadow of himself.

Walter Winston gathered and funded the group that battled the cult in '24, and was considered their leader. This group consisted of Douglas Henslowe, Vince Stack, Katherine Clark and Franklin Cormac Kullman.