'The Winchesters': The History of 'Supernatural's Family of Monster Hunters (2024)

You just can't keep a good Winchester down! Although Supernatural officially ended in the fall of 2020, the upcoming prequel series The Winchesters has been officially picked up by the CW, keeping the monster-hunting legacy alive. The series is set to follow a teenage John Winchester (Drake Rodger) and Mary Campbell (Meg Donnelly) — the future parents of Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) — as sparks begin to fly, and they uncover dark secrets that tie back to their respective families.

While we know where John and Mary end up eventually, this new series will explore the origins of their romance and everything we didn't know about the Winchester family before Supernatural. But in order to know where we're going, it helps to know where we've already been. In any event, it's time to start your engines and shift to drive as we review the strange history of John and Mary Winchester.

Family History

The Winchesters come from a long line of Men of Letters, a secret society tasked with chronicling the supernatural, which extends all the way back to Sam and Dean's paternal great-great-great-grandfather. This means that John Winchester, his children, and his grandchildren are all Men of Letters Legacies, tasked with carrying on the time-honored tradition. But John never knew that as, sadly, his father Henry (Gil McKinney) disappeared from their then-home in Normal, Illinois in 1958 after a tussle with the Knight of Hell Abaddon (Alaina Huffman), who wiped out the entire American branch of the Men of Letters ("As Time Goes By").

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In trying to escape from his attacker, Henry arrived in 2013, where he would meet his grandsons Sam and Dean, only to be killed by Abaddon shortly after. Because of this, John grew up not really knowing his birth father and was raised by his mother Millie (to be played by Bianca Kajlich on The Winchesters) in the town of Lawrence, Kansas. According to a line from the Season 4 episode "In The Beginning...," which implies that John has some sort of father figure in his life well into his young adulthood, Millie Winchester eventually remarried. During the Vietnam War, John joined the United States Marine Corps and served overseas, only to return home afterward and find work as a mechanic. This John Winchester (played by Matt Cohen) was as normal as anyone could be, seemingly unaware of the paranormal or anything to do with hunting monsters or the Men of Letters.

Mary Winchester (née Campbell), on the other hand, was raised by a family of hunters. Along with her father Samuel (Mitch Pileggi), mother Deanna (Allison Hossack), and an unnamed brother (who supposedly lived in Greenville, Illinois), she grew up ganking everything from ghosts and vampires to demons and shape shifters. Having been trained to hunt her whole life, Mary was close with both of her parents, often joining them on different jobs to protect innocent civilians. But eventually, young Mary Campbell (played by Amy Gumenick) grew a distaste for hunting, wishing only for a normal life. Eventually, Mary met John Winchester and the pair fell in love, but only after hating each other first (evidently, Cupid changed that — no, seriously). For the first time in her life, Mary finally saw a way out of the hunting life.

The Winchesters

On his own time-traveling adventure, Dean showed up in 1973 just in time for the demon known as Azazel to terrorize Lawrence. In the chaos, the demon kills both of her parents, Samuel and Deanna Campbell, and John, forcing Mary to make an impossible choice. Rather than lose her future with John forever, she makes a deal with the Yellow-Eyed Demon to bring her fiancée back from the dead, but rather than exchange his life for her soul, Azazel bargains for the fate of Mary's own future child ("In The Beginning..."). Not long after losing her parents, John and Marry were married, with the latter shedding her Campbell name and bloody legacy for her new identity as a Winchester. Little did Mary know, Winchesters are just as prone to paranormal activity as Campbells, if not more so.

Five years later, in 1978, John and Mary — then pregnant with her firstborn son Dean — are again visited by their children from the future (this time Sam joins Dean) who returned to the past to save their parents from a rogue angel. Eventually, they tell their parents everything about Mary's eventual death, but, to keep the timeline from being changed, the archangel Michael erased John and Mary's memories of their future children, returning Sam and Dean to their own time ("The Song Remains the Same"). Afterward, John and Mary resumed their normal life, awaiting their firstborn son.

On January 24, 1979, Dean was born, which changed their lives drastically. Little else is known about the Winchesters during this time, but we know from some flashbacks that John and Mary's marriage wasn't always perfect. John (played as an adult by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) even had to move out for a time while they worked things out ("Dark Side of the Moon"). We also know that Mary (played as an adult by Samantha Smith) occasionally drifted back into hunting, though she did her best to stay away ("Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox"). Their second son Sam was born a few years later on May 2, 1983.

Six months after Sam's birth, Azazel returned to Lawrence to claim his bargain with Mary - Sam. Having already dripped his demon blood into the baby's mouth, Mary barged in and tried to stop the Yellow-Eyed Demon, but was too late. Instead, Azazel killed her, having gotten what he came for. John only barely got his two boys out of the house before it was consumed by fire ("Pilot"). Driven by vengeance and help from a local psychic named Missouri Moseley (Loretta Devine), John became a hunter, bent on finding and killing the thing that killed his wife ("Home"). He would continue to wear his wedding ring until the day he died.

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Quest for Vengeance

It took John years to learn how to become a world-class hunter, keeping a detailed journal of all his exploits with the paranormal. He would often leave Sam and Dean for weeks at a time in order to pursue a monster and became a frequent patron of a hunter bar known as Harville's Roadhouse, where he occasionally met and worked with other hunters. At some point, John befriended Sioux Falls hunter Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver), whom he would leave his boys with from time to time (Bobby would become a surrogate father to Sam and Dean).

During this time, John also fathered another son named Adam Milligan (Jake Abel), who he visited on occasion, though he failed to mention any of this to Sam or Dean, who wouldn't meet their brother until years later ("Point of No Return"). Because of his quest for vengeance, John raised Sam and Dean as soldiers, which caused a rift between him and Sam, who left for Stanford in 2002 after he turned 18. In 2005, John disappeared in search of the Yellow-Eyed Demon, getting really close to discovering his true plans for Sam (and the others like him), not to mention how to kill the demon. During this time, Sam and Dean started hunting together while John continued to pursue Azazel; they occasionally crossed paths along the way ("Shadow"). The trio even took down a nest of vampires (though not all of them) to get their hands on the demon-killing weapon, the Colt ("Dead Man's Blood").

While the boys were looking for their father, they returned to Lawrence to find their childhood home haunted by a poltergeist. As it turned out, Mary's spirit still resided there, fighting back against the evil and even saving the lives of her sons, now grown. After apologizing to Sam for her deal with Azazel, her spirit finally passed on to Heaven ("Home"). All of this eventually led to a confrontation with the Yellow-Eyed Demon that resulted in a massive car crash, nearly killing Dean ("Devil's Trap"). In exchange for his own son's life, John made a deal with Azazel — his life for his son's. The demon accepted and after warning Dean about the demon's plans for Sam, John finally died and went to Hell ("In My Time of Dying"). After a year of searching, Sam and Dean eventually tracked Azazel down to southern Wyoming, where he opened a "damned door to Hell." After being beaten by the demon, the boys were saved at the 11th hour by the spirit of their father who had climbed out of Hell to help his boys kill the demon. Afterward, John ascended to Heaven, finally at peace, with Mary ("All Hell Breaks Loose - Part 2").

Resurrections and Beyond

John and Mary stayed in their shared Heaven for over a decade in Earth years, and an unspecified amount of time in Heaven years, without any interruptions. Sam and Dean continued to hunt, saving the world on multiple occasions, including from the Darkness (Emily Swallow), who rewarded Dean with a gift — his mother, back from the dead ("Alpha and Omega"). Having been dead for 33 years, Mary struggled to deal with her resurrection, the fact that her husband was dead, and that her sons were fully grown. She didn't remember anything about her death nor did she remember meeting her sons as a ghost. It took Mary months to acknowledge her present reality and finally come to see Sam and Dean as her two little boys.

Mary spent the next few years working alongside her sons, the angel Castiel (Misha Collins), and the Nephilim Jack (Alexander Calvert), hunting monsters across America. During this time, they faced off against the British Men of Letters, creatures from the Apocalypse World, and the Devil (Mark Pellegrino) himself, all the while growing closer as a family unit. The boys learned a lot about their mother's hunting past during her new lease on life, seeing her in a completely different light than they had before (which was hard for Dean). Although she tried to move on from John, Mary was never able to leave her husband's memory in the past. She continued to love him no matter how much time passed, even wearing his wedding band around her neck.

Due to unforeseen circ*mstances involving a magic pearl, Dean wished John back to the present where he reunited with his family. Tragically, their reunion couldn't last more than a day since John had been pulled from 2003 and his presence in 2019 gradually began to change reality (including Mary's resurrection). Eager to lay down his life for his wife, John decided to go back to his own time with the hope of being reunited with his family someday soon. After their first family dinner, Sam destroys the magic pearl. As John begins to fade away to the past, Mary grips his hand until he's gone, reminded that the love they shared was eternal ("Lebanon").

But John and Mary wouldn't be separated for long. In an accident involving Jack's nigh-divine superpowers, Mary is killed and immediately sent back to her shared Heaven with John ("Absence"). While losing their mom for a second time was incredibly hard for the Winchesters (especially Dean), they were ultimately grateful for the extra time that they had with her as adults. In the Supernatural series finale, Dean arrived at the pearly gates to learn that his parents happily reside at their own place nearby. Thankful, Dean takes a drive through Heaven's highway to reunite with Sam before presumably finding them next ("Carry On"). No matter what struggles they've endured, there's no doubt that the Winchesters will always keep fighting to survive, and the love between John and Mary will live on well beyond their soul's departure from Earth.