Winchester is perhaps best known for its guns and for little things like winning the Civil War for the Union. However real history buffs and fans of the truly bizarre will know the legend of Winchester House. This strange structure, which has been declared a national monument, has a history that Stephen King wishes he could make up and a legend which puts modern ghouls like Bloody Mary and the Hook Man myth to shame.
It all started back when Sarah Pardee married Oliver Winchester in the year 1862 at the height of the Civil War. Winchester had an interest in several different businesses before his marriage, including shirt making, but when he acquired the rights to the Volcanic Repeater rifle the man’s name became inextricably linked with American firearms. It was the Civil War, and the demand for the Henry rifle, that made Winchester and his new bride richer than either of them would have dreamed possible.
At first the marriage went well. There was plenty of money, business was roaring, and in 1866 Sarah gave birth to a daughter named Annie Winchester. The baby sadly only lasted for four days, and she died of a wasting illness. Sarah was deeply saddened by the loss of her daughter, and some say it took her eight years to become something resembling her old self again. In 1881 her husband, and the current heir to the Winchester fortune, died of tuberculosis. Possibly helped along by the quack medicine that hadn’t been debunked at that time. This left Sarah with all the grief of a childless widow, and the unheard of sum of twenty million dollars, with roughly a thousand more rolling in every day.
It was at this point where things get strange. Sarah, afflicted by her depression got some advice from a friend. That advice was to consult a spiritualist, something that was all the rage in the era of the occult when organizations like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were becoming major social forces. So Sarah consulted a medium who conducted a seance, and her all-seeing Ouija board apparently told her to inform the grief stricken and half crazed widow that the souls of her daughter and husband were still in the house with her. Also that she’d been cursed, and that the souls of everyone that died by her husband’s guns would haunt her till the day she met her own end.
Sarah, being a modern and intelligent woman… took the medium at her word. Sarah sold her house on the East Coast and, guided by the hand of her departed husband, came to California. In 1884 she arrived in Santa Clara, and there found a modest six room house being built on 160 acres of land. She bought it all from the owner, as she was more than able to afford, and began construction on the foundations of her new home for herself and her deceased companions.
Here’s where things got strange. Sarah scrapped the plans that the original home owner had, and began to build as if she was constructing the home off the top of her head. She employed various carpenters and builders, presenting the foreman with new, hand-drawn blueprints every morning. In small details they were accurate, and even highly artistic, but if you looked at the big picture Winchester House was an Architectural manticore, a mis-matched Frankenstein who seemed to have no rhyme or reason in its construction. The house had gotten up to 26 rooms, very few of which made any sort of sane sense, when railroad cars for the materials and furnishings were dedicated to the constant stream of need the projected possessed.
This went on for 36 years. Rooms would be built around rooms, doors opened to steep drops, sky lights were built above skylights and stairways went up just to loop around and go back down again. Fireplaces were installed everywhere, closets opened to brick walls and everywhere there was a maddening sense of chaos as what had been a home became an estate, and what would be an estate became a massive labyrinth that only the experienced or the possessed could really navigate. Sarah built this place to contain the spirits she believed would haunt her, but especially to confuse and even to trap the bad men, the villains and the wicked devils that were no doubt coming to move in with bloody holes left behind by Winchester bullets.
In 1906 the house, if such a term was still applicable when it was seven stories and possessed enough rooms to hold several palaces, was struck by an earthquake. Sarah survived, and she was convinced that the quake was the anger of the spirits who thought the house was nearly complete. So to keep things under control Sarah went right back to consulting with the builders, sealing off rooms and ensuring that the house would never, ever be truly finished. This continued on, unabated, until her death in 1922.
Of course Sarah Winchester had drained a huge amount of the fortune, and there were other Winchester heirs who were enraged there was so little left. But there was a rumor of jewels and gold hidden in a safe somewhere inside Winchester House. So the inheritors, hoping to make something out of a bad situation, tried to find it. They opened nearly 20 safes, but all they found were old socks, newspaper clippings and bit of fishing line. Any secrets that Winchester House held it wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
Over time the place developed a reputation, the story bringing people to see it. Ripley, or the Believe it or Nor Fame, added to the fires of infamy that burned by reporting things like the fact that workmen took 6 weeks just to remove the furniture because the place was so difficult to navigate. Eventually the 160+ (no one’s sure of the exact count) room home was declared a national landmark in the 1970s, and to this day people can come to California at 525 South Winchester Boulevard in San Jose, California to view madness in architectural form. There’s still mixed word on the ghosts, though many people who work in the house claim to have seen and heard things ranging from mysterious footsteps to the sounds of ghostly workmen. Other opinions run to the idea that even the dead could lose their way in the nonsensical twists and turns dreamed up by a manwoman and a fortune earned with blood and bullets.
“Winchester Mystery House,” by Anonymous at Prarie Ghosts
“Alleged Hauntings- The World Famous Winchester Mystery House,” by Anonymous at Winchester Mystery House