The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearm magnate William Wirt Winchester. Located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, the Queen Anne Style Victorian mansion is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan. It is a designated California historical landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is privately owned and serves as a tourist attraction.
Since its construction in 1884, the property and mansion were claimed by many to be haunted by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles. Under Winchester's day-to-day guidance, its "from-the-ground-up" construction proceeded around the clock, by some accounts, without interruption, until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased. Sarah Winchester's biographer, however, claims that Winchester "routinely dismissed workers for months at a time 'to take such rest as I might'" and notes that "this flies in the face of claims by today's Mystery House proprietors that work at the ranch was ceaseless for thirty-eight years."
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After her husband's death from tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20.5 million (equivalent to $520 million in 2017). She also received nearly fifty percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to $25,000 a day in 2017. These inheritances gave her a tremendous amount of wealth which she used to fund the ongoing construction.
Tabloids from the time claimed that, at some point after her infant daughter died of an illness known as marasmus a children’s disease in which the body wastes away and her husband died of pulmonary tuberculosis, a Boston medium told her (while supposedly channeling her late husband) that she should leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles. Winchester left New Haven and headed for California. Though it is possible she was simply seeking a change of location and a hobby during her lengthy depression, other sources claim that Winchester came to believe her family and fortune were haunted by ghosts, and that only by moving West and continuously building them a house could she appease these spirits.
In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began building her mansion. Carpenters were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven-story mansion. She did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so the home contains numerous oddities such as doors and stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms and stairs with odd-sized risers. Many accounts attribute these oddities to her belief in ghosts.
Before the 1906 earthquake, the house had been seven stories high, but today it is only four stories. The house is predominantly made of redwood, as Mrs. Winchester preferred the wood; however, she disliked the look of it. She therefore demanded that a faux grain and stain be applied. This is why almost all the wood in the home is covered. Approximately 20,500 U.S. gallons (78,000 L) of paint were required to paint the house. The home itself is built using a floating foundation that is believed to have saved it from total collapse in the 1906 earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. This type of construction allows the home to shift freely, as it is not completely attached to its brick base. There are roughly 161 rooms, including 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms (one completed and one unfinished) as well as 47 fireplaces, over 10,000 panes of glass, 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two basements and three elevators. Winchester's property was about 162 acres (66 ha) at one time, but the estate has since been reduced to 4.5 acres (1.8 ha) â€" the minimum necessary to contain the house and nearby outbuildings. It has gold and silver chandeliers, hand-inlaid parquet floors and trim, and a vast array of colors and materials. Due to Mrs. Winchester's debilitating arthritis, special "easy riser" stairways were installed as a replacement for her original steep construction. This allowed her to move about her home freely as she was only able to raise her feet a few inches high. There was only one working toilet for Winchester, but all other restrooms were decoys to confuse spirits. This is also the reason why she slept in a different room each night.
The home's conveniences were rare at the time of its construction. These included steam and forced-air heating, modern indoor toilets and plumbing, push-button gas lights, and Mrs. Winchester's personal (and only) hot shower from indoor plumbing. There are also three elevators, including an Otis electric and one of which was powered by a rare horizontal hydraulic elevator piston. (Most elevator pistons are vertical to save space, but Winchester preferred the improved functionality of the horizontal configuration.)
Mrs. Winchester never skimped on the many adornments that she believed contributed to its architectural beauty. Many of the stained glass windows were created by the Tiffany Company. Some were designed specifically for her, and others by her, including a "spider web" window that featured her favorite web design and the repetition of the number thirteen, another of her preoccupations. This window was never installed, but exists in the so-called "$25,000 storage room" - so named because its contents were originally appraised at a value of $25,000. The value today is inestimable, but $25,000 would be equivalent to $366,000 in 2017. A second window was designed by Tiffany himself, so that when sunlight strikes the prismatic crystals a rainbow is cast across the room. The window was installed in an interior wall in a room with no light exposure, preventing the effect from being seen.
When Winchester died, all of her possessions (apart from the house) were bequeathed to her niece and personal secretary. Her niece then took everything she wanted and sold the rest in a private auction. It supposedly took six trucks working eight hours a day for six weeks to remove all of the furniture from the home, an account disputed by Winchester's biographer. Mrs. Winchester made no mention of the mansion in her will, and appraisers considered the house worthless due to damage caused by the earthquake, the unfinished design and the impractical nature of its construction. It was sold at auction to a local investor for over $135,000, and subsequently leased for 10 years to John and Mayme Brown, who eventually purchased the house. In February 1923, five months after Winchester's death, the house was opened to the public, with Mayme Brown serving as the first tour guide. Harry Houdini toured the mansion in 1924 and the newspaper account of his visit (displayed in the rifle museum on the estate) called it the Mystery House.
Today the home is owned by Winchester Investments LLC, a privately held company representing the descendants of John and Mayme Brown. The home retains unique touches that reflect Mrs. Winchester's beliefs and her reported preoccupation with warding off malevolent spirits. These spirits are said to have directly inspired her as to the way the house should be built. The number thirteen and spider web motifs, which carried spiritual significance for her, occur throughout 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 stained glass window contains 13 colored stones. The drain covers on the sinks also have 13 holes. In tribute, the house's current groundskeepers have created a topiary tree shaped like the numeral 13. Also, every Friday the 13th, the large bell on the property is rung 13 times at "1300 hours" (13:00 PT, 1:00 PM) in tribute to Winchester.
In the early 1990s the Winchester property had parapsychologist, anomalist and paranormal investigator Christopher Chacon conduct the only in-depth scientific investigation (30-day around-the-clock analysis) of the reported "haunt phenomena" on the property.
In 2016, it was announced that another room was foundâ€"an attic space that contains a pump organ, Victorian couch, dress form, sewing machine and paintings â€"and was made available for viewing by the public.
In 2017, the Winchester Mystery House debuted their first new daytime tour in 20 years, the 'Explore More Tour'. This tour takes guests through rooms never before opened to the public, and explores the rooms left unfinished at the time of Sarah Winchester's death.
In popular culture
- The February 1986 issue of Swamp Thing (#45) by Alan Moore and Stan Woch & Alfredo Alcala took place in a haunted California mansion built by "Amy Cambridge", a fictionalized version of Sarah Winchester.
- The house is the primary setting for Michaela Roessner's 1993 science fiction novel Vanishing Point, in which it becomes the home of a squatter community following the disappearance of most of the human race.
- The Winchester house is the setting of a subplot in the 1997 Tim Powers fantasy novel Earthquake Weather.
- The 1997 play Hammers by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller depicts the construction of a fictionalized version of the Winchester House, from the point of view of a carpenter whose entire working life is spent on this project.
- In the 2012 novel The Vorrh by Brian Catling, the Winchester Mystery House is featured in a scene where photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, one of the novel's several protagonists, is tasked by Sarah Winchester to attend a seance and capture the spirits that will be summoned by the medium. He is skeptical and becomes convinced that he has failed after developing the photographs; however, Sarah Winchester's enthusiastic response to the printed images indicates that he was unknowingly successful.
- For the 2012 episode of MythBusters "Smell of Fear", the build team visited the Winchester Mystery House to look around and later watch "one of the scariest movies of all time" (the title of which wasn't revealed) on a television that they set up in the grand ballroom, then gather their sweat samples for testing. (This clip was not seen in full on the American version of the episode.) Later on the "Aftershow" about the episode, Kari Byron revealed that after she first visited the Mystery House as a Brownie it had given her nightmares, and that the house was "still creepy".
- Shinji Mikami, creator of the survival-horror video game The Evil Within, released in 2014, cites the house as an influence. In game, the Victorian Mansion level appears to draw influence from the Mystery house, featuring bizarre and confusing architecture intended to distract and lead the player astray.
- The 2016 comic book House of Penance by Peter Tomasi and Ian Bertram is set during the building of the house.
- Ghost Adventures and Ghost Brothers filmed episodes in 2016 related to the house and its spiritual encounters.
- Sarah Winchester, Phantom Opera, is a 24-minute film by French film maker Bertrand Bernello, which had its North American premiere at the 54th New York Film Festival, October 2016. It is an imaginative narrative of Sarah Winchester's life with emphasis on the Mystery House.
- The Winchester Mansion was the subject of Mystery House, episode 162 of the 99 Percent Invisible podcast, hosted by Roman Mars.
- In 2017, filming took place on the property for the film Winchester, featuring Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester. The film was released on February 2, 2018.
- Sarah Winchester and the Mystery House were the subjects of the Lore_(podcast), Episode 79 which is hosted by Aaron Mahnke.
- The Avalon Hill board game Betrayal at House on the Hill and its expansion set, Widow's Walk, were inspired by the Winchester Mystery House, and the "boss haunt" of Widow's Walk directly references Sarah Winchester and her legend.
Gallery
See also
- The Amber House Trilogy, a young adult book series about a mansion that has been continuously rebuilt and expanded for generations.
- Haunting of Winchester House, a film by The Asylum loosely based on the myths surrounding the house
- Rose Red, a TV miniseries about a haunted mansion kept under continuous construction for decades by eccentric owners. The house keeps supernaturally expanding after being abandoned by its living owners.
References
External links
- Official website
- "Santa Clara County: California's Historic Silicon Valley". Discover Our Shared Heritage Travel Itinerary. National Park Service.
National Register of Historic Places, in cooperation with the City of Santa Clara, the California Office of Historic Preservation, and the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers (NCSHPO)
 - Pusey, Jr, R.E.; Hubbard, Ray (Nov 20, 2011) [1963]. "Mrs Winchester's House". San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive. Documentary. Directed by Dick Williams, narrated by Lillian Gish. v63839-2 : CBS 5, KPIX-TV. 189349.Â
- Mayerowitz, Scott (Oct 11, 2010). "Eccentric House Designed to Confuse Ghosts". Good Morning America. ABC News. 11834520.Â
- "Winchester Mystery House: The House That Fear Built". Weird California. Weird US.Â
- Weird US - Winchester Mystery House on YouTube (Feb 3, 2007)
- Taylor, Troy (2013). "Winchester Mystery House- The Haunted History of One of America's Most Haunted Houses". Prairie Ghosts.Â
