Today, the mansion has grown from its original eight-room farmhouse to a sprawling 161 room mansion containing a bizarre collection of architectural features, such as staircases that lead to walls and ceilings, doors that open out into nothing, and even a room designed specifically for seances. At one point, the house is said to have had about 500 rooms, and to have been seven stories high, though after the 1906 earthquake Sarah restricted her building to four stories. Sarah did not use any architects, preferring to add rooms, staircases, and other architectural features haphazardly, with no fixed masterplan. Despite this, the house was constantly being added to and removed for over 38 years. Though the prevailing story is that construction on the Winchester Mystery House occurred uninterrupted from 1884 to 1922, when Sarah passed away, in reality, there were periodic breaks for both the workers and Sarah. The original two-storied Farmhouse that Sarah Winchester bought ©2021 The Winchester Mystery House The History of the House Sarah was convinced that the only way to protect herself was to build a house for herself and her spirits, and that if “the hammers ever ceased”, she would die. The story goes that after Sarah lost her daughter to marasmus, and then her husband to tuberculosis, she consulted a medium, who told her that her family was being haunted by all the people who had been victims of the Winchester rifles. The history of the house is deeply tied to its owner, Sarah Winchester, whose husband William Winchester was the heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The Pergola in the gardens of the Winchester House_©2021 The Winchester Mystery House The Tragic Tale of Sarah Winchester In 2018, a horror film was made about the infamous house and the spirits that live within.The house has been designated as a California historic landmark and serves as a popular tourist attraction, enough that it has featured in books, movies, plays and even serves as the inspiration for a ride at Disneyland. The month-long, round-the-clock investigation included interviewing over 300 people regarding their experiences on the property, and analyzed every aspect of the environment for any unusual phenomena. In response to the ongoing claims of ghostly encounters and other paranormal phenomena on the property, in the early 1990s the Winchester management had a parapsychologist and paranormal investigator named Christopher Chacon conduct a full-scale scientific assessment of the property. Though it’s open now, signs of damage from the earthquake are still clearly visible. Some say Sarah Winchester took this as a sign from the spirits that she was too close to completion and ordered the unfinished front half of the house to be boarded up. As the theory goes, to avoid them she would sleep in a different bedroom every night and take labyrinthine paths through her own home.Ī massive earthquake struck the Bay Area in 1906 and toppled the top three stories of the house, damaging the other four stories along with it. Some theories say she believed that as soon as construction was complete, she would die, while other theories suggest she built the house like a maze in order to keep her paranormal tormentors at bay and lost in the many intricacies of the building. After her husband passed away, a psychic told her that to evade the spirits, she would have to move out west, buy a home, and build nonstop. Winchester was being haunted by the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle, which her late husband’s company had invented. Winchester demanded constant changes to her very large house. A particularly odd delight is a cabinet that, when opened, extends through 30 rooms of the house. Staircases lead straight to ceilings, expensive Tiffany stained-glass windows were installed in places where they would get no light, and there are more secret passages than Narnia. Not all the 2,000 doors can be walked through-one leads to an 8-foot drop to a kitchen sink, another to a 15-foot drop into bushes in the garden below. Of course, that’s not all that’s unique about the house. It had over 160 rooms and 40 bedrooms, 10,000 windows, and even 2 basements. She purchased a small eight-room farmhouse and started a small renovation project that would take 36 years and $5.5 million (in the money of the time), only stopping when she passed away in 1922.īy the time she was done, the Winchester Mansion was a modern marvel with indoor plumbing, multiple elevators, a hot shower, and central heating. In 1886 an eccentric woman named Sarah Winchester traveled from New Haven, Connecticut, to San Jose, California, to start a new life.
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