WINCHESTER MANSION

To fully understand this story we must first start with Oliver Winchester, a man of business whose fortune is the base of this story. In the late 1850's He took over the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, which wasn't doing very good at the time and Oliver decided to improve the old Volcanic repeating rifle by the Help of an engineer named Benjamin Tyler Henry. The new gun was created in 1860 and named the Henry rifle, which was than improved once more 6 years later with the help of another employee Nelson King. The company became known as the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

Oliver Winchester made a great fortune with his rifle company. His new rifle was not used much in the American Civil War, but was being used by many folks after the Civil War, and many people had lost their lives due to this new weapon.
During this time Oliver Winchesters son William Wirt Winchester had fallen in love with a woman named Sarah Pardee and they had gotten married in September of 1862 in New Haven, Connecticut. A stroke of bad luck had hit the new Winchester couple when they lost their only child Annie Pardee just one month after her she was born. Fifteen years later William Wirts life was taken due to pulmonary tuberculosis.

Sarah inherited the Winchester fortune which was about $20,000,000 along with 48% of the rifle company, but as they say money can not buy happiness and Sarah Winchester became very depressed, hardly ever leaving her home. Sarah decided to go turn to mediums and psychics to help ease her pain in the hopes that she might be able to communicate with her husband William. All the mediums she had invited to her home had failed except for one from Boston named Adam Coons. This medium told Sarah that her husband was with them and that his message was that she was cursed by the spirits of people that had been killed by the Winchester rifles. Sarah had apparently lost her child and husband because these spirits where paying the family back for their deaths.

She was then instructed to sell her home and go west to build a new home for herself, but also for those spirits of those that were killed by the Winchester riffle. She was told that as long as she kept building the new house their would be a chance that the curse would be lifted, however if she was to ever stop construction she would die soon after. She traveled across the country until she got to the Santa Clara Valley in California. She purchased an 8 bedroom home and began to hire carpenters and construction workers to work on this life long project that she had been instructed to pursue without a completed design of the soon to be mansion, because it would continue to grow as long as Sarah Winchester was alive. It is said that Sarah got her plans for the home by the spirits of which it was being built for as it progressed.

According to legend, Mrs. Winchester enacted a nightly séance to help with her building plans and for protection from “bad” spirits. While she sometimes drew up simple sketches of the building ideas, there were never any blueprints….or building inspectors! In the morning, she would meet with John Hansen, her dutiful foreman, and go over new changes and additions.

During the early years of construction, this resulted in some awkward and impractical concepts such as columns being installed upside down – though some suggest this was done deliberately to confuse the evil spirits.

An extravagant maze of Victorian craftsmanship – marvelous, baffling, and eerily eccentric, to say the least. Tour guides must warn people not to stray from the group or they could be lost for hours! Countless questions come to mind as you wander through the mansion – such as, what was Mrs. Winchester thinking when she had a staircase built that descends seven steps and then rises eleven?

Some of the architectural oddities may have practical explanations. For example, the Switchback Staircase, which has seven flights with forty four steps, rises only about nine feet, since each step is just two inches high. Mrs. Winchester arthritis was quite severe in her later years, and the stairway may have been designed to accommodate her disability.

The miles of twisting hallways are made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. Mrs. Winchester traveled through her house in a roundabout fashion, supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might be following her.

This wild and fanciful description of Mrs. Winchester’s nightly prowl to the Séance Room appeared in The American Weekly in 1928, six years after her death:

“When Mrs. Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of the Indian or even of a bloodhound, to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment into another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her. Then she opened a window in that apartment and climbed out, not into the open air, but onto the top of a flight of steps that took her down one story only to meet another flight that brought her right back up to the same level again, all inside the house. This was supposed to be very discomforting to evil spirits who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps.”

A House Built For Spirits?

We may never know for sure if Mrs. Winchester built her house to accommodate the spirits, but over the years the story has come down that she believed her life was unavoidably affected by departed souls. Presumably she wanted to be friendly with the “good” spirits and avoid the “bad” spirits – and the way to be friendly with the “good” spirit, it seemed, was to build them a nice place to visit.

According to this theory, Mrs. Winchester accommodated the friendly spirits by giving them special attention. For example, it is said that there were only three mirrors in the entire house at the time of Mrs. Winchester’s death. Legend has it that spirits hate mirrors, since the sight of their reflection causes them to vanish.

This is why Mrs. Winchester’s servants and secretary reportedly used only hand mirrors or went without.

The mansion also contained a profusion of light sources, from gas jets and countless candles, to electric light bulbs. Supposedly spirits feel conspicuous and humiliated by shadows, since they cannot cast their own.

The Lore

Speculation is bound to pursue a wealthy, eccentric recluse like Mrs. Winchester. Many wild rumors circulated about her during her residence in San Jose – her house was even known locally as “The Spirit House” – and some say the rumors may have actually added to Mrs. Winchester’s isolation. But when she died peacefully in her sleep at the age of eighty-two, the curiosity of local people was unleashed.

Mrs. Winchester The Spy

Bizarre explanations of how Mrs. Winchester had lived flourished. Many long-time employees became very superstitious over the years and even believed that Mrs. Winchester could walk through solid walls and unopened doors. She did, in fact, have elaborate spying features built into the house to keep an eye on her servants. There are also stories of how she sometimes appeared noiselessly behind them to watch them work.

The Lady’s Demands

Mrs. Winchester occasionally tested the loyalty of her help. Once she told a painter to paint the walls and ceiling of an entire room with red enamel; three days later, she had him repaint the same room white. Another time, she was trying to decide which of 3 applicants to hire as a new gardener. She asked each to plant a row of cabbages upside down. The first did so with-out saying anything, and the second refused her request. The third one agreed to do so but suggested to Mrs. Winchester that cabbages were normally planted with the roots in the ground. The third gardener got the job. He was not afraid to speak up, but recognized that Mrs. Winchester was the Boss!

Mrs. Winchester And The Spirits

It has been said that Mrs. Winchester slept in a different bedroom every night, supposedly in order to confuse evil spirits. Some say that she also held special dinner parties for her spirit friends. Legend has it that she would serve her phantom guests in gold plates, offering them dishes like caviar, truffles, and pheasant stuffed with pate. On the other hand, this theory might have come from rumors about the mansion’s well-fed servants!

Paranormal Investigators

In the Winchester Mystery House™, some people have temporarily lost their eyesight, felt icy chills in spots where there were no drafts, and seen locked doorknobs turn. Researchers of the paranormal have spent the night in the house, employing their special skills to investigate these claims and dispel any wild rumors.

The Number 13

Whether or not one believes in Mrs. Winchester’s superstitions about spirits, it’s harder to dismiss occurrences of the number 13 throughout the house. Many windows have 13 panes and there are 13 bathrooms, with 13 windows in the 13th Bathroom. There are also 13 wall panels in the room prior to the 13th Bathroom, and 13 steps leading to that bathroom. The Carriage Entrance Hall floor is divided into 13 cement sections. There are even 13 hooks in the Séance Room, which supposedly held the different colored robes Mrs. Winchester wore while communing with the spirits.

It’s interesting to note that Mrs. Winchester’s will had 13 parts and was signed by her 13 times

Here are even more thirteens: 13 rails by the floor-level skylight in the South Conservatory, 13 steps on many of the stairways, 13 squares on each side of the Otis electric elevator, 13 glass cupolas on the Greenhouse, 13 holes in the sink drain covers, 13 ceiling panels in some of the rooms, and 13 gas jets on the Ballroom chandelier. (Mrs. Winchester had the thirteenth one added)

The grounds have their share of unexplained mysteries. Even the name Mrs. Winchester gave her estate, Llanada Villa, is a mystery. The words are Spanish for “house on flat land,” but no one knows what special meaning they had for Mrs. Winchester.

The number 13 occurs often on the grounds as well as in the house; for example, there are 13 cupolas in the greenhouse and 13 fan palms lining the front driveway.

Mrs. Winchester Passes Away

Mrs. Winchester suffered greatly from arthritis in her later years. She passed away in her sleep from heart failure on September 5, 1922 and was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut beside her beloved husband. She was survived by her sister and many nieces and nephews, to whom she left cash and substantial trust funds. She also left cash sums to her favorite employees and a substantial sum to the Winchester Clinic of the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center.

The Mystery Lives On

What was Mrs. Winchester’s true motivation for devoting the second half of her life to building what is now known as the Winchester Mystery House™? No one can say with complete certainty, for no one ever interviewed her and she left not a single journal. Since Mrs. Winchester’s death, hundreds of wild stories have appeared about this mysterious woman and the sprawling mansion that bears her name. It seems odd that none of her relatives or former employees ever came forward to contradict these stories, despite that fact that some of them lived more than forty years after Mrs. Winchester’s death. For some reason, did they feel threatened by talking – or did they feel the need to continue to guard Mrs. Winchester’s privacy even after her death?