Table Of Content
- The Abandoned 'Ghost Mansion' of Northern Italy
- In popular culture
- In 1885, a widowed Sarah Winchester moved to California to start a new life in a farmhouse she built on 40 acres.
- "There is always going to be a certain amount of mystery attached to this mystery house," Boehme said.
- "We don’t have documentation, but what everyone has always loved is the legends and the lore," Boehme said.
- Another explanation could be that she found it amusing. "I also think maybe she had a sense of humor," Boehme said.
The Winchester Mystery House is in many ways the perfect American roadside attraction in that it is a combination of history and folklore built around the eccentricities of a mysterious, private person. Over her lifetime until she died in 1922, Sarah expanded and renovated her home until it grew in size to 24,000 square feet and featured 160 rooms. Most of Llanada Villa was built in the Queen Anne Revival style, but some sections featured Victorian, Gothic, and Romanesque features. Originally, Sarah hired the services of two architects but eventually dismissed them and drew up many plans for her home herself. These spirits are reportedly what called Winchester to make so many illogical additions to the home.
The Abandoned 'Ghost Mansion' of Northern Italy
My daughter and I agreed that the house undoubtedly felt creepy, but not scary. Many of the rooms were dark, unremarkable, and surprisingly small. We did feel like we were walking through a maze as we took a spiraling tour that included various ups and downs, but is also possible the route we followed was intended to create this effect. In 1866, Sarah and William had one daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, but she died only one month after her birth. William Wirt Winchester died at the age of 44 of tuberculosis soon after the death of his father and mother.
In popular culture
Inside you'll find quite a few architectural oddities, like a staircase that leads to nowhere, cabinets that open into walls, and a door that opens up to a 12-foot drop. Since 1923, tours have been taking curious visitors through the gargantuan mansion, which remains a famous tourist attraction today. The remnants of the seven-story tower that toppled during the 1906 earthquake—finials, rails, and decorative trimmings that rained down like beads from a chandelier—are kept in the cavernous attic space. To make it accessible to visitors, Taffe’s team has fitted the area with myriad handholds and stabilizing planks.
In 1885, a widowed Sarah Winchester moved to California to start a new life in a farmhouse she built on 40 acres.
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Mysterious houses designed and constructed by eccentric owners are featured in almost every state. Each of these homes is a mixture of history, folklore, and P.T. There is the Lizzie Borden House in Massachusetts, Craig-E-Clair Castle in New York, the Asa Packer Mansion in Pennsylvania, the House on the Rock in Wisconsin, Coral Castle in Florida, and the actual home of P.T. "After Sarah Winchester passed away, there were no blueprints left behind," shares the attraction on its site, and as well as the fact that this digital experience is the first floor plan created for fans to explore from home.
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Winchester inherited $20 million after her husband died in 1881, and not long afterward moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to an eight-room farmhouse in orchard-studded Santa Clara Valley. A dedicated crew of carpenters built new rooms so quickly that no one bothered to draw up blueprints. And she didn’t hesitate to make unorthodox building decisions—a stairway ascending to a wall, a closet about an inch deep, a “door to nowhere” that opens to empty space. After she died in 1922, the businessman John Brown rented the house, christened it a tourist attraction, and later purchased it outright.
"There is always going to be a certain amount of mystery attached to this mystery house," Boehme said.
Please arrive 30 minutes before your scheduled tour time to find parking or use a ride share service. As you walk away from the house’s manicured grounds, the polished facade of the upscale mall across the street smacks you in the face. And you begin to realize that there’s a comfort to the house’s curling, hidden spaces, a freedom in its eccentricities, a majesty in its abstractions. There’s a thrill, too, in knowing that Winchester likely hid some spaces so well that no one has seen them for over a hundred years. “There’s very possibly things we haven’t discovered yet, just because we don’t have blueprints,” Magnuson says. There’s solace in the idea that, even in privacy-phobic Silicon Valley, there are still secrets at the house—and plenty of questions that don’t really even need answers.
The house became a tourist attraction nine months after Winchester's death in 1922. The Victorian and Gothic-style mansion is renowned for its size and its architectural curiosities and for the numerous myths and legends surrounding the structure and its former owner. The tale that she believed she had to keep building or she would experience death is not backed up by the actual construction record of the building. There are no records of séances being held in the house and staff members claimed that Sarah had no interest in them. Sarah’s relatives did not back up the claims of her being superstitious and her reclusiveness may have been due to her many physical ailments.
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Sarah Winchester – heir to the Winchester-rifle fortune – spent 38 years constructing this mammoth white elephant. No expense was spared in the construction, the extreme results of which sprawl over 4 acres. Apparently, it was commissioned because she claimed the spirits of the people killed by Winchester rifles told her to.
Additionally, Winchester insisted that the home be built exclusively out of redwood – however, she didn’t like the look of the wood, so she insisted it be covered with a stain and a faux grain. By the time the house was completed, over 20,000 gallons of paint had been used to cover the wood. Despite providing more realistic theories for Winchester's mysteries, Boehme admitted that she has heard her name whispered behind her back when no one else was in the room. However, she hopes people come to the house to learn more about how Winchester was a creative businesswoman. Time magazine once named the Winchester house one of the most haunted places in the world. The house opened for tours just five months after she passed away.
It would be difficult for anyone to give a definitive assessment of the motivations of Sarah Winchester since she was a private person who did not reveal much to the public. What I do know is that she left us with a mystery and an unusual home as an artifact. In addition to daily tours, guests are encouraged to stroll around the property by taking the self-guided Sarah’s Garden Tour. In true roadside attraction fashion, all visitors exit through an extensive gift shop featuring a variety of souvenirs. Knowing very few details about the history of the Winchester Mystery House, my daughter, Liz, and I booked a weekday noon tour and drove from San Francisco to San Jose.
Overall, the presentation about Sarah Winchester was informative and intriguing while the home offered a view into the history of the early 1900s in California. But, at the top of any list of creepy homes in the United States is always the Winchester Mystery House. I genuinely enjoy visiting and seeing places that have become a part of American folklore. I often find that they have an interesting back story and often reveal a great deal of cultural history. Out of the 13 bathrooms in the home, only one was functional, in an effort to confuse any ghosts wishing to haunt a spigot. Furthermore, she would sleep in a different room every night in the Winchester house, and use secret passageways to get from room to room so that no spirits could follow her.
The Winchester Mystery House is just off Highway 280 and across the street from Santana Row. It isn't always full of colorful leaves and pumpkin lattes and fuzzy sweaters. In fact, it's still summertime, officially, as the first of the "ber" months begins, and the thermometers around the Golden State very much reveal that fact. And when you can get it, all while staying home, and help out a famous California attraction? The feeling is as good as finding a perfect pumpkin in the patch. A year later, rooms that were never opened to the public were put on display, including sections of the home that had remained unfinished at the time of her death.
We’ve been mentioned in many “Top Destination” lists around the world. Though visitors can watch the video tour for free, the Winchester Mystery House is asking visitors to consider purchasing a voucher for use at a later date. My daughter and I found visiting the Winchester Mystery House to be an entertaining way to spend an afternoon.
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