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The Winchester Mystery House

Karen Stollznow - B@D LANGUAGE

Upon discovering that I’m an investigative skeptic, a colleague of mine remarked, “you must go to the Winchester Mystery House!”

Years ago, I’d seen a documentary about this bizarre mansion with a curious past, and so I set out to investigate the story on an appropriate day, Halloween. While it passes largely unnoticed in Australia, Halloween has near holiday status in the US. For weeks beforehand, stores are decorated festively while houses are adorned with effigies of witches, vampires, grim reapers and demons. Hedgerows are covered in mock spider webs with ‘monster’s claws’ peeking out. Gardens are elaborately decorated with dangling plastic skeletons, bats, polystyrene tombstones and many varieties of pumpkins. Trick-or-treating is immensely popular and even the big kids get into the ‘spirit’ of the event, donning costumes and holding parties. In this tradition, the Winchester Mystery House conducts Halloween flashlight tours.

Located in Downtown San Jose, California, this incredible Gothic Victorian mansion is an oddity, surrounded by freeways, fast food outlets and the high rises of Silicon Valley. In the bygone days, when Santa Clara County was known for its orchards, the eccentric Winchester Rifle heiress, Sarah Winchester, designed and built this legendary house. This isn’t so much a paranormal story as a story about a woman whose life was reputedly ruled and ruined by the paranormal.

Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1839. In 1862, during the height of the Civil War, Sarah married William Winchester, the sole child of Oliver Winchester, owner of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The couple only had one child, Annie, whom died in infancy of tuberculosis. Oliver died in 1880 and was quickly followed by William, who died in 1881. Her husband, like her child, died of tuberculosis and Sarah became a major benefactor to Pulmonary research, donating $2 million during her lifetime to this cause. As the last Winchester, Sarah became an independently wealthy woman. Her husband bequeathed to her fifty percent of the Winchester Company and the substantial income of $1000 per day, tax free as it was then!

Cruel Counsel

Sarah slipped into a deep depression following the deaths of her family members. But do the facts end here? Sarah, now alone and vulnerable, was reputedly convinced her family were victims of a curse. Allegedly, she travelled to Boston to consult with psychic medium Adam Coons. Instead of providing Sarah with a comforting message, Coons confirmed the wealthy widow’s fears that the Winchester family was cursed. In illogical logic, he explained that the spirits of those people and animals who had died at the hands of a Winchester rifle, ‘the gun that won the west’, were avenging their deaths by claiming the lives of her husband, child and father-in-law. Sarah was next. Coons’ had a peculiar ‘solution’. The only way Sarah could appease the spirits was to build them a house. Coons advised that his client move west and build this home. As long as the house was being built, the spirits would not harm Sarah. Utterly convinced by Coons and desperate to remove this ‘curse’, Sarah relocated to San Jose and purchased an eight room farmhouse. Coons’ cruel counsel commenced Sarah’s mission to create a constant, 38 year work-in-progress leading to an astonishing labyrinthian mansion. On what was once a 161 acre estate, the contemporary building boasts some staggering statistics: 160 rooms and 4 storeys (in its prime the house had 7 storeys!), with 6 kitchens, 40 bedrooms, 19 chimneys, 40 staircases, 47 fireplaces, 52 skylights, 950 doors, 3 elevators, 2 ballrooms and 10 000 windows!

It’s said that Sarah had builders working 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, over the 4 decades of construction. However, there were only ever two sets of formal blueprints, for the elevators and the boiler. All other plans were sketched onto scraps of paper, napkins or even tablecloths and were destroyed upon implementation. Was this the procedure of an amateur architect or, according to legend, a deliberate ploy to prevent the ‘spirits’ from knowing the outlay of the house? Construction began in 1884 and ended on the day of Sarah’s death, 5th September 1922. In total, the mansion was remodelled over 600 times, at a cost of five and a half million dollars!

On Tour

I attended the complete Estate Tour of the house, including a guided tour of the mansion (a generous viewing of 110 of the rooms!) and a ‘Behind the Scenes’ guided tour of the estate grounds. Tours are conducted all day but I decided to attend the last one of the evening, to appreciate the eerie ambiance of the house. In its heyday, the house was gas lit. Aside from a few contemporary lights, the tours are held mostly in darkness and with many of the many windows wide open, allowing in the cold valley air. Sadly, none of the original furnishings adorn what must have once been an opulently decorated home. Upon Sarah’s death, her sole relative, niece Frances Marriot, auctioned off most of the furnishings, from the crockery to an ornate bird bath in the aviary. The tour guide informed us that it took 8 weeks to remove all of the furniture from the premises, at 6 truckloads per day! Only 24 of the rooms are now furnished sparsely with donations, all genuine period furniture, but not the original household décor. Aside from the fireplaces, elevators, a chandelier, an organ and some original marble and tiling, all that remains is now the house, as a cold, dark and empty shell.

One of the first rooms we visited was the ‘Séance Room’, built deep inside the house. The room has three exits but only one entrance. One door leads to a sink while another door opens to a ten foot drop to the kitchen! According to our guide, this is where Sarah held nightly séances between the hours of midnight and 2am. At midnight the bells in the bell tower would ring to summon the spirits to the séance. When the séance was completed, the bells would toll to signal that it was time for the spirits to depart. Conflicting stories state that Sarah’s construction efforts were ‘guided’ by her husband, while the guide asserted that Sarah’s séances were an attempt to ‘contact’ the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles, to seek their ‘advice’ and instructions on how the following day’s construction should proceed. Apparently, Sarah’s goal was to never complete the remodelling, lest the spirits exact their revenge upon the last living Winchester.

Guilt?

If we believe the stories, when Sarah began her quest to placate the ‘spirits’, her life became inextricably bound to the paranormal, superstition and fear influencing every part of her life. Sarah Winchester was, by all accounts, an educated woman of her time. She had attended school, was fluent in four languages and was an accomplished musician. So, why did she succumb to the occult? Why did she believe Coombs’ superstitious theory and illogical ‘solution’, and to such an obsessive extent? My theory is that Sarah suffered a powerful combination of grief, a natural predisposition to depression and considerable guilt at her family’s bloodthirsty trade and subsequent affluence. Apparently Sarah often referred to her family’s wealth as “blood money” derived from misfortune. Furthermore, this was still the zenith of Spiritualism. Perhaps these factors led to Sarah’s indoctrination into the occult and superstitious existence, her substantial wealth allowing for the indulgence of her eccentricity.

If any readers have ever participated in a séance, you will recall that the spirits seem to only ever ‘know’ as much as the medium does, and have lost the ability to spell correctly. Well, the spirits that Sarah ‘contacted’ were hardly architects or structural engineers! The Winchester mansion has many, many peculiar and redundant features. This is a house that could have been the brainchild of MC Escher. Where to begin? The house itself looks like an elaborate, colourful Victorian mansion, albeit with many add-ons; turrets, cupolas, and cornices. We started the tour in the stage coach entrance and as we entered the house itself, were directed to peer around a corner at a stairwell. This infamous stairwell leads straight to the ceiling!

This house is as eccentric as its owner and designer. The legend asserts that Sarah built the maze-like mansion to confuse and disorient any lurking spirits, but the design truly succeeded in confusing her staff! Given it’s such a large and complicated premises, not to mention that Sarah didn’t ever want anyone to know her exact whereabouts, servants were summoned to a wing, rather than a room! The house is a web of corridors, stairwells and rooms within rooms within rooms. There are many doors high enough to only accommodate Sarah’s diminutive 4 foot 10 inch frame. There is a tiny, superfluous balcony. One room has a window built into the floor. Countless closets, doors and windows open out onto blank walls. A ‘door to nowhere’ opens outward to an 8 foot drop! A blind chimney stops short of the ceiling. There are numerous trapdoors and double-back hallways. There are security bars on internal windows. There is a ‘Room of Fires’, a sauna-like room with seven sources of heat, built to “ease Mrs Winchester’s arthritis”. Most rooms have strange, awkwardly-shaped alcoves of varying height and depth, that aren’t large enough to house anything at all.

All of the bathrooms have glass doors and spy holes, while the kitchen was designed so that Sarah could overhear the gossip of her staff. Apparently, if anyone ever proposed building plans, discussed her plans, or her, they were fired on the spot. For their loyalty and silence, her staff were paid $3 per day, triple the standard rate. Throughout the house, curious, winding stairwells climb only a few feet and are raised only two inches high. While the tour guide initially explained this as another architectural attempt to ‘confuse the spirits’, I was pleased to hear a grain of skepticism employed in the alternate theory, that Sarah may have designed these ‘easy riser’ stairwells with her chronic arthritis in mind.

During the 1906 earthquake, in the early hours of the morning, Sarah became trapped in a room in the front section of the house. The walls shifted and the door became jammed shut. She has been in the habit of sleeping in a different room each night, purportedly to ‘confuse’ the spirits as to her whereabouts. Again, this only confused her staff, when they couldn’t find her. Eventually, after a full hour of searching, she was located. The marks still exist on the door where a crowbar was employed to wedge it open. The earthquake damage to the house was extensive. The entire top three floors collapsed into the garden and were never rebuilt. We were told that the incident convinced Sarah that the ‘spirits’ were displeased with the progression of her handiwork as it appeared that she was nearing completion of the home. She promptly sealed off the front section of the house, thirty rooms in total, and they were never again used during her lifetime. Supposedly, this was to ensure that the house was perpetually ‘under construction’. To this day, they remain as they were, partially remodelled and with broken plaster and damaged walls as evidence of the quake. This episode also persuaded Sarah to select a permanent bedroom, with easy access to her séance room, and it was here that she died in her sleep, at the age of 83.

Today, the Winchester Mystery House is regarded as the “safest house in California” as far as earthquakes are concerned, as the mansion is built on ‘floating foundations’. This is a feature implemented by her builders and not of her own design. Contrary to this title, Sarah had yet another strange feature built into her home. A Victorian superstition of the time dictated that one column in every home must be installed upside down, for good luck. As usual, Sarah took this notion to the extreme. She reversed this tradition, and had every column placed upside down, bar one!

It appears that Sarah was ahead of her time for environmental design as an upstairs green house was designed to conserve water. This feature was also built into her kitchens and bathrooms. The house has many mod-cons that were seldom found at the time of its construction, including steam and forced-air heating, indoor toilets and plumbing, button controlled gas lights, a hot water shower and the three elevators, one model which is unique to the house.

Guests Not Welcome

Despite her many ‘guest rooms’, her parlours and ball rooms, obviously named for convention, Sarah never had any guests, aside from one famous gentleman who never made it past the front door. One day, US President Teddy Roosevelt made an unannounced visit to the Winchester home. A particular rifle had been named after this leader, a limited edition commemorative weapon named the ‘Theodore Roosevelt’. Appearing on the doorstep of the home, the staff member who opened the door, obviously unaccustomed to visitors, reprimanded the startled Roosevelt, for daring to try to enter through the front door! Obviously mistaken for a disruptive job applicant, Roosevelt was advised, “you’ll enter the house through the back entrance, like the rest of the servants!” Roosevelt was so highly offended that he left the grounds and never returned! In a more skeptical but less dramatic account, Roosevelt had requested a visit with Sarah but he was flatly refused. Contradicting the tour guide story, a book produced by the estate asserts that Harry Houdini once made an impromptu visit to the house. Houdini was graciously welcomed and even attended a midnight séance! However, this event took place in 1924, two years after Sarah’s death!

If we believe the stories, Sarah must have led a lonely and tortured life. Despite her painfully arthritic hands, she would often play the ballroom organ with great energy, “for the spirit guests”. Every night, the lady of the house would sit down to a lavish dinner, alone. Or so it would seem. The elaborately decorated table was always set for thirteen; Sarah, and her twelve ‘spirit’ guests. Contrary to the Friggatriskaidekaphobes, Sarah had an obsession with the number thirteen that was reflected throughout the house. This is a reoccurring theme everywhere, from the thirteen windows in most rooms to the thirteen steps for each stairwell to the thirteen drains in every sink. In the séance room, there are 13 clothes hooks for the 13 coats she used in her nightly ceremonies. Sarah was a preferred customer of the Tiffany Company in New York and the house still contains many fine examples of lead light windows. The most prized example contains hundreds of crystals and cost $15000. She was once invited to design her own leadlight window and created a piece that is a swirl of colours and stars, of course, thirteen stars.

The Secret Vault

One of the last rooms we visited was the ballroom, an elegant room that reputedly cost $9000 to build. A door in the centre of the room was locked at all times during Sarah’s lifetime and only she had the key. Upon her death, her staff eagerly seized the keys and unlocked the door. Inside, they found a vault. Inside, they found another vault, and yet another within that. After unlocking a total of five vaults, they came to the ‘treasure’. Not money, not jewellery, as they had expected, but a lock of her husband’s hair, a lock of her daughter’s hair and their obituaries. Had Sarah truly been superstitious, perhaps she so carefully stored these precious keepsakes, to hide them from those who would use them against her, in a spell, or a curse.

San Jose wasn’t always known as Silicon Valley. A tour brochure claims that, prior to the Dot Com boom, the region was previously known as the “Valley of the Heart’s Delight” as it was renowned for the Winchester orchards and local farms. The Winchester estate, in its 160 acre glory, was mostly farmland where plums, apricots, almonds and walnuts were gown, dried and sold at markets under Mrs Winchester’s own packing label. Only a few trees still exist on the grounds. The estate also contain a Firearms museum and a Products museum. The Winchester Company didn’t only produce guns, they also produced cutlery, flashlights, fishing tackle, roller skates and electric irons. They were also the country’s largest producer of hardware, including farm and garden tools.

Upon Sarah’s death, the house and contents were sold off by her remaining relative, the mansion left unfinished and unfurnished. The mansion was soon purchased by a group of investors who planned to use it as a tourist attraction. Within two years, the house was opened for self-guided tours. Apparently, Robert Ripley was one of the very first visitors to the property. Sadly, during these unsupervised visits, much of the property was damaged, vandalised or stolen.

Haunted?

But are there any ghost stories surrounding the Winchester Mystery House? It is important that I note this tour is marketed as an historical tour and not as a ghost tour. I was only informed about any ‘possible’ paranormal phenomena upon my questioning of the tour guide. While my tour guide didn’t have any stories, she had heard many stories from visitors and other guides. As always, these are the stock ghost stories; footsteps down the halls, cold spots, orbs captured in photographs, the sound of doorknobs turning and doors banging (with so many doors and windows open during the tours, why is that so strange?) and sightings of Sarah. Various books and websites repeat these same stories about the mansion, including other tales of phantom organ playing, disembodied voices and screams, strange lights, strange smells and even sightings of ectoplasm! Of course, various ‘psychics’ have toured the house and capitalised on its reputation, including Sylvia Browne, who confirmed the ‘curse’ and reported to have witnessed the spirits of both Sarah and fallen soldiers from the Civil War. Most surprising of all, is that there aren’t any reports of phantom hammering and construction. These people just don’t know how to invent a plausible ghost story!

Speculation

Should we be skeptical about the stories surrounding the Winchester Mystery House? Absolutely! We have no primary documents attesting to the stories, in fact, they are all anecdotal and usually conflicting. Sarah was extremely reclusive and didn’t leave behind any diaries or letters that revealed her beliefs. Books about the house and owner all provide indirect, second-hand information, one popular book was written by the grandson of a former gardener! Have the stories been embellished over time? After all, Sarah was the subject of much gossip and rumour during her day, and beyond. Did Sarah really visit Adam Coombs and even if she did, what took place during the sitting? Did she receive other advice that influenced her actions? Was she profoundly superstitious or was this all-consuming project just an eccentric hobby for Sarah, a distraction from her loneliness and sorrow?

Unfortunately, this is all speculation, as are most of the stories surrounding the mansion and owner. The strange, inexplicable features of the house are attributed to Sarah’s attempts to placate or confuse the ‘spirits’ who had cursed her family. But are they really “inexplicable”? A little bit of conjecture can provide potential explanations for many of the strange features. The winding ‘easy-riser’ steps designed with a pragmatic purpose, for Sarah’s mobility. Barred windows in internal rooms? Perhaps these internal rooms were once external and the bars served a valid security purpose. The chimney that stops short of the ceiling? Perhaps this was where a roof once stood. A window in the floor of a room? Perhaps this was also a roof and the window a skylight. Doors that open onto walls? More examples of rooms added on to rooms. After all, this is an extremely ad-hoc house!

It is said that when Sarah died, news of her demise spread quickly throughout the estate, to the servants and builders who immediately lay down their tools. Apparently, nails can be found throughout the mansion, half-hammered in, the work halted mid-task. However, the existing house and 6 acres of the estate necessitate constant maintenance; there are gardens to care for, rooms to paint and constant cleaning and repairs. Fact or fiction, the construction continues, and the alleged ‘quest’ lives on.

Stollznow, Karen. 2005. The Winchester Mystery House of San Jose. The Skeptic. Vol.25, No.3, pp.24-28.

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I'm Karen Stollznow ...(Cunning) Linguist,
Author, Skeptic and Investigator of the
paranormal and
pseudo-scientific.

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