For some people the thought of home improvement is a nightmare,
but the owner of the Winchester Mystery House,
was convinced that if her workers stopped working, she would die.
The result was the biggest and spookiest mansion in the west – The Winchester Mystery House.
This beautiful and yet bizarre mansion belonged to Sarah Winchester,
the heiress of the Winchester Rifle fortune.
She kept her home, in San Jose, California, under constant construction
every day for 38 years believing it would prolong her life.
The strange history of the house and her story are intertwined
in what has become a mixture of truth and legend.
Following the death of her 6 week old baby daughter Annie and, 15 years later, her husband William,
Sarah consulted a Boston psychic. He told her that the spirits of people who had lost their life
to the Winchester Rifle had sought revenge by taking the lives of her family.
Sarah already had an interest in the spirit world and the fact both Annie and her husband
had passed away so young (William was just 43 years old) and their funerals were marked by violent storms,
must have made it easy for her to accept paranormal causes. The psychic, supposedly
having made contact with William, announced that the only way she could escape her own death was to leave
New Haven, , travel west, buy a house and continuously build rooms on it to the
direction of these vengeful spirits, and so provide them a final resting place.
So in 1884 Sarah Winchester set about turning her personal grief into an
architectural reflection of her psyche, choosing a location where she was less likely
to be troubled by haunting storms. She chose to buy a small 8 room farmhouse set in 162 acres
of the Santa Clara Valley in California, which grew into a huge 24,000 sq ft Queen Anne Style
Victorian mansion with as many as 160 rooms today.
Incredibly it was once even larger, at seven stories, before an earthquake in 1906 reduced its size.
A sprawling puzzle of a house with as many as 10,000 windows, 2000 doors, 52 skylights, 47 fireplaces,
40 staircases, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens as well as 3 elevators.
Sarah employed an architect and building began in the traditional style of the existing house,
but rumour soon went about the farming community that the architect had been replaced
– by Sarah Winchester herself! The style of the house wasn’t about to change, but its size definitely was.
Every night, at midnight, Sarah would invite spirits to converse with her in the Séance Room
and to instruct her where to build the next day. The spirits informed her that all would be well so long as
the sound of hammers never stopped. So she would pass on her designs to a staff of carpenters on
scraps of paper who worked around the clock on the haphazard construction, bereft of a masterplan,
until the house covered 4 acres. Nothing was to impede the want of the spirits - outside walls became inside
walls and roofs became floors as the endlessly growing house engulfed outbuildings, barns and stables.
Even though they died years ago, it’s said that some of these workers are still on the job.
The ghost of a painter has frequently been seen in overalls in the hallways near the laundry room
and the apparition of a man has been seen in the ballroom, as if he were making repairs to the fireplace.
The mansion is a confusing maze of rooms and corridors, more akin to a theme park construction
than the whim of an eccentric owner. It must have been a frightening experience for new servants
who lost their way. This is the creepiest staircase in the house. You’ll take 44 steps, make seven complete turns
and travel over 100ft, only to find yourself on the floor below – only to find yourself on the floor below –
just 9ft away. But that’s not the only weird thing about the construction of this house.
Having been called the house that spirits built, doors open onto walls, fireplaces have no chimneys and
staircases lead to nowhere. Costly windows were set into floors, whilst ceilings and walls block light to others.
The number 13 also appears conspicuously in the design, such as the number of steps on staircases,
as well as spider web motifs – both of which carried spiritual significance for Sarah.
Bells connected by ropes called her servants – the only people allowed in the house except for carpenters.
An exceptionally private individual, Sarah kept the house for herself …and the spirits.
She had a fence built and a thick hedge planted to shield her and the house from prying eyes.
She hid away from both cameras and social interaction, and in later years only a butler
and a niece were permitted to have contact with her. This is one of just a few photographs known of her,
which was taken by a gardener without her knowledge. She appears, as was her want, dressed in black
as if in continual mourning. Despite this she is thought to have been generous to servants that proved loyal
and a financial benefactor to the local community – all of which became overlooked when muddied by gossip
and speculation as to what a rich and secretive woman was doing in her mysterious house.
As the end of her life drew near she was more and more constrained by arteritis and seldom seen by anyone,
even within the house. The workmen excused the absence of her observant eyes for her ambivalence to
the construction’s progress and so, on the evening of 4 September 1922, the carpenters took the opportunity
to stop work work, drink and play cards. The sound of a hammer was never to be heard again.
The very next day her niece found her now 82 year old aunt in one of the mansion’s bedrooms
having passed away quietly during the night. Whether truthful or the result of gossip
feeding the creation of myths, the story of her passing certainly befits the house’s legend.
Sarah could in fact have been found in any of the house’s many bedrooms as, mysteriously;
she never slept in the same room more than two nights in a row in an effort to confuse the house’s spirits.
Now Sarah’s spirit is also said to haunt its confusing maze of rooms and corridors
as an integral part of the enigma that is her Mystery House.