Winchester Mystery House

Winchester House
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
View of the mansion from the southeast.
Location	San Jose, California
Built	1884
Architectural style	Late Victorian
NRHP reference No.	74000559
Added to NRHP	August 07, 1974

The Winchester Mystery House is a well-known California mansion that was under construction continuously for 38 years, and is reputed to be haunted. It once was the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester, but is now a tourist attraction. Under Sarah Winchester's day-to-day guidance, its "from-the-ground-up" construction proceeded around-the-clock, without interruption, from 1884 until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased. The cost for such constant building has been estimated at about US $5.5 million (if paid in 1922, this would be equivalent to almost $70 million in 2008 dollars).

The mansion is renowned for its size and utter lack of any master building plan. According to popular belief, Sarah Winchester thought the house was haunted by the ghosts of individuals killed by Winchester rifles, and that only continuous construction would appease them. It is located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, California.

Inspiration

Deeply saddened by the deaths of her daughter Annie in 1866 and her husband in 1881, and seeking solace, Sarah consulted a medium on the advice of a friend. According to popular history, the medium, who has become known colloquially as the "Boston Medium", told Sarah that she had the feeling that there was a curse upon the Winchester family because the guns they made had taken so many lives. She told Sarah that "thousands of people have died because of it and their spirits are now seeking vengeance."

Although this is disputed, popular belief holds that the Boston Medium told Sarah that she had to leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must "build a home for yourself and for the spirits who have fallen from this terrible weapon, too. You can never stop building the house. If you continue building, you will live. Stop and you will die." The last two statements are problematic at best and out right fiction at worst. If the statements were really made, why would Mrs. Winchester leave an extremely well documented and very detailed will? What is true is that Mrs. Winchester did move west, settling in California, where she began construction on her mansion.

Sarah inherited more than $20 million upon her husband's death. She also received nearly 50 percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, none of which was taxable until 1913. This amount is roughly equivalent to $21,000 a day in 2008. All of this gave her a tremendous pool of wealth from which to draw to fund construction on the mansion.

The house today

One of the house's curious doors which lead to nowhere (except a ten foot drop).

Prior to the 1906 earthquake, the house had been built up to seven stories tall, but today it is only four stories. The house is predominantly made of redwood frame construction, with a floating foundation that is believed to have saved the estate from total collapse in both the 1906 earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. There are about 160 rooms, including 40 bedrooms and two ballrooms. The house also has 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two basements and three elevators. Winchester's property was some 162 acres (650,000 m²) at one time, but now the estate is just 4.5 acres (24,000 m²) — the minimum necessary to contain the house and nearby outbuildings. It has gold and silver chandeliers and inlaid parquet floors and trim. There are doors and stairways that lead nowhere and a vast array of colors and materials. Before the availability of elevators, special "easy riser" stairways were installed to allow Winchester access to every part of the mansion, to accommodate her severe arthritis. Roughly 20,000 gallons (76,000 liters) of paint were required to paint the house. Due to the sheer size of the house, by the time every section of the house was painted, the workers had to start repainting again.

The house also has many conveniences that were rarely found at the time of its construction, including steam and forced-air heating, modern indoor toilets and plumbing, push-button gas lights, a hot shower from indoor plumbing and even three elevators, including one with the only horizontal hydraulic elevator piston in the United States.

Today the home is owned by Winchester Investments LLC and it retains unique touches that reflect Winchester's beliefs and her reported preoccupation with warding off malevolent spirits. The number thirteen and spider web motifs, which she considered to be lucky, reappear around the house. For example, an expensive imported chandelier that originally had 12 candle-holders was altered to accommodate 13 candles, wall clothes hooks are in multiples of 13, and a spider web-patterned Tiffany window contains 13 colored stones. In tribute, the house's current groundskeepers have created a topiary tree shaped like the number 13. Also, every Friday the 13th the large bell on the property is rung 13 times at 1300 in tribute to Sarah.

Shortly after the seance, Sarah sold her home in New Haven and with a vast fortune at her disposal, moved west to California. She believed that she was guided by the hand of her dead husband and she did not stop traveling until she reached the Santa Clara Valley in 1884. Here, she found a six room home under construction which belonged to a Dr. Caldwell. She entered into negotiations with him and soon convinced him to sell her the house and the 162 acres which it rested on. She tossed away any previous plans for the house and started building whatever she chose to. She had her pick of local workers and craftsmen and for the next 36 years, they built and rebuilt, altered and changed and constructed and demolished one section of the house after another. She kept 22 carpenters at work, year around, 24 hours each day. The sounds of hammers and saws sounded throughout the day and night.

As the house grew to include 26 rooms, railroad cars were switched onto a nearby line to bring building materials and imported furnishings to the house. The house was rapidly growing and expanding and while Sarah claimed to have no master plan for the structure, she met each morning with her foreman and they would go over the her hand-sketched plans for the day’s work. The plans were often chaotic but showed a real flair for building. Sometimes though, they would not work out the right way, but Sarah always had a quick solution. If this happened, they would just build another room around an existing one.

As the days, weeks and months passed, the house continued to grow. Rooms were added to rooms and then turned into entire wings, doors were joined to windows, levels turned into towers and peaks and the place eventually grew to a height of seven stories. Inside the house, three elevators and 47 fireplaces were installed. There were countless staircases that led nowhere; a blind chimney that stopped short of the ceiling; closets that opened to blank walls; trap doors; double-back hallways; skylights located one above another; doors that opened to steep drops to the lawn below; and dozens of other oddities. Even all of the stair posts were installed upside-down and many of the bathrooms had glass doors on them.

Sarah was intrigued by the number 13. Nearly all of the windows contained 13 panes of glass; the walls had 13 panels; the greenhouse had 13 cupolas; many of the wooden floors contained 13 sections; some of the rooms had 13 windows and every staircase but one had 13 steps. This exception is unique in its own right: It is a winding staircase with 42 steps, which would normally be enough to take a climber up three stories. In this case, however, the steps only rise nine feet because each step is only two inches high.

The house continued to grow and by 1906, it had reached seven stories tall. Sarah continued her occupancy, and expansion, of the house, living in melancholy solitude with no one other than her servants, the workers and, of course, the spirits. It was said that on sleepless nights, when she was not communing with the spirit world about the designs for the house, Sarah would play her grand piano into the early hours of the morning. According to legend, the piano would be admired by passers-by on the street outside, despite the fact that two of the keys were badly out of tune.

The most tragic event occurred within the house when the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 struck. When it was over, portions of the Winchester Mansion were nearly in ruins. The top three floors of the house had collapsed into the gardens and would never be rebuilt. In addition, the fireplace that was located in the Daisy Room (where Mrs. Winchester was sleeping on the night of the earthquake) collapsed, shifting the room and trapping Sarah inside. She became convinced that the earthquake had been a sign from the spirits who were furious that she had nearly completed the house. To ensure that the house would never be finished, she decided to board up the front 30 rooms of the mansion so that the construction would not be complete - and also so that the spirits who fell when portion of the house collapsed would be trapped inside forever.

For the next several months, the workers toiled to repair the damage done by the earthquake, although actually the mammoth structure had fared far better than most of the buildings in the area. Only a few of the rooms had been badly harmed, although it had lost the highest floors and several cupolas and towers had toppled over. The expansion on the house began once more. The number of bedrooms increased from 15 to 20 and then to 25. Chimneys were installed all over the place, although strangely, they served no purpose. Some believe that perhaps they were added because the old stories say that ghosts like to appear and disappear through them. On a related note, it has also been documented that only 2 mirrors were installed in the house; Sarah believed that ghosts were afraid of their own reflection.

On September 4, 1922, after a conference session with the spirits in the seance room, Sarah went to her bedroom for the night. That night, she died in her sleep at the age of 83. She left all of her material possessions to her niece, Frances Marriot, who had been handling most of Sarah’s business affairs for some time. Strangely the house itself was not mentioned at all in the will. Little did anyone know, but by this time, Sarah’s large bank account had dwindled considerably. Rumor had it that somewhere in the house was hidden a safe containing a fortune in jewelry and a solid-gold dinner service with which Sarah had entertained her ghostly guests. Her relatives forced open a number of safes but found only old fishlines, socks, newspaper clippings about her daughter’s and her husband’s deaths, a lock of baby hair, and a suit of woolen underwear. No solid gold dinner service was ever discovered.

The furnishings, personal belongings and surplus construction and decorative materials were removed from the house and the structure itself was sold to a group of investors who planned to use it as a tourist attraction. One of the first to see the place when it opened to the public was Robert L. Ripley, who featured the house in his popular column, "Believe It or Not." The house was initially advertised as being 148 rooms, but so confusing was the floor plan that every time a room count was taken, a different total came up. The place was so puzzling that it was said that the workers took more than six weeks just to get the furniture out of it. The movers became so lost because it was a "labyrinth," as they "American Weekly" magazine in 1928. It was a house "where downstairs leads neither to the cellar nor upstairs to the roof." The rooms of the house were counted over and over again and five years later, it was estimated that 160 rooms existed, although no one is really sure if even that is correct.

Today, the house is a California Historical Landmark and is registered with the National Park Service as "a large, odd dwelling with an unknown number of rooms." Several different tours of the house are available, including flashlight tours at night on dates around Halloween and each Friday the 13th.

Depictions in popular culture

• In the 1950s the house became well known throughout the United States due to multiple presentations on the television show You Asked for It.

• Tim Powers' novel Earthquake Weather incorporates the legends of the Winchester House and suggests that Sarah Winchester built the structure as a deliberate effort to capture and channel ghosts as a "mask" to protect her from detection by otherworldly forces.

• One chapter of Hirohiko Araki's manga The Lives of Eccentrics covers the construction of the Winchester mansion.

• The Winchester House is also referenced in Shirley Jackson's novel, The Haunting of Hill House.

• Sarah Winchester and her Mystery House is the subject of one chapter in The Big Book of the Unexplained.

• Several special issues of Dennis the Menace comics appeared in the 1970s, including a book-length story of Dennis and his parents visiting the Winchester Mystery House.

• Michaela Roessner's science fiction novel Vanishing Point centers around the community that settles in the Winchester Mansion after a global catastrophe, and the house serves as a center of changes to the laws of space and physics.

• Jeremy Blake's video Winchester Trilogy, centered on the house, was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005.[1]

• In Sci-Fi Channel's Ghost Hunters the TAPS crew investigates the Winchester mansion to try and find the ghosts rumored to haunt the mansion.

• On October 19, 2007, the team from UK Living TV's Most Haunted investigated the Winchester Mystery House for ghosts in a seven-hour live broadcast.

• A book by Lisa L. Selby entitled The Inscrutable Mrs. Winchester and Her Mysterious Mansion was published in 2005. It tries to separate fact from fiction about Sarah Winchester's story and the house she built.

• The team from UK Living TV's Dead Famous investigated the Winchester Mystery House as one of three locations to try to find the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock.

• Stephen King's scripted miniseries Rose Red seems to use the Winchester Mystery House as inspiration. The miniseries is about a haunted house called Rose Red, which a woman continuously built on without any real master plan, because she was told that she would die when it was finished with construction.

• In anime Ghost Hunt, a similar house inspired by the Winchester house is used as the setting for one of the story arcs: Blood Soaked Maze

• The house was named 2nd in a list by the Travel Channel of the 10 most visited, creepiest destinations in the world.

• Author Sherry A. Mauro wrote a fiction series loosely based on the mansion and Mrs. Winchester. The three-part series is inspired by the Winchester Mystery House and has references throughout the books about the mansion. The books are about the Devour family and how each generation of women is compelled to build and rebuild on a large Victorian mansion to appease the spirits haunting it.

• Author Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves was heavily influenced by the Winchester Mystery House.

• Books published by White Wolf Publishing for its Vampire: the Masquerade and Mage: the Ascension game lines list the Winchester Mystery House as both a "haven" for Malkavian vampires and a "Chantry" for Euthanatos mages.

External links

• Winchester Mystery House website
• The Mystery House Blog features regularly updated images of the mansion (most recent update November 2005)
• Video Tour and Historic Documentary of The Winchester Mystery House from YouTube
• A room-by-room commentary on the mansion from Strangetastic.com
• The History of One of America's Most Haunted Houses by Troy Taylor