I wanted to be an architect when I grew up.
Suppose I'd had the opportunity to design a home when I was six years old. Give a first grader unlimited blueprint paper and ever-growing sums of cash, and a construction crew able to work twenty-four hours a day. The result would be very like the home of Mrs. Sarah Winchester.
In an architect, paranoia and childhood present the same symptoms. Sarah's house has doors that don't lead anywhere, stairs that climb into solid ceiling, cupboards made from fine carved mahogany revealing storage spaces an inch deep: ideal for storing pencils.
In time, my interest in architecture was replaced with an interest in human psychology. The Winchester House is suited to both.
The Story of Winchester
Sarah Winchester was born Sarah Lockwood Pardee in September of 1839. When she grew up she was four foot ten. She was the belle of
New Haven, Connecticut.
Meanwhile, William Wirt Winchester inherited the fortune and business of father and shirt manufacturer Oliver. The fortune included a firm that manufactured the Volcanic Repeater — the world's first semi-automatic rifle. Since these were the days of front-end loading muskets, the repeater became a favorite along the frontier. Native Americans riding bareback and firing single-shooters could do little to counteract a rifle which loaded its rounds with an internal lever.
In 1860, the Volcanic Repeater was followed by the Henry Rifle. This one featured a tubular magazine that fed ammunition under the barrel: for the gun-challenged, that means it had a clip. Those who wielded the Henry Rifle could get a shot off every three seconds. That doesn't sound like much by today's standards, but, remember, these followed muskets.
Winchester rifles became a staple for Union troops fighting the Civil war. The business grew quickly.
September 30, 1862: While the Henries flared a thousand miles away, Sarah and William were married in an elaborate ceremony in New Haven.
Four years after her marriage, Sarah Winchester gave birth to Annie Pardee Winchester.
Those of us who paid attention during our high school anatomy classes are familiar with marasmus. We hear about it descending on faraway places and taking children from shanties made of straw: it's a disease that makes the body waste away.
Annie Pardee Winchester lived to be nine days old.
For the next decade, Sarah Winchester lived inside herself, near madness.
Evidently, the marriage came apart: Sarah returned to her family. On March 7, 1881, William Winchester fell to tuberculosis. Sarah inherited 20 million dollars — not adjusted for inflation — and an additional income of roughly $1100 a day.
The Neverending House
Money means nothing. Even twenty million dollars richer and pulling in a supplementary income that to this day would be a comfortable sum, Sarah continued to grieve for her husband and child.
On a friend's advice, she sought the counsel of a spiritual medium to ease her pain. The medium provided a somewhat detailed description of the deceased heir and explained that the Winchester family's bad luck was the result of a curse. According to the medium, the spirits of those who had been killed by Winchester firearms were seeking vengence. Sara's only recourse was to follow the sun west, start a new life, and build a home for herself and the growing droves of dead.
Sarah wasted no time. She sold her home in New Haven, eventually settling in California's Santa Clara Valley.
She found her muse in a six-room farmhouse under construction in San Jose belonging to a Dr. Caldwell. After a flurry of negotiations, she convinced him to sell her the house and the 162 acres on which it rested.
Sarah promptly discarded Caldwell's plans. She hired a crew of 22 carpenters who worked 24 hours a day. The San Jose farmhouse would be torn down, rebuilt, altered and expanded non-stop for the next 38 years.
Each morning, Sarah met with her crew to present plans she had drawn up. But she was no architect. Frequently her plans were a complete jumble. She could have been designing a maze to confuse the spirits, or she could have been completely mad. The Winchester Mystery House has windows built into the floors, upside-down posts, a spiraling staircase with steps two inches tall that ascends into a solid ceiling. A door on the second floor opens to a twenty-foot dropoff into a garden. Closets open into blank walls. Hallways double back. Skylights are located one right above the other.
By 1906, the house was seven stories tall. It had three elevators and 47 fireplaces, all but two of which led to nothing. Frequently, Sarah's plans proved unworkable, but she found solutions: often times, she just built a new room around an existing one. Towers erupted from the roofs, windows became doors, rooms became wings. Railroad tracks were expanded from an existing line to maintain a continuous flow of building supplies.
Sarah went all-out. The house contains ornate woodwork — mahogany banisters, carved wall-panels, fully furnished rooms, exotic rugs.
If you've seen the house, you know that today it has only four stories.
Sarah Winchester has the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake to thank for that.
Even with its chaotic designs, the Winchester house fared much better than most of the surrounding structures. Still, the damage was extensive. The top three floors shook off into the gardens. The room in which Sarah was sleeping shifted in the maze of hallways, trapping her inside. When she was retrieved alive several hours later, she had the derelict rooms boarded up, probably to use the opportunity to trap a few spirits in the rubble.
Scarcely missing a beat, Sarah's crew resumed building. Instead of replacing the top three floors, they built laterally. The house's 15 bedrooms became 20, then 25. Chimneys and fireplaces sprouted out all over the place — none of them worked.
On the night of September 24, 1922, Sarah Winchester went to sleep and did not wake up. She was 83 years old. That's a good place to make it, fighting spirits the whole way.
Sarah left everything to her niece, Frances Marriot. When the men came to remove the furniture from the house they became lost. In a safe fabled to hold solid gold dinner service to entertain spirits there was found some newspaper clippings, some baby hair, and a suit of wool underwear.
When Ripley of Believe it or Not! fame stumbled on the house for the first time, he advertised it as containing 148 rooms. The floor plans were so confusing that subsequent room counts all yielded a different total. Five years after Ripley's first count, the house was estimated to hold a grand total of 160 rooms — but even to this day, no one can figure out the floor plans well enough to provide a definite number.
Other Interesting Things I Failed To Shoehorn In Elsewhere
Sarah Winchester had an unusual preoccupation with the number 13. One chandelier, originally designed to hold twelve candles, was altered (somewhat awkwardly) to hold thirteen. All staircases, except for the spiraling one described at the beginning, had steps in multiples of 13; hooks on coat racks apppeared in multiples of 13. Winchester reportedly went so far as to divide her will in 13 sections, each with a signature.
Most of the bathrooms had glass doors.
Painting the house is a mammoth endeavor, requiring some 20,000 gallons of paint.
Sarah also favored numbers 7 and 11. There's a stairway that goes down seven steps and up eleven. The short spiraling staircase turns seven times and has 44 steps — an easy multiple of eleven.
The house has a grand total of 10,000 windows, some of which are made of priceless Tiffany stained glass.
While the room count in the current building hovers around 160, it's estimated that throughout the course of its construction some 600 rooms were built and then torn down.
The house has the strangest bell tower ever built. One could only approach it from the outside by climbing onto the roof of the mansion by a ladder mounted on the side. The bell itself is attached to a rope at the top of an unclimbable wall; when still in use, it was reached through a series of underground tunnels known only to the bellringer and his assistant.
Visiting the Winchester Mystery House
Naturally, this house built specifically for spirits is purportedly one of the most haunted places on Earth.
Today, the Winchester Mystery House is a lucrative tourist attraction. Visitors are regaled with stories of doorknobs turning by themselves, of windows closing hard enough to shatter.
Read Danielewski's House of Leaves sometime — you may note some parallels.
The house's contact info is as follows:
Address
The Winchester Mystery House
525 South Winchester Blvd
San Jose, CA 95128-2588
Phone Numbers
Group Sales & Business Offices: 1-408-247-2000
Current Tour Information: 1-408-247-2101
Upcoming Special Events Info: 1-408-247-1313
Sources
About Famous People
http://www.aboutfamouspeople.com/article1231.html
---. "The Winchester Mystery House."
http://www.geocities.com/soho/veranda/4103/winchest.html
Obi-Wan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page
http://www.ghosts.org/haunted/winchester/winchester.html
Spooky Living 365
http://www.hallowfreaks.com/winchester.html
Haunted Hamilton
http://www.hauntedhamilton.com/gotw_winchester.html
Ghosts of the Prairie
http://www.prairieghosts.com/winchester.html
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House