The Winchester Mystery House has long been one of my favorite spooky topics. Though I have not yet had the good fortune of seeing this location in person, it is high on my list of spooky/haunted places I want to visit. And if you are for some reason not yet familiar with the Winchester Mystery House, get ready to add it to your list, too, because this is a really interesting story.
Even if you don’t know the full story, you may have already heard the name of the Winchester Mystery House—or at the least the name Winchester (no, in this case we are not talking about the impossibly attractive classic rock loving brothers traversing the country fighting demons and other supernatural forces. Sorry). The Winchester Mystery House has been featured on several ghost hunting TV shows, such as Ghost Adventures, and was also made into a movie starring Helen Mirren and Jason Clarke which was released earlier this year. Do I recommend that movie? So glad you asked. No, I don’t. While it has its decent moments and I enjoyed some of the allusions to Victorian culture and customs, overall, it was a pretty big letdown and I didn’t feel it did justice to the Winchester Mystery House’s legacy. Plus, the ending seemed like a cobbled together mish-mash of ideas that the filmmakers scrambled to create just to tack something onto the end of the film and ratchet up the drama level unnecessarily.
The real Winchester Mystery House is spoopy enough on its own that it doesn’t need the additional fanfare of overblown movie magic. The enormous mansion was once owned and lived in by Sarah Winchester, the heiress to the enormous fortune accrued by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, AKA the manufacturers of Winchester rifles.
When I say this woman was an heiress to an enormous fortune, I mean enormous. Sarah Winchester’s husband died in 1881, leaving her with what would, in modern times, be about $521 million dollars, plus fifty percent ownership of the company. As a result, her income was about $1000 a day—and if that seems like a lot, that was $1000 per day in 1881. That’s the equivalent of $25,000 a day now.
So what did Sarah Winchester do with her $25,000 a day income? She paid several construction crews to work around the clock, constantly building, rebuilding, and adding onto her giant seven story mansion in San Jose, California. But she didn’t have them just building normal hallways and rooms in a blind attempt to make the house bigger and bigger. She built in a fashion that seemed totally random—hallways that led to nothing, staircases that stopped at a solid ceiling, doorways that opened to absolutely nothing, or rooms with windows that overlooked other parts of the house. It seemed like it didn’t make any sense at all.
But to Sarah Winchester, it did. You see, Mrs. Winchester believed she was constantly building in order to satisfy ghosts. And not just any ghosts—the ghosts of the people who had been killed by Winchester rifles. After Sarah Winchester’s husband and young daughter both died, she visited a psychic medium who told her she had to move to California and build this mansion for the spirits. She took this very much to heart, and continued to build the mansion until the day she died.
Sarah Winchester herself is shrouded in a bit of mystery, and no one can confirm for sure what her ultimate intentions were. During the decades Mrs. Winchester was alive and actively working on the mansion, seances, spiritualism, and finding ways to communicate with the dead were all things which were becoming more and more popular and commonplace (see heresee here to find out more about how Ouija boards rose to popularity during this time). All that we know for sure is that Sarah Winchester definitely took quite an interest in spiritualism. Some say Sarah Winchester was continuously building the house according to the plans which the ghosts were conveying to her during her seances (this is the version of the story portrayed by the aforementioned movie Winchester). Some believe she continued building because she was attempting to outrun the ghosts, and that her questionable architectural design skills existed as they were so that she could confuse them—doors leading to nothing and staircases that end abruptly can be enough to throw anyone off. But whatever the exact reason for building was, most agree that Mrs. Winchester was doing it for or because of the ghosts that she believed she was communicating with on a regular basis.
Sarah Winchester died on September 5th, 1922—at which point the endless construction on the mansion immediately ceased—but the supernatural forces she believed existed in her mansion lived on. Both people who work at the Winchester house and people who visit it have claimed to hear strange noises, see things move, experiencing doors slamming, and even witness apparitions. Some people even claim to have seen the spirit of Sarah Winchester herself. Of course, it wouldn’t be surprising that she’s still hanging around the spoopy mansion she worked so hard on, and which she supposedly built to serve as a shelter for ghosts.
Most believe that the spirits are still very active and well at the Winchester mansion, and a few even believe that Sarah Winchester’s seances and building for the dead have turned the mansion into a portal of some sort—a veritable hotbed of paranormal activity.
Granted, there are those who believe that Sarah Winchester was just a very depressed woman struggling to process the death of her family and that it had nothing to do with the ghosts of those who had been killed by her family’s rifles chasing her down.
You can still visit and find out for yourself what you think is hanging around this mysterious mansion. The Winchester Mystery House is open daily for tours where you can check out 110 out of the 160 spoopy rooms that Mrs. Winchester had built while she was alive. There are also seasonal tours and events, and you can even book special events at the house, such as weddings. Nothing like getting married in a spoopy mansion full of ghosts who are angry about being shot to death, right?
Of course, nowadays, you’re not allowed to take your own pictures inside the Winchester house because Lionsgate bought the photography rights when they made the movie. I mean I’m not saying movie studios ruin everything, but I’m also not saying they don’t ruin things.
So, what do you all think? Was Sarah Winchester really trying to outrun the ghosts? Or just the ghosts of her pasts? Had you heard about the Winchester Mystery House before this? Is it somewhere you’d ever want to visit! Let me know in the comments! You know I’d love to talk. <3
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