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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.
Sarah Winchester
It has been a beloved piece of quirky, creepy Americana since it opened. More than 12 million slack-jawed visitors have followed a planned route through Winchester’s singular vision. Other than household staff, few saw the home’s interior during Winchester’s lifetime. She kept to herself following the deaths of her husband and infant daughter, Annie, from illness.
Winchester restored most of the damage inflicted by the earthquake.
The top three floors were ultimately removed, leaving the house with only four stories, as seen today. There was no plan – no official blueprints were drawn up, no architectural vision was created, and yet a once-unfinished house took shape on a sprawling lot in the heart of San Jose, California. Inside, staircases ascended through several levels before ending abruptly, doorways opened to blank walls, and corners rounded to dead ends.
Boehme said there's no documentation that Winchester ever suffered from the guilt those killed by a Winchester rifle.
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.
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.
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.
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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Boehme describes the room as "elegant" with embossed wallpaper that surrounds the space and elaborate furniture that fills the room. Although it's beautiful, there is a darker reason why this room is so famous. This is the room where Winchester died of heart failure in 1922, at age 82. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 damaged the Winchester mansion all the way out in San Jose. After seeing the damage, Boehme said Winchester decided to remove the top few floors because it was too dangerous.
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The staircase landing opens onto an array of finished and unfinished rooms, including the Crystal Bedroom, where pale yellow, mica-flecked wallpaper gives the walls a luminous quality. One reason this room had been off-limits for so many years is concern about what sunlight might do to the wallpaper, so at some point it may need to be sealed off again. Though the house has a reputation as a dim warren, its estimated 10,000 panes of glass reflect Winchester’s desire for natural light. At one point, an outdoor patio was enclosed, so she had a skylight installed in its floor to pull light from above into the newly shrouded room below. It’s as though she carved tunnels through the house to let light penetrate. Nearly 100 years after the house opened for tours, millions of guests have visited Sarah Winchester’s beautiful home.
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.
Boehme said it's likely that Winchester used this space as a sauna to help ease her arthritis. While some believe this staircase was meant to confuse ghosts, Boehme said Winchester actually designed the smaller steps so that she could easily get upstairs with her arthritis. The pointed spires, the wraparound porch, the shingles, and the elaborate columns are all popular features of a Queen Anne Revival, according to Boehme. We took a 65-minute tour through 110 rooms of the unique estate in the fall of 2019.
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.
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.
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