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Even 95 years after her death, it seemed that Sarah Winchester’s house was still holding on to some secrets. In the years Sarah Winchester lived in the house, the residents of San Jose whispered about its strange construction and even stranger inhabitant, but it was in the years after her death that the wild stories became even wilder. Newly in possession of a massive fortune and struggling with the loss of her husband and daughter, she sought the advice of a medium.
"We don’t have documentation, but what everyone has always loved is the legends and the lore," Boehme said.
After appraisers deemed the house worthless due to its strange design, damage from the earthquakes, and long-winded construction, Marion took everything in it and auctioned it off. The current owners of the house claim it took six weeks to empty the house of all furniture, though the report is uncorroborated. Unfortunately, in 1904, an earthquake struck San Jose, and the Winchester Mystery House sustained a hefty amount of damage. Thanks to the floating foundation (a foundation that equals the weight of the surrounding soil) the entire house was saved from collapse.
"It's like a time capsule really," Boehme told Business Insider.
Sarah Winchester was a woman of independence, drive, and courage who lives on in legend. And the mansion she built is world renowned as much for the many design curiosities and innovations (many ahead of their time) as it is for the reported paranormal activity that resides within these walls. The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, is one of the nation’s most curious landmarks. Built by a millionaire widow over the course of 36 years, the sprawling mansion features more than 200 rooms, 10,000 windows, trap doors, spy holes and a host of other architectural oddities. Inside the maze-like estate, visitors may hear that unsettling organ play, or see ghostly figures trapped on dead-end staircases or meandering down twisting hallways. Like any good haunted house, the Winchester estate has its fair share of secret passageways, as well as a dedicated séance room.
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It has been a beloved piece of quirky, creepy Americana since it opened. More than 12 million slack-jawed visitors have followed a planned route through Winchester’s singular vision. Other than household staff, few saw the home’s interior during Winchester’s lifetime. She kept to herself following the deaths of her husband and infant daughter, Annie, from illness.
The staircase landing opens onto an array of finished and unfinished rooms, including the Crystal Bedroom, where pale yellow, mica-flecked wallpaper gives the walls a luminous quality. One reason this room had been off-limits for so many years is concern about what sunlight might do to the wallpaper, so at some point it may need to be sealed off again. Though the house has a reputation as a dim warren, its estimated 10,000 panes of glass reflect Winchester’s desire for natural light. At one point, an outdoor patio was enclosed, so she had a skylight installed in its floor to pull light from above into the newly shrouded room below. It’s as though she carved tunnels through the house to let light penetrate. Nearly 100 years after the house opened for tours, millions of guests have visited Sarah Winchester’s beautiful home.
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Boehme said it's likely that Winchester used this space as a sauna to help ease her arthritis. While some believe this staircase was meant to confuse ghosts, Boehme said Winchester actually designed the smaller steps so that she could easily get upstairs with her arthritis. The pointed spires, the wraparound porch, the shingles, and the elaborate columns are all popular features of a Queen Anne Revival, according to Boehme. We took a 65-minute tour through 110 rooms of the unique estate in the fall of 2019.
Boehme describes the room as "elegant" with embossed wallpaper that surrounds the space and elaborate furniture that fills the room. Although it's beautiful, there is a darker reason why this room is so famous. This is the room where Winchester died of heart failure in 1922, at age 82. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 damaged the Winchester mansion all the way out in San Jose. After seeing the damage, Boehme said Winchester decided to remove the top few floors because it was too dangerous.
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In 1884, Sarah Winchester purchased what would later become known as the Winchester Mystery House. At the time of the sale, the house was a small unfinished farmhouse, but that quickly changed. Boehme said the windows share similar motifs and similar glass, but they have different types of designs. The Daisy Bedroom has daisies in its stained-glass windows, for example.
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There’s a way that these reports of hauntings, the mythos behind Winchester herself, and the staff’s enthusiasm for it all create an atmosphere of suggestibility. The new Winchester movie plays on that idea, and so do some of the newer upgrades that have been made to the house. Taffe, who used to work at a theme park, has a nose for this kind of theatricality. He and his team recently perfected a high-octane sound clip that replicates the 1906 earthquake that brought down the house’s turreted tower and trapped Winchester in the scroll-covered Daisy Bedroom for hours. “This is the full-length one.” As a speaker in the nearby bedroom emits a rising bellow, the floor starts to shake. Sounds of smashing glass and crockery punctuate the rumbles.
The ballroom is the biggest room in the house with the highest ceiling, reaching 12 feet. A fireplace mantle takes up most of one wall, while wood paneling covers most of the other walls. After this conservatory, visitors pass from the newer part of the house to the older part, using a small set of stairs that once acted as exterior porch steps.
The legacy of the Winchester Mystery House is embedded in its many unusual architectural and interior design novelties. Boehme finds that the legend has little power to explain Winchester’s unusual construction ideas. “A lot of stories were told about her way before she died, even. She really wouldn’t engage or talk to the press because they said such bad things about her.” During her lifetime, her silence likely fed all sorts of rumors.
Some heroic construction work went into making sure the new spaces were safe, according to Michael Taffe, head of the house’s operations and maintenance team. “There’s a lot of modifications to actually make that a route,” he says. “You had raw redwood that wasn’t finished; it had to be framed and covered with plaster.” Wonky nails were pounded flat, old earthquake debris was cleared out, and floorboards installed.
For the most part, no one was permitted even to photograph her. “There’s a story about Teddy Roosevelt making an appearance in San Jose and wanting an audience with the Winchester widow,” says Magnuson. “He knocked on the front door and was not even let in.” Her eccentricity and the ghost stories—not to mention the scandal of a woman living autonomous and alone—have always been amplified in the house’s history. More striking, though, is the extraordinary artistic freedom she exercised in creating it, as well as the lengths to which today’s staff must go to keep the house intact and open. In the 1800s, Sarah Winchester—the peculiar heir to the famed rifle company fortune—began building a labyrinthine Victorian mansion in San Jose, California. The story goes she spent four decades transforming the eight-room farmhouse into a sprawling 161-room complex hoping to outrun the ghosts of the people killed by a Winchester rifle.
The top three floors were ultimately removed, leaving the house with only four stories, as seen today. There was no plan – no official blueprints were drawn up, no architectural vision was created, and yet a once-unfinished house took shape on a sprawling lot in the heart of San Jose, California. Inside, staircases ascended through several levels before ending abruptly, doorways opened to blank walls, and corners rounded to dead ends.
One of the first things you notice upon approaching the Winchester Mystery House is that the front door is not aligned with the roof peak above it—it is staggered slightly to the right. This might be a minor detail, but it hints at the disorder that unfolds within. The mastermind behind this architectural oddity—a sprawling Queen Anne Revival with 160 rooms—was Sarah Winchester, the widow of the rifle magnate William Winchester. Famously private and eccentric, she built onto her California home on and off for more than 30 years.
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