Winchester Mystery House
There is a reason. A widow grieves. A widow spends 38 years and millions of dollars building a house that makes no sense.
In 1862, Sarah Pardee married William Wirt Winchester, heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, maker of the famous Winchester rifle, the gun that “won the West,” the ads said. It was a blessed marriage in the beginning. Then, in 1866, a month after the birth of their only child, a baby girl named Annie, she died. William died of tuberculosis in 1881. Sarah was single and childless and worth an estimated $20 million. She was earning roughly $1,000 a day in royalties from the rifle company.
By all accounts she never really recovered from the grief. She consulted a medium who told her she was haunted by the spirits of everyone killed by the Winchester rifle, and that was a great many people. The medium told her that she must go west and build a house. It was a house, not just any kind of house, but the house she had to build all the time, never stopping, day or night. While they were building, the spirits could not hurt her. If she ever stopped building, she’d die.
Sarah Winchester bought a farmhouse in San Jose, California, and began building in 1884. She had crews of carpenters working shifts around the clock, seven days a week, 365 days a year. For 38 years running, the sound of hammers and saws filled the property.
The result is one of the strangest constructions in the history of mankind.
The house grew to 160 rooms, 40 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, 2 ballrooms, and 10,000 windows. But the architecture makes no sense at all. They have stairways that go right into the ceiling. Doors that open straight onto ten-foot drops to the garden below. The cabinets are 2 inches deep. A four-story chimney, nowhere, and not quite at the roof. The stained glass windows have spider web motifs everywhere—Sarah was interested in the number 13, and many of the windows are grouped into 13 panes.
Was she making a maze to confuse the spirits? Was it the work of a brilliant, disordered intellect? Or was she going quietly mad with grief?
Sarah Winchester resided in the house until her death on September 5, 1922. She was 82. When she died, the carpenters laid down their tools and walked away. Middle finger. Mid-wall. Work was being left off all over the house.
Today, the Winchester Mystery House is a California historical landmark and a popular tourist attraction. A million people have walked its impossible hallways. And no one—historians, architects, or paranormal investigators—has ever quite figured out what Sarah Winchester was trying to build or what she was trying to keep away.
