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Legend has it that she did it to appease or confuse the ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles. Getting to know the house is, in a strange way, like getting to know the woman who built it—and no ghost stories are necessary to marvel at its creativity and ambition. The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester.
Never Miss A Mysterious Moment
But as Katie Dowd of SFGate points out, there is “scant proof” for this theory. Winchester could have been engaging in an eccentric brand of philanthropy, as she built her home during an economic depression, and the continuous construction project provided jobs for locals. When she died, in fact, the heiress left most of her money to charity.
Under new management, the labyrinthine mansion is giving up more of its closely guarded secrets.
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 Winchester Mystery House: California’s Original Haunted Mansion?
Since her death, little has been uncovered about Sarah Winchester and the reasoning behind her obsession with building the Winchester Mystery House. She gave no interviews, left behind no journals, and had no family willing to speak about her. After her death in September of 1922, Sarah Winchester left all of her belongings to her niece, Marion, who had served as her personal secretary later in life. However, the Winchester Mystery House was never mentioned in her will, adding to the mystery of the home. Stranger so was the fact that many of the alterations seemed pointless. Staircases would ascend several levels then end abruptly, doors would open to solid walls, and hallways would turn a corner and end in a dead-end.
Take a Free Virtual Tour of the Winchester Mystery House - Smithsonian Magazine
Take a Free Virtual Tour of the Winchester Mystery House.
Posted: Wed, 25 Mar 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Take a Free Virtual Tour of the Winchester Mystery House
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.
Inside California's beautifully bizarre Winchester Mystery House - Business Insider
Inside California's beautifully bizarre Winchester Mystery House.
Posted: Sun, 24 May 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]
I even remember that one of the windows had Sarah Winchester peering out from behind a curtain. I often wondered what it would be like to visit the real home. Almost fifty years later, I had the opportunity to do that with my daughter. Winchester hired carpenters to work around the clock, expanding the small house into a seven-story mansion.
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.
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.
At the age of 43, she was able to become the mistress of her own home for the first time in her life, Boehme said.
Most likely, she moved west to live in a drier and warmer climate due to problems with rheumatoid arthritis, an illness that plagued her all her life. Here she purchased an eight-room farmhouse and ranch in 1886, which she called Llanada Villa. This would eventually become the Winchester Mystery House. The United States has many unique roadside attractions throughout the country that focus on the strange and unusual.
Magnuson wanted to open some of these rooms to the public, but not all of the house’s long-term employees agreed. On most days, two types of tours are offered, the Guided Mansion Tour and the Walk with Spirits Tour. The Mansion Tour takes guests around 110 of the 160 rooms and provides visitors with background information on Sarah Winchester and the construction of her home. The Spirits Tour invites guests to look beyond the ordinary by experiencing a wake in the parlor of the house, taking part in a Victorian-era séance on the third floor, and ending in the dark, spooky basement of the home.
The story took the rumors about the hauntings in the house and ran with them, depicting a woman crazed by the ghosts of Winchester rifles. Filming for the movie took place at the actual Winchester Mystery House. After the house was emptied, a local investor purchased the home for a cool $135,000. Just five months after Sarah Winchester died, the Winchester Mystery House was opened to the public for tours.
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.
Due to the lack of a plan and the presence of an architect, the house was constructed haphazardly; rooms were added onto exterior walls resulting in windows overlooking other rooms. Multiple staircases would be added, all with different sized risers, giving each staircase a distorted look. "Outside in the front gardens of the mansion, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. It was what appeared to be a bushy-haired woman staring out of one of the windows on the second floor," a guest identified as N.R. But those stories do, in some way, conceal the real Sarah Winchester. Publicity-shy though she may have been, she was more anchored in the real world than the spirit one.
According to Boehme, Winchester had a passion for remodeling and building homes after she helped construct one back in Connecticut. Boehme said the remodels were nothing but a passion project for Winchester. Winchester Mystery House™ offers complimentary parking to guests. Parking is available in the front lot, and there is overflow parking in the Santana Row garages across the street.
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