What happens when a rumor is allowed to spread and grow for generations?
The past becomes so muddied that we begin to accept lies as fact.
Hi everyone, ken here, welcome to "ThisHouse"!!
Today we are exploring the truth behind the Winchester Mystery House.
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If you are familiar with the Winchester Mystery House, the story you’ve probably heard goes
something like this.
Sarah Winchester was a mysterious and eccentric recluse who had inherited the Winchester Rifle
fortune.
She believed that the ghosts of every person killed by a Winchester were drawn to her,
so she turned her house into a labyrinth to escape their presence, with construction never
ending as rooms were added with staircases to nowhere, trapdoors to four story drops,
and a bell tower to call on ghosts.
She was obsessed with the occult and conducted seances every night to plead with the spirits
haunting her home and became enamored by the number 13, building windows, doors, and rooms
in sets of 13.
What if I told you that this entire story is false?
That, definitively, none of this ever happened?
So where did this story come from?
Let’s go all the way back to 1862 to find out.
Sarah married the love of her life, William Wirt Winchester, whose family had founded
the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.
The young couple began planning their life together in New Haven, Connecticut, and had
their first and only child, a baby girl they named Annie.
But she was born sick, and quickly passed away.
Not long after, her husband and his father both passed away as well.
Leaving her an inheritance of about 362,000 dollars, most of which was in stocks, the
modern day equivalent of about ten and a half million dollars.
Instead of simply retiring and enjoying her money, she made a series of wise investments
causing her fortune to grow year after year.
When she was 46 years old, Sarah developed rheumatoid arthritis, which is when her doctors
advised her to move to a warmer climate.
She had fond memories of traveling to San Francisco with her late husband, so she headed
out west to California to begin searching for a property.
She met up with an agent for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in 1886 who began showing
her around the region.
While they were in San Jose, he showed her an 8 room farmhouse set on 45 secluded acres.
She found the setting peaceful and purchased the home, naming it Llanada Villa for its
resemblance to Spain’s countryside.
Upon settling in, she invited her niece to come live with her, eventually gifting her
a home nearby as a wedding present.
She became very active in the local charity scene, frequenting fundraisers with her niece,
becoming significant donors to the American Red Cross.
All the while, she began imagining the possibilities of her property.
She had greatly enjoyed building her and William’s home in Connecticut, picking out décor and
collaborating with architects and interior designers.
She even expressed that if a woman of status should be allowed to work, she would like
to become an architect.
But the reality of the time is that such dreams were prohibitive.
For her house in San Jose she hired 2 architects, but quickly dismissed them.
She decided to follow her dreams, and build for herself.
She began sketching plans for her dream house and hired a large staff to live on site while
construction commenced.
Every morning she would gather her team and instruct them as to their plans and goals
for the day, planning out and managing every step of the construction process.
As the house grew in size, she would make adjustments to the plans, calling for some
rooms to be ripped out and reworked.
And when a room was finished out and it did not meet her vision, she went back to the
drawing board.
This series of intermittent renovations, spurred on by someone without formal training in design,
lead to a seemingly haphazard floor plan with long narrow halls and misaligned rooms.
Because of her advancing arthritis, standard stairs were painful for her to climb, so she
had more manageable staircases built, using 44 steps to climb ten feet.
In addition to her love of architecture and creation, she was an avid gardener with an
expansive collection of indoor plants.
Even with more money than she could spend in a lifetime doing whatever she wanted, conservation
was important to her.
She created a water run-off system in her house resembling trap doors.
Any excess water from her indoor plants would travel through a series of pipes to water
her outdoor garden.
The interior finishes of the home became a reflection of her personality with quotes
decorating the walls and custom millwork tying rooms together on neat, geometric grids.
She collected stained glass windows, collecting hundreds of them to be installed in different
rooms, and changing up the décor to better accent the art glass.
Just as her house of 500 rooms was nearing completion, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
violently shook the region.
Entire wings of her house collapsed along with a seven story tower.
By this time, her health was failing and she was too tired to redesign her house.
She instructed her team to simply clean up the mess and seal off the house from the elements.
This lead to doors being permanently locked on what were now exterior walls, and staircases
being boarded up in place where their landings had failed.
Her water drainage system could not be repaired, so without plants to water, the indoor drains
were covered over.
The earthquake eliminated an estimated 340 rooms, leaving her with only 160 rooms in
her mansion.
As her illness progressed, she went into town less and less, being too tired and sick to
leave the house.
She passed away in 1922.
Without any proper heirs, she left the entirety of her estate to be divided equally amongst
her niece and staff who had become her best friends, working side by side to realize her
artistic vision.
Later that year, the house was sold to investors who leased the house to John and Mayme Brown
who began devising a plan to turn the house into a tourist attraction.
Haunted houses were becoming a popular around this time, so they fabricated a story about
superstitious and occult happenings centered around Sarah Winchester.
The initial reaction from neighbors and friends of Sarah was that of outrage, as she had been
a kind, creative, and generous woman of the community.
They further went on to imagine a medium in Boston by the name of Adam Coons who they
said instructed Sarah to move to California to escape the ghosts of everyone killed by
Winchester rifles.
No such person by that name lived in, or much less, ran a business as a psychic in Boston
during that time period.
They further went on to claim that the house had been intentionally designed to confuse
ghosts, ignoring the earthquake’s catastrophic impact on the house, going even further to
add rooms and windows to create sets of 13 pairings throughout.
On tours of their haunted house you would hear that seances were conducted in the blue
room, which is highly unlikely given that this was the live-in gardener’s quarters
and Sarah would not have invaded his space.
The fabrications seemed to have no end, even claiming that the bell tower was used to call
on ghosts when it was actually used to signal staff for shifts.
The Browns were so successful with their story telling that Authors around the United States
began to write fictional novels based on the Browns’ stories, further feeding into the
lore, which the Browns would then use as “evidence” for their fabrication.
Now, 100 years later, over 12 million visitors have heard this version of Sarah’s life.
Instead of celebrating the life of a woman pioneering architecture in a male dominated
field, or the life of a whimsical artist who offered steady employment to dozens of people
for nearly 40 years, Sarah’s legacy has been distorted to the point that that there
is no longer a shred of truth to her legend.
Maybe someday, her life’s work and contributions can be reframed to become a candid reflection
of Sarah Winchester.
Thank you all for watching, I really hope that you enjoyed this video.
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