On Sunday, along with other members
of the RVA Horror Book Club, I visited the place where a man lost his life… a place
so lovely that when walking by we tend to look up to the building's grand appearance and easily overlook a bent spear in a decorative
fence. If you look up, you can see the window where a man named Colonel J. M. Winstead of Winston, North Carolina who was a highly esteemed banker and businessman fell to his death landing on the fence.
On August 23, 1894, Winstead climbed the steps of the Old City Hall clock tower. From there, he fell from the window being impaled on the spiked cast
iron fence below the building.
There
appears to be a great deal of speculations about whether Winstead jumped, fell, or was
pushed out the window. Some jump to conclusions (oy, that's a bad unintentional pun which I'll leave) that the distance of a jump, a fall, or even a push would land Winstead at various distances from the building.
One
site reports,
Willie Dunsford, who was standing on the corner of Tenth and Broad streets, happened to look up at the clock tower and provided the most exact description of Winstead’s end to a Richmond Dispatch reporter. Dunsford said he saw Winstead discard shoes, hat and cane, “then stand up on the railing of the balcony, bend over a little, and jump off headlong toward the ground.” No matter what caused it, witnesses to the aftermath who happened to be on Broad Street that day all agreed they would never forget “the disheartening sight” of Col. Winstead’s gory end on the cast iron fencing of City Hall.
Would Winstead take a dive from the building?
Have you ever heard that really it isn’t the feeling
of falling that people fear when they’re in a high place such as a clock tower
or bridge, but it is the fear of jumping? “No, no, no, I’m not going to kill
myself,” you mutter. In fact, research shows that “high
place phenomenon” or HPP actually stems from “a misinterpreted safety signal”
and is not associated with suicidal tendencies.
Winsted’s
body was returned to North Carolina where there was funeral at Greensboro’s
Green Hill cemetery the evening after the day of his fall.
The
same
site notes,
His friends at the funeral loyally maintained that Winstead’s hat blew off, and it was his attempt to catch his hat, not suicide, that caused his death.
One of the saddest parts of this story is not
Winstead’s death, which is pretty sad itself, and it is not that at the time
customers of his bank in North Carolina immediately went to withdraw their
money assuming that Winstead’s “suicide” indicated some type of scandal or financial
problems. That turns out to be
unfounded. The saddest part of this story is that Winstead’s gravestone
is so rubbed away that it can hardly be read. Without the bent fence as gruesome
as it may seem, I would not even be thinking about Winstead nor would most
others.
The next time that you see a slight bend in an fence,
you may just wonder what happened to cause it. And, you may even remember the story of Colonel J. M. Winstead.
