Inside 'mystery' house said to be haunted over 'blood' fortune of who built it
Once the US’s largest and most expensive private residences - The Winchester Mystery House is shrouded in mystery.
The colossal San Jose mansion has its foundations in an empire that built a precedent of violence and death. Its size is mainly due to the frantic guilt of Sarah Winchester.
Sarah sought to assuage her her family’s sins by continually pillaging and re-constructing parts of the unsettling and vast building. The widowed Sarah Winchester, dubbed “rifle widow” was the heiress of her repeat-rifle magnate, father-in-law Oliver Winchester’s empire.
The Winchester rifle was the earliest repeat-fire rifle, eliminating the need to reload and maximising damage.
After her husband, Will Winchester died, for almost forty years Sarah dedicated her life to the ceaseless, futile building and re-building of the house . She worked on her home with shifts of 16 carpenters who were paid three times the going rate and worked 24 hours a day, every day, from 1886 until Sarah’s death in 1922.
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Thousands of visitors flock to the house every year (Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images)The original, unassuming eight-room cottage spiraled into a sprawling, maze of rooms that now comprises 200 rooms, 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces, and 2,000 doors, trap doors, and spy holes.
Sarah sketched designs on napkins or brown paper for carpenters to build additions, towers, cupolas, or rooms that made no sense and had no purpose, sometimes only to be plastered over the next day.
In 1975, workers discovered a new room. It had two chairs, an early 1900s speaker that fit into an old phonograph, and a door latched by a 1910 lock. She had apparently forgotten about it and built over it.
All the original furniture was sold after Sarah Winchester's death (MCT via Getty Images)People were baffled by Sarah Wincehster’s escapades. But Sarah had become disturbed. She lived in almost complete solitude.
Endlessly unsettled by the blood on the hands of her family, she became convinced that her misfortunes, the death of her husband and one-month-old daughter, were retribution for the souls killed by Winchester rifles.
Laura Trevelyan, descendant of the Winchester rifle empire wrote in The Guardian: “Sarah Winchester, was supposedly so racked with guilt and haunted by the spirits of those killed by the Winchester that she started building a house in California because a medium advised her that endless building would appease the dead.
Sarah Winchester was said to think the house was haunted by victims of the Winchester rifle (Bettmann Archive)“Construction only stopped when she died.”
Inside her eccentricity is apparent, and arresting. A staircase, one of 40, goes nowhere and ends at a ceiling. Cabinets and doors open onto walls, rooms are boxes within boxes, small rooms are built within big rooms, balconies, and windows are inside rather than out, chimneys stop floors short of the ceiling, and floors have skylights.
A linen closet as big as an apartment sits next to a cupboard less than an inch deep. Doors open onto walls. One room has a normal-sized door next to a small, child-sized one. Bull’s-eye windows give an upside-down view of the world.
Sarah Winchester built up and ripped down parts of the house until the day she died (Moment Editorial/Getty Images)Pamela Haag, who used Sarah as the muse for her book on gun history in America wrote in The Smithsonian : “Winchester’s mansion conveys a restless, brilliant, sane—if obsessive—mind and the convolutions of an uneasy conscience. Perhaps she only dimly perceived the sources of her unease, whether ghostly or profane. But she wove anguish into her creation, just as any artist pours unarticulated impulses into her work.”
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Trveleyan added that her great-great-great grandfather’s “pride and joy was the revolutionary Winchester repeating rifle, one of the first guns to fire rounds repeatedly, taking away the cumbersome need to stop and reload”.
She said: “The company’s officials were always wary of having a history of their beloved rifles written – we don’t want dead buffalo and Indians on every page, observed my great-great-uncle Ed Pugsley, the chief engineer.”
“There is no airbrushing over the brutality of the settling of America’s west, in which guns were central. The Winchester was deployed to kill Native Americans defending their historic lands .”
“A special summer home is the legacy of the company for our generation. As I rake the beach for oyster shells, if I narrow my eyes I can conjure up the image of a cowboy out west galloping on his horse, his trusty Winchester at his side.”
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