Wordcrafters Multi-Muse

Sam Winchester

Sam was born on May 2, 1983 to John and Mary Winchester in Lawrence, Kansas. He is one of two focal characters in the series, along with his older brother, Dean, who's four years his senior. He is named after his maternal grandfather, Samuel Campbell, and comes from a line of expert hunters on his mother's side of the family and men of letters on his father's side, respectively.Sam's childhood is explored in the form of flashbacks (as well as present-day dialogue) in episodes throughout the series.When Sam was six months old, his mother Mary (a retired creature hunter) was engulfed in a massive conflagration by yellow-eyed demon Azazel (one of four Princes of Hell). Her death was not premeditated, but rather a result of her incidental interruption of Azazel's visit to Sam's crib in the night – a contractual option Azazel had acquired with Mary's "consent" years before Sam was born, and which Azazel was now exercising in order to feed Sam his own demon blood to bestow him with psychic powers. Sam was saved from the ensuing housefire by his father, who then gave him to then-four-year-old Dean to carry outside, but Mary tragically died. Since that event, Dean has felt responsible for Sam and became Sam's de facto protector, largely due to their father's absence when he was away tracking Azazel.Sam and Dean spent their childhood moving from town to town every few weeks while their father hunted supernatural beings, seeking to exact revenge on their mother's killer. Consequently, they lived frugal childhoods and struggled to form long-term connections with others. Sam believed that his mother had died in a car accident and that his father was a traveling salesman, until the age of 8 (1991), when he read John's meticulous hand-written journal entries, describing intricate details of his hunts (as well as creature-related literature and obsessive cataloguing of demonic omens related to Azazel), compelling Dean to confirm the existence of the paranormal. Soon after, Sam seriously considered fleeing his life, as a runaway, with his imaginary friend, Sully (1991), but ultimately rejected the opportunity to escape and expelled Sully from his life. Sam started hunting alongside his brother and father at the age of 8-12, assuming increased responsibilities around the time that Dean left temporary foster care at Sonny's (1995); however, he began wanting a normal life without monsters again. A couple of years later (1997), a teacher, Mr. Wyatt, took interest in Sam, encouraging him to carve out a life away from the "family business" upon reading his writing assignment: a precocious story about a werewolf hunt, which Wyatt interpreted as an allegory and an in-depth character study about family dynamics. Throughout the rest of his teens, he continued to provide support to John and Dean, including in an advisory capacity for a kitsune hunt (1998) which he stumbled into personally in direct connection to meeting teenaged Amy Pond. At nineteen, after a heated argument with John, Sam matriculated into Stanford University, thus finally splintering from his family and their hunting crusade, until the main story events unfolded in Season 1, pulling him back into a role of saving people.