Ol’ Widow Winchester and the house that $5 million built.
I got a chance to give a symposium talk at the conference in San Jose last weekend, and during a bit of free time I found my way over to the Winchester Mystery House. This house was under continuous construction for 38 years, under the daily direction of Sarah Winchester, who supposedly built the additions to the house to appease some spirits that were haunting her. In my opinion, a lot of the odd construction could be the building of additions without any sort of master plan, but thats just me. Not really one that gets excited by ghost stories, I was more interested in the construction of this house, the architecture, and the chance to take some interesting photographs.
The story behind the houses starts on the other side of the country in Connecticut. After her daughter and husband died, Mrs. Winchester consulted a psychic of some sort that told her the family was cursed, and she was haunted but the souls of all the people that had been killed by Winchester firearms. She was ‘drawn west’ so she went to San Jose, bought an six room farm house and started construction in 1884. This construction went on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 38 years until her death at the age of 83 in 1922. The day she died the workmen stopped. All told she spend over $5 million on construction, funded by the $20 million in cash and the $1000 per day she earned from half ownership in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company she inherited from her husband at his death.
The house has some “interesting” features, like staircases that go to the ceiling, or doors that open to blank walls, or chimneys that rise though four stories just to stop short of the roof.
She was also pretty short (well under five foot tall), so some of the work in the house was obviously scaled for her size.
Other than the oddities in the house, there was beautiful hand carved woodwork, elegant gardens, and stained glass all over the place.
Also interesting was that during the 1906 earthquake, she was trapped in one of the front bedrooms, when the wall shifted and the door was bound in the frame.
The servant staff had to pry the door open, and this is supposedly the marks on that door.
After she was freed, Mrs. Winchester decided that the earthquake and damage were signs from the spirits that she had spent too much time on the front part of the house, so she boarded up the front 30 rooms, and left them as is. Today you can still see the unrepaired damage from the 1906 quake.
For more information there is always the wikipedia article, or a room by room virtual tour on a haunted whatnot site.
