Exploring The Winchester House

Welcome to my Haunted Places Blog! I've now added the Winchester House in San Jose, California, to my list of Haunted Places that I want to visit. It once was the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Winchester, heir to the Winchester empire, the manufacturer of the famous Winchester repeating rifle. The Winchester Repeating Arms Company was located in New Haven, Connecticut. Oliver Winchester was grooming his son, William to takeover the company one day.  In 1862, Sarah and William were married.  Their happiness would, sadly, be short lived. 

I like history, and Sarah Winchester's tale piqued my interest. I had so many questions and had to know more. The study of human behavior has always fascinated me; learning what makes people tick. What would drive someone to the lengths that she went? There is usually more to such a story, than meets the eye.  All that anyone can really do, is take educated guesses at certain aspects of her life, as there isn't much actual proof to back up a lot of her story. That never stops speculation and stories, especially in regards to anything involving any suspected supernatural occurrences.

     
                                        This picture is of the windows inside the house.

The Queen Anne style mansion is known for its size and complete lack of any master building plan, but that isn't entirely accurate. Sarah Winchester, had plans; In fact, she went through several architects, eventually drawing the plans out herself, despite no formal training in that area.  Sarah Winchester believed that the house was haunted by the ghosts of the people who fell victim to Winchester rifles, and that only continuous construction would assuage them. The house was continuously under construction for 38 years; from 1884 until Sarah's death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased.The Guinness Book of World Records gave the house the "Record for Longest Continuous Home Construction.

William and Sarah had a baby girl on July 12th, 1866, whose name was Annie Pardee Winchester. She died tragically, just 40 days after she was born, due to an infantile disease know as Marasmus (a severe form of malnutrition due to body's instability to metabolize proteins).  They were devastated, and this begun what Sarah believed to be a curse.  In December of 1880, Sarah's father in law, Oliver Winchester died Then, in March 1881, William died suddenly of tuberculosis. When he died, Sarah inherited $20 million and roughly a half of the ownership in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The money did little to comfort distraught Sarah when she had just lost the two people she loved most in the world. 

Heartbroken and inconsolable, Sarah left, supposedly going on a 3 year "world tour", during which time, she consulted with a medium.  The medium then informed a grieving Sarah, that she was cursed by the ghosts of everyone that had been killed by a Winchester rifle. Then they advised her to travel West, where she could build a home for the ghosts; telling her, "you must never stop building the house. If you continue building, you will live forever. But if you stop, then you will die." She really took this to heart. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in Santa Clara Valley, and began building her mansion. There are people that argue that she was simply moving there, because her remaining family, her brother in law and 2 of her sisters, lived in the Bay area. They also argued that since Sarah was so well off, she bought the house with hopes of expansion, for her family to all move into.  That did not happen.  We can't know what really happened, and perhaps there were a combination of factors involved in her decisions, as with most people. 

Shakespearean inspired windows in house

Sarah Winchester, was well educated and quite innovative. She was possibly the first person to use wool for wall insulation and the first to create indoor cranks to open windows.  She stood at only about 4'10," but wore her hair piled on top of her head, as was the style and it gave her the appearance of being taller. Doing her hair this way, was a pain to do, and high maintenance. Fortunately she was a bit of a genius, and developed a shower system for her small stature.  Back then, bath tubs were a lot more common than showers. She had several bathrooms and bath tubs, but only 1 shower.  This particular shower only sprayed her front and back, from the neck down, as to not disturb her hair. Eccentricities aside, Sarah turned the 8 bedroom farmhouse into a 160 room mansion. Mind you, there are a lot of stairways, windows in ceilings, doors to nowhere, and rooms without floors. There were bedrooms supposedly found, that had been walled up, hidden, and secret rooms.  Were these to confuse the ghosts?  The home itself is built using a floating foundation, which is believed to have saved it from total collapse in the 1906 earthquake. It was one of the century's strongest earthquakes.  During the earthquake, Sarah was trapped in an attic room for a while.   She blamed angry spirits for all of it and boarded up the room. This was the only time that construction took a brief break.  There was a lot of damage from the earthquake. Then it resumed, continuing around the clock.  

Among her superstitions and eccentricities, Sarah had an obsession with the number 13.  There are different theories.  We generally know 13 as an unlucky number.  Sarah went way beyond, just being general superstitious.  The most common theory is that she used the number 13 everywhere, to ward off evil spirits. There were 13 hooks in the seance room, 13 ceiling panels in the entrance hallway, 13 rungs on each stairway railing, flights of 13 stairs, etc.   The Hall of Fires, as Sarah called it, had multiple fireplaces. Sarah would shut herself in the hall and light all of the hearths, as if roasting herself. Oddly, the house has 47 fireplaces, but only 17 chimneys. 

A skylight in the floor

Despite being odd, she was a very generous person.  They were in hard times and people like to talk, painting her a a crazy lady building a house for ghosts, while many people were struggling to get by.  Every story has to have a villain. Sarah was said to have been a generous employer, paying above the going rate and providing on site room and board.  She kept to herself mostly, avoiding the social circuits and lavish parties that the wealthy upper class like herself typically enjoyed.  She had an annual ice cream social on the grounds of her home, for local orphans.  

Sarah died in her sleep in September 1922, at the age of 85, despite continuing construction, per the medium, for the ghosts.  She was buried alongside her husband and daughter. They say that upon the workers hearing the news of her death, all construction stopped immediately, even to the extent of leaving hails half hammered in. Sarah had never stopped construction, for long, during her life, so, her work would never truly completed to her satisfaction. Is it possible that Sarah Winchester's ghost wanders about the halls of the Winchester as well as the other ghosts? Does she linger, feeling she has unfinished business because she stopped building due to her death? Was she angry?

Sarah did not mention the mansion in her will, and appraisers considered the house utterly worthless because of the damage caused by the earthquake in 1906, the unfinished design and the impractical nature of its construction. The house was valued at a mere $5,000. Despite that, it sold at auction to a local investor for just over $135,000.  Regardless of the "value", at the time of Sarah's death, it had an impressive 160 rooms, 47 fireplaces, 10,000 panes of glass, 17 chimneys, 2 basements, 3 elevators, and a partridge in a pear tree. Just kidding about the partridge(I was seeing if you were paying attention).The Winchester house was more of a liability than an ideal home for most people.  There were doors and staircases to nowhere, secret rooms and windows in floors. Sarah had a private Seance room, and was the only one who had a key and could enter the room. The stories say that she went into the seance room each night, building plans clutched in her hand, to commune with the spirits. The Seance room lies at the center of the house.  It has 1 entrance and 3 exits.  The 1st exit is the entrance, the 2nd exit is a door right next to that, but it opens to an 8 foot drop, into the kitchen sink, in the floor below. Ouch. The 3rd exit door, has no latches or handles, so if someone goes through, the door shuts behind them and they can't get back in. Were the 3 exits to possibly trick the ghosts that Sarah felt haunted her? 

Five months after Sarah Winchester's death, the Winchester Mystery House opened to the public in February 1923. Since the Winchester house opened to the public, people have talked about having strange occurrences, blaming ghosts.  A lot of people have reported seeing orbs, hearing unexplained organ music playing, or having their hair pulled, just to name a few things.Harry Houdini toured the mansion in 1924, and in the newspaper account of his visit; which was displayed in the rifle museum on the estate, called it the Mystery House. Harry also did a seance there, trying to disprove the presence of any spirits in the mansion. He did not believe in the psychic powers of medians like Ms. Winchester had, his goal was to prove that they were full of it. When he left, he said he could not prove nor disprove that there were ghosts.  What happened at his seance?

Harry Houdini

People who work in the mansion, have described strange experiences.  The caretaker claimed to have heard footsteps and breathing in the empty house at night, long after the mansion emptied out. On one lonely night, he heard the sound of a screw slowly turning, followed by a "plink" as it fell to the floor, but when he turned on the lights he could find nothing out of place. A year later, a ghostly stranger who appeared in a photograph the caretaker’s friend, had taken at the house one New Year’s Eve. After all, the man, whom neither of them recognized,  appeared wearing  workman’s heavy coveralls. That ties in with the most commonly sighted apparition, a man pushing a wheel barrow in the basement.  He might have been a former landscaper? Another longtime employee at the Winchester House said he was often a target for the sort of pranks that a mischievous spirit would play. As he closed the mansion up one evening, he locked the heavy doors to the main courtyard and then set the burglar alarm. When he turned back to check the doors, he found them unlocked. Of course, he was alone in the house at the time. Another evening, after conducting a walk through of the house at the end of the day, he carefully locked all of the doors and turned off every light, but as he walked to his car, he looked up to discover that all of the lights on the third floor were on. While anyone could forget to turn off just one light, he couldn’t imagine forgetting to turn off an entire floor’s worth of lights. A final bit of mischief occurred in his absence, but it seems clear that he was the target. One morning, he arrived to find his desk drenched with water. All of the paperwork he’d left the night before was soaked through, and his pencil cup was filled to the brim. There had been a light rain the night before, but the walls and ceiling around the desk were bone dry and undamaged.

The Winchester House has an undeniably intriguing history and  even to this day, people claim to have ghostly encounters. They host ghost tours, sleepovers, and fright nights. That is definitely on my traveling bucket list!  TIME magazine even placed the Winchester House among the Top 10 Most Haunted Places. I will write another blog entry post-visit. Go and check out the spooky mansion for yourself. Safe travels and don't go through the wrong door!