![]() Today, the legend and the legacy live on in Sarah’s bizarre Victorian beauty. When Sarah passed away in 1922, the still-incomplete (after 38 years of construction) house sprawled out over six acres and held 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 47 stairways, six kitchens… (you get the picture). The result is a maze of twisting hallways, secret passageways, stairways going nowhere, and even doors in the floor. Built to confuse the malicious spirits pursuing the widow, the house has no overarching rhyme or reason in its plans-except to make it impossible to navigate without knowing where you’re going. Winchester purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began her life’s work on a “house of spirits,” constructed with the assistance of friendly ghosts she contacted through her seance room. In 2018, a horror film was made about the infamous house and the spirits that live within.Rumored to be the most haunted mansion in the Bay Area, San Jose’s infamous Winchester Mystery House is both home to ghouls galore and an architectural road map to the psyche of its disturbed and eccentric creator, Sarah Winchester. After the 1881 death of her gun-magnate husband (whose family manufactured the famous Winchester repeating rifle), the distressed New England society wife was advised by a medium that she must move west to flee the ghosts of those who had fallen victim to rifle’s fire. 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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