June 17, 2009 • 19 mins
When a psychic told Sarah Winchester that the spirits of every person who died from a Winchester rifle would haunt her unless they were appeased, she built one of the world's strangest houses. Learn more with this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Kainer, joined by fellow editor Katie Lambert.
Hello Candice, Katie. I'm so glad you're here today because
(00:21):
I've got a topic that's just a little bit creepy
and I need a good friend to help guide me
through the scary parts. I think I know where you're
going with this. That's because today is the Winchester Mystery House.
It is, and what a fabulous topic. And I must
say that all of you who write to you as
your questing scary history stories and stories about ghosts, your
(00:41):
emails and messages have not gone unheard, and today they
shall be heated because we're beginning a multi part series
on the ghosts of history, and I'm thrilled to start
with the Winchester Mystery House. So tell us a little
bit about Sarah Winchester. Sarah Winchester, to whom most guides
(01:02):
at the Winchester Mystery House today referred to as Mrs
Winchester to show deference, was born Sarah Party in eighteen
thirty nine in New Haven, Connecticut, and she was vacious.
She was beautiful. Everyone wanted to be around her, and
she was pursued by many men in New Haven. And
also I should note, because this will be important later,
(01:25):
she was a very petite woman and she reached a
height of four ft ten inches. She's a tiny little
thing then a tiny little thing. But she married a
very well to do or soon well to do man
named William Word Winchester. And when I hear Winchester, because
I am a Georgia girl, I think of guns. Winchester
Arms became very famous during the time of the Civil
(01:46):
War and William Winchester bought into the company fairly early on,
and he actually perfected a type of rifle that could
be loaded and uh fired very quickly. And of course,
during the time of the Civil War here the troops
needed a gun that could do this on the battlefield,
and so the government actually put in several orders for
(02:07):
this repeating rifle, and private citizens wanted the gun to
so it really took off, and the company became known
as the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and William Winchester became
quite wealthy off of this venture. He really did, he
really really did. But as we all know, money can't
buy happiness and they actually met their share of tragedy
(02:28):
as a young couple. They had a daughter named Annie,
who was born in eighteen sixty six, but she died
just a few months later, and Sarah Winchester understandably was
heartbroken over the death of her daughter, and when her
husband died in one that was sort of the final
blow to her psyche. I think it really was. And
(02:48):
as you can well imagine, the death of an infant
would be hard enough to cope with, and then the
death of her husband, who understandably was helping her cope
with the death of her daughter, it was just the
final blow for her and she wasn't quite sure where
to turn. During the Victorian era, it wasn't unusual for
people to seek the guidance of a spiritualist, even Mary
(03:10):
Todd Lincoln, as we've mentioned before and another podcast, what
hold Seances in the White House, some of which Lincoln
reportedly attended after her son died, and she saught the
help of the spiritualist, and she got a very direct
and pointed message, and the message was that there were
spirits who were very angry at the Winchester family and
(03:31):
in fact may have taken the life of Sarah Winchester's
husband and child, and in order to appease these spirits,
she needed to go and do a little construction project
of her own. And that's putting it mildly, because what
she engaged in was a thirty eight year long, never ending,
twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, construction project.
(03:53):
And there's pretty different versions of the legend, and I
think anytime you talk about ghost story, it's understood that
people have different ways of telling the tale. And the
version I'm going with that I've seen most commonly is
that her husband's spirit led her out west as far
as she could go, leaving behind the East coast and
(04:14):
going to the west coast in San Jose, where she
encountered a farmer who had a six room farmhouse that
he was willing to sell her on many many many
acres of land, plenty of room to build, and with
her husband's guidance, she settled on this place and she
began this project that um like I said, spanned thirty
(04:36):
eight years and almost outlasted an earthquake, and really continued
up until the day that she died. And actually it
was said that Sarah believed when the construction of the
house finished, she would die that she thought once everything
was done, then she was done as well. And if
you're wondering how she paid for all of this, it
was with the Winchester money. I think rumor has it
(04:57):
that she got what twenty million, and in addition to
that amount, she had shares in the company, and her
budget boiled down to something like a thousand dollars a
day to live on. And if you want to account
for inflation, you can multiply that number roughly by twenty
to get an idea of how much that would event
live on per day. So clearly she had a lot
(05:19):
of financial means at her disposal to work with. And
again getting into the nitty gritty details of the legend,
some sources say that she was under the impression that
if she stopped building, she would die because the spirits
would get her, and other sources say she was under
the impression that if she continued to build, she could
have everlasting life, essentially as long as you build and
(05:41):
you live. But she died, obviously, irregardless of of the
building project. And you may be wondering, how on earth
could someone find enough home construction projects to last them
thirty eight years. Well, we're not talking about just building
some giant mansion on all of the as acres. Her
house is called the Mystery House for reason. And if
(06:04):
you go on a tour, you will see things like
doors that open into walls, staircases that are nearly vertical,
staircases that go straight up to the ceiling, and then
just stop. Some doors when you open them, it's an
immediate drop into the launch stories below. One closet door
opens into a drop that falls into a kitchen sink
several stories below. Um there's cupboards that have only an
(06:27):
inch of room behind them. There's skylights that look up
into skylights that look up into skylights. There's a back
porch that's completely walled in, and it's just absurd really
upon first glance to to take in this house. But
you know, to put it in perspective, to think about
this woman and the messages that she was getting, you know,
(06:50):
from the spiritualists help that she saw it, an also
from you know, her own stages of morning. Well, I
think when you are grieving over someone, people tend to
to do something like to take a physical action, and
Sarah Winchester took that to the extreme, she did get
a little bit eccentric, but she just kept building and
building and building, and sometimes would just tear down a
(07:11):
room that they had just built and start all over again.
Like there wasn't a big plan, right, there was. There
was no uniformity to what she was doing, and there
are no blueprints or records that exist today. And according
to some legends, she would tear off a she had
a butcher paper from the kitchen, and she would go
into her special science room and she would consult with
(07:33):
the spirits about what she was supposed to do the
next day. And then that morning she would go and
meet with her contractor and they would sit down together
and go over her plans. People aren't even entirely sure
which rooms she actually lived in necessarily, although there are
teeny teeny tiny stairs all throughout the house in the
places she frequented most often, because she had horrible arthritis
(07:56):
and she could only take these little, like inch long steps. Yeah,
I think they're they're two inches tall. And there's a
blog essentially that's written by a former guide who worked
at the Mystery House. I think it's called Mystery House
guide dot com, and the former guide recounts experiences working there,
and according to a guide Lingo, they're called easy risers,
(08:18):
and apparently they're a little bit difficult to walk up
and down. And I know, for me, I have really
long legs, it is harder to take a shorter step
sineas to take really big steps onto big stairs and
the big, substantial, well really normal stairs that you see
in the Winchester Mystery House or remnants from the old
farmhouse that was there. And that's an explanation that some
(08:39):
give to the staircase that leads to the ceiling, that
that's the original part of the farmhouse and she just
built stuff right on top of it. I think that's
the explanation from people who are trying to say, you know,
she's not nuts. She had there was some sort of
rhyme and reason in her head, even if it wasn't
something that makes sense to us anymore. And the contractor
(08:59):
who worked with her, I don't know his name. I
don't know that any records really exist about who well
did labor there, but it was it was told that
she was a generous woman who had lots of money
and she wanted to help employ people. She wanted people
to work for her and have a good place to
work in. And so the servants who worked there are
pretty content and what they did. But it was well
(09:21):
understood that you didn't contradict her or you didn't ask
questions why. For instance, she bought beautiful tiffany glass and
I was going to have a stained glass window put in,
but then she wanted a wall built directly behind it,
obviously defeating the purpose of stained glass and the idea
of sunlight coming streaming through. And for someone to talk
back to her and say, you know what, no, I
(09:41):
don't really see the vision you're going for, like a
good contractor might would be instantly squelch. You didn't talk
back to Mrs Winchester. She was paying you the big bucks,
and in fact she was giving people such good business
that one rail line was even diverted to run closer
to where she lived to bring in timber and other
materials for projects. I think her employees were pretty devoted
(10:03):
to There's a legend of the basement ghost at the
Winchester house, and guides and other people visiting would say
that they met this man in the basement. He had
on overalls, he had a wheelbarrow, what was he doing
in the basement, And the people would always say, no,
one's supposed to be in the basement, it's closed off.
I don't know who that is. And finally someone saw
(10:24):
a picture, a very old picture of Mrs Winchester and
her employees, and said, oh, that's him and pointed to it,
and of course it was a man who had been
dead for quite a long time who now supposedly haunts
the house that was built to keep ghosts from haunting
Mrs Winchester. And that's the really scary and creepy facet
of this ghost story is that here's a woman who
(10:45):
was working to a peace ghosts, but was also likely
very terrified of them, and so by building a labyrinth
of a home, she thought she would trick them, trick
them into not finding her, tricked them into leaving her alone.
And she thought that ghost were afraid of mirrors too,
so supposedly she only had two mirrors hanging in the
(11:07):
whole sixty room house. So it's a strange case of
wanting to appease the spirit by saying not hanging up mirrors,
and wanting to trick them. Some legends say that she
slept in a different room in the house every night
to keep the ghosts at bay. Other sources say, well, no,
that's not really true, because most of the rooms were
so small they wouldn't have been substantial enough for a
master bedroom. Well, and that may have come back to
(11:29):
haunt her pun intended during the San Jose earthquake, which
actually trapped her in what's called the Daisy Bedroom for
hours and hours and hours, and I'm not sure anyone
knew where she was, and they didn't know how to
get her out. So when you think of this eccentric,
frightened woman in the middle of an earthquake who's also
trapped in her labyrinthine house, I think you can see
(11:53):
a little bit more about Sarah Winchester's life, right, And
the reason for some of the strange things that occur
in this house could be easily explained by an elderly
woman's fear like clear glass bathroom doors. Perhaps she was
so afraid of being caught in another room she wanted
to make sure people could see through and see her
where she was. And for instance, the fact that one
(12:16):
room has four fireplaces, what room needs for fireplaces? It
was the only room in the house that could really
get hot enough to help soothe her arthritis pains. And
these are just some of the dangers that come along
with being a recluse and building a very mysterious house.
I think that even in her time as well as today,
people had trouble getting from room to room and Florida floor.
(12:38):
Before the earthquake that you mentioned, Katie, there were actually
seven stories to this house, towers, flying buttresses. It was
just a huge spectacle of Victorian access really, and after
the earthquake, she was she was convinced that the forces
were trying to tell her that something was at work.
They were really concerned she had almost finished the project.
They were out to get her. So she shut that
(12:59):
part of the house completely down, and part of it
had crumbled in the midst of the disaster, so it had,
you know, shut itself down to But she thought that
by completely closing out the ghosts, she could trap the men.
But another disadvantage to being a rec close is set
you don't get many visitors, and she missed a pretty
important visitor according to some sources, Teddy Roosevelt to be exact,
(13:22):
who supposedly wanted to pay her a call and made
it known to city officials that he would like to
visit Mrs Winchester, and she was having none of it.
He was on his grand tour of the West, and
he had heard things about this house, as many people had,
you know, contemporaries of Mrs Winchester and um. According to
one of our office colleagues, Molly Edmunds, who's been on
(13:44):
the tour not too long ago, one of the guides
told her that he came to the front door to
see her. And again, this may be the stuff of legend,
but it's fun, so I'll tell you anyway. And missus
Winchester didn't like people coming to our front door. And
apparently she she was thought to have exclaimed, who comes
to a front door? Well, you know, I guess Teddy
(14:05):
Roosevelt call them crazy. But he was turned away, and
he never got to see Mrs Winchester or her house.
And as much as people may the light and the
strangeness of the house, and as many people as may
poke fun at the strange things that this woman conceived of,
it's very poignant to think about two quotations that are
(14:27):
inscribed in a grand ballroom. And she kept no diary,
she kept no records. We have anecdotal evidence from people
who lived on the grounds or people who came into work,
but we don't really know what she was thinking. And
so uh. The guides website that I mentioned before offers
some analysis into these lines from Shakespeare. One of which
(14:49):
is from Toilets and Cressida, and it's the line, part
of a line really that says wide unclasped the tables
of their thoughts, and it comes from a part in
the play where Krista is being berated for being a
little bit coy. But in the Victorian era the play
was rewritten to reflect that she was chased and she
(15:11):
was meant to be a heroine for having that very
Victorian attribute, and this may have been a way that
Mrs Winchester conceived of herself as a chased heroine who
was doing right by her deceased husband and daughter and
was going to be rewarded eventually. And then the other
one is from Richard the Second and it says, these
same thoughts people this little world, and this comes from
(15:33):
a moment in the play where the king has been
dethroned and he shut off into his own little microcosm
of society, his own little world, and he's making it
work for him, what works for him, the things that
occupy his time in his mind, And that would have
been the same from Mrs Winchester. You know, if anyone
understood one's own little world, I think it would be
(15:53):
Sarah Winchester, right, I mean, left alone to grieve the
death of her daughter, the death of her husband, fearing
day in and day out that she was going to
be gotten by spirit who were killed by the rifle
that her husband manufactured and made his mint off of.
And people sometimes second guess the fact that she threw
so much money into this house that today would be
(16:16):
valued around five point five million, but with such a
disaster when she died that it was bought up for
only one thirty five thousand dollars. You know what was
she doing with the money? Well? Who was she to
hang on to it if it was got from a
weapon that killed people during Civil War? She didn't even
mention it. In her will. She mentioned the furniture, I think,
and said that her niece I believe, could take what
(16:39):
she wanted and sell the rest. But the house was
never even brought up at all, not at all, and
people knew it was sort of the strange house on
the block and business meant saw their opportunity to make
it into a tourist attraction. And in addition to being
a real tourist attraction, it was also pretty innovative. I mean,
it was no Bill Gate smart house, but it's supposedly
(16:59):
had one of the first water hot water heaters in
the state of California, so that was pretty cool, and
had a you know, an elevator system and all sorts
of interesting and novel ideas that she came up with
with her contractor. And so eventually, you know, evolved over
time from this strange tourist attraction that just had arrows
painted on the floor to guide people through to UM.
(17:21):
At one point it was a wax museum, and today
it's a veritable tourist attraction. It's a museum. You buy
your ticket, I think maybe around what twenty dollars is
that right? Sounds about it? It sounds about right, And
then you you walk through and you're taking on a
very detailed and guided tour and UM. Again, I keep
referring to this website because I just found it so helpful.
(17:42):
The guide was explaining that if you want a good
tour guide and a good tour guy can make or
break the tour. You need to go in the fall
of the winter because in the summertime there are so
many people who flocked to San Jose to the Mystery
House that they hire a lot of students. And Molly Edmunds,
our colleague, actually had a drama student who she said
(18:02):
was wonderful. You can imagine how much fun it would
be to have the drama kid from your high school
taking you through this creepy, haunted house. And that's the
experience she had. So when you go, no matter what
you marvel at, whether it's the stairs or the ghosts
that may be lurking around, be sure stop and really
think about the historical aspects of the house, how the
money was required to build it, what the Victorian era
(18:25):
did to influence Mrs Winchester and her ideals. And I
think you'll find that history will enrich any ghostly experience
you have. And that's our philosophy. A leis because we're,
you know, for history nerds, But that's that. If you
want to learn more about the Winchester Mystery House, you
can read why is the Winchester Mystery House? How Stairs
Leading to Nowhere? On how stuff works dot com for
(18:47):
moralns and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
works dot Com And be sure to check out the
stuff you missed in history class blog on the house
stuff works dot com home page. Do Do
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Kainer, joined by fellow editor Katie Lambert.
Hello Candice, Katie. I'm so glad you're here today because
(00:21):
I've got a topic that's just a little bit creepy
and I need a good friend to help guide me
through the scary parts. I think I know where you're
going with this. That's because today is the Winchester Mystery House.
It is, and what a fabulous topic. And I must
say that all of you who write to you as
your questing scary history stories and stories about ghosts, your
(00:41):
emails and messages have not gone unheard, and today they
shall be heated because we're beginning a multi part series
on the ghosts of history, and I'm thrilled to start
with the Winchester Mystery House. So tell us a little
bit about Sarah Winchester. Sarah Winchester, to whom most guides
(01:02):
at the Winchester Mystery House today referred to as Mrs
Winchester to show deference, was born Sarah Party in eighteen
thirty nine in New Haven, Connecticut, and she was vacious.
She was beautiful. Everyone wanted to be around her, and
she was pursued by many men in New Haven. And
also I should note, because this will be important later,
(01:25):
she was a very petite woman and she reached a
height of four ft ten inches. She's a tiny little
thing then a tiny little thing. But she married a
very well to do or soon well to do man
named William Word Winchester. And when I hear Winchester, because
I am a Georgia girl, I think of guns. Winchester
Arms became very famous during the time of the Civil
(01:46):
War and William Winchester bought into the company fairly early on,
and he actually perfected a type of rifle that could
be loaded and uh fired very quickly. And of course,
during the time of the Civil War here the troops
needed a gun that could do this on the battlefield,
and so the government actually put in several orders for
(02:07):
this repeating rifle, and private citizens wanted the gun to
so it really took off, and the company became known
as the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and William Winchester became
quite wealthy off of this venture. He really did, he
really really did. But as we all know, money can't
buy happiness and they actually met their share of tragedy
(02:28):
as a young couple. They had a daughter named Annie,
who was born in eighteen sixty six, but she died
just a few months later, and Sarah Winchester understandably was
heartbroken over the death of her daughter, and when her
husband died in one that was sort of the final
blow to her psyche. I think it really was. And
(02:48):
as you can well imagine, the death of an infant
would be hard enough to cope with, and then the
death of her husband, who understandably was helping her cope
with the death of her daughter, it was just the
final blow for her and she wasn't quite sure where
to turn. During the Victorian era, it wasn't unusual for
people to seek the guidance of a spiritualist, even Mary
(03:10):
Todd Lincoln, as we've mentioned before and another podcast, what
hold Seances in the White House, some of which Lincoln
reportedly attended after her son died, and she saught the
help of the spiritualist, and she got a very direct
and pointed message, and the message was that there were
spirits who were very angry at the Winchester family and
(03:31):
in fact may have taken the life of Sarah Winchester's
husband and child, and in order to appease these spirits,
she needed to go and do a little construction project
of her own. And that's putting it mildly, because what
she engaged in was a thirty eight year long, never ending,
twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, construction project.
(03:53):
And there's pretty different versions of the legend, and I
think anytime you talk about ghost story, it's understood that
people have different ways of telling the tale. And the
version I'm going with that I've seen most commonly is
that her husband's spirit led her out west as far
as she could go, leaving behind the East coast and
(04:14):
going to the west coast in San Jose, where she
encountered a farmer who had a six room farmhouse that
he was willing to sell her on many many many
acres of land, plenty of room to build, and with
her husband's guidance, she settled on this place and she
began this project that um like I said, spanned thirty
(04:36):
eight years and almost outlasted an earthquake, and really continued
up until the day that she died. And actually it
was said that Sarah believed when the construction of the
house finished, she would die that she thought once everything
was done, then she was done as well. And if
you're wondering how she paid for all of this, it
was with the Winchester money. I think rumor has it
(04:57):
that she got what twenty million, and in addition to
that amount, she had shares in the company, and her
budget boiled down to something like a thousand dollars a
day to live on. And if you want to account
for inflation, you can multiply that number roughly by twenty
to get an idea of how much that would event
live on per day. So clearly she had a lot
(05:19):
of financial means at her disposal to work with. And
again getting into the nitty gritty details of the legend,
some sources say that she was under the impression that
if she stopped building, she would die because the spirits
would get her, and other sources say she was under
the impression that if she continued to build, she could
have everlasting life, essentially as long as you build and
(05:41):
you live. But she died, obviously, irregardless of of the
building project. And you may be wondering, how on earth
could someone find enough home construction projects to last them
thirty eight years. Well, we're not talking about just building
some giant mansion on all of the as acres. Her
house is called the Mystery House for reason. And if
(06:04):
you go on a tour, you will see things like
doors that open into walls, staircases that are nearly vertical,
staircases that go straight up to the ceiling, and then
just stop. Some doors when you open them, it's an
immediate drop into the launch stories below. One closet door
opens into a drop that falls into a kitchen sink
several stories below. Um there's cupboards that have only an
(06:27):
inch of room behind them. There's skylights that look up
into skylights that look up into skylights. There's a back
porch that's completely walled in, and it's just absurd really
upon first glance to to take in this house. But
you know, to put it in perspective, to think about
this woman and the messages that she was getting, you know,
(06:50):
from the spiritualists help that she saw it, an also
from you know, her own stages of morning. Well, I
think when you are grieving over someone, people tend to
to do something like to take a physical action, and
Sarah Winchester took that to the extreme, she did get
a little bit eccentric, but she just kept building and
building and building, and sometimes would just tear down a
(07:11):
room that they had just built and start all over again.
Like there wasn't a big plan, right, there was. There
was no uniformity to what she was doing, and there
are no blueprints or records that exist today. And according
to some legends, she would tear off a she had
a butcher paper from the kitchen, and she would go
into her special science room and she would consult with
(07:33):
the spirits about what she was supposed to do the
next day. And then that morning she would go and
meet with her contractor and they would sit down together
and go over her plans. People aren't even entirely sure
which rooms she actually lived in necessarily, although there are
teeny teeny tiny stairs all throughout the house in the
places she frequented most often, because she had horrible arthritis
(07:56):
and she could only take these little, like inch long steps. Yeah,
I think they're they're two inches tall. And there's a
blog essentially that's written by a former guide who worked
at the Mystery House. I think it's called Mystery House
guide dot com, and the former guide recounts experiences working there,
and according to a guide Lingo, they're called easy risers,
(08:18):
and apparently they're a little bit difficult to walk up
and down. And I know, for me, I have really
long legs, it is harder to take a shorter step
sineas to take really big steps onto big stairs and
the big, substantial, well really normal stairs that you see
in the Winchester Mystery House or remnants from the old
farmhouse that was there. And that's an explanation that some
(08:39):
give to the staircase that leads to the ceiling, that
that's the original part of the farmhouse and she just
built stuff right on top of it. I think that's
the explanation from people who are trying to say, you know,
she's not nuts. She had there was some sort of
rhyme and reason in her head, even if it wasn't
something that makes sense to us anymore. And the contractor
(08:59):
who worked with her, I don't know his name. I
don't know that any records really exist about who well
did labor there, but it was it was told that
she was a generous woman who had lots of money
and she wanted to help employ people. She wanted people
to work for her and have a good place to
work in. And so the servants who worked there are
pretty content and what they did. But it was well
(09:21):
understood that you didn't contradict her or you didn't ask
questions why. For instance, she bought beautiful tiffany glass and
I was going to have a stained glass window put in,
but then she wanted a wall built directly behind it,
obviously defeating the purpose of stained glass and the idea
of sunlight coming streaming through. And for someone to talk
back to her and say, you know what, no, I
(09:41):
don't really see the vision you're going for, like a
good contractor might would be instantly squelch. You didn't talk
back to Mrs Winchester. She was paying you the big bucks,
and in fact she was giving people such good business
that one rail line was even diverted to run closer
to where she lived to bring in timber and other
materials for projects. I think her employees were pretty devoted
(10:03):
to There's a legend of the basement ghost at the
Winchester house, and guides and other people visiting would say
that they met this man in the basement. He had
on overalls, he had a wheelbarrow, what was he doing
in the basement, And the people would always say, no,
one's supposed to be in the basement, it's closed off.
I don't know who that is. And finally someone saw
(10:24):
a picture, a very old picture of Mrs Winchester and
her employees, and said, oh, that's him and pointed to it,
and of course it was a man who had been
dead for quite a long time who now supposedly haunts
the house that was built to keep ghosts from haunting
Mrs Winchester. And that's the really scary and creepy facet
of this ghost story is that here's a woman who
(10:45):
was working to a peace ghosts, but was also likely
very terrified of them, and so by building a labyrinth
of a home, she thought she would trick them, trick
them into not finding her, tricked them into leaving her alone.
And she thought that ghost were afraid of mirrors too,
so supposedly she only had two mirrors hanging in the
(11:07):
whole sixty room house. So it's a strange case of
wanting to appease the spirit by saying not hanging up mirrors,
and wanting to trick them. Some legends say that she
slept in a different room in the house every night
to keep the ghosts at bay. Other sources say, well, no,
that's not really true, because most of the rooms were
so small they wouldn't have been substantial enough for a
master bedroom. Well, and that may have come back to
(11:29):
haunt her pun intended during the San Jose earthquake, which
actually trapped her in what's called the Daisy Bedroom for
hours and hours and hours, and I'm not sure anyone
knew where she was, and they didn't know how to
get her out. So when you think of this eccentric,
frightened woman in the middle of an earthquake who's also
trapped in her labyrinthine house, I think you can see
(11:53):
a little bit more about Sarah Winchester's life, right, And
the reason for some of the strange things that occur
in this house could be easily explained by an elderly
woman's fear like clear glass bathroom doors. Perhaps she was
so afraid of being caught in another room she wanted
to make sure people could see through and see her
where she was. And for instance, the fact that one
(12:16):
room has four fireplaces, what room needs for fireplaces? It
was the only room in the house that could really
get hot enough to help soothe her arthritis pains. And
these are just some of the dangers that come along
with being a recluse and building a very mysterious house.
I think that even in her time as well as today,
people had trouble getting from room to room and Florida floor.
(12:38):
Before the earthquake that you mentioned, Katie, there were actually
seven stories to this house, towers, flying buttresses. It was
just a huge spectacle of Victorian access really, and after
the earthquake, she was she was convinced that the forces
were trying to tell her that something was at work.
They were really concerned she had almost finished the project.
They were out to get her. So she shut that
(12:59):
part of the house completely down, and part of it
had crumbled in the midst of the disaster, so it had,
you know, shut itself down to But she thought that
by completely closing out the ghosts, she could trap the men.
But another disadvantage to being a rec close is set
you don't get many visitors, and she missed a pretty
important visitor according to some sources, Teddy Roosevelt to be exact,
(13:22):
who supposedly wanted to pay her a call and made
it known to city officials that he would like to
visit Mrs Winchester, and she was having none of it.
He was on his grand tour of the West, and
he had heard things about this house, as many people had,
you know, contemporaries of Mrs Winchester and um. According to
one of our office colleagues, Molly Edmunds, who's been on
(13:44):
the tour not too long ago, one of the guides
told her that he came to the front door to
see her. And again, this may be the stuff of legend,
but it's fun, so I'll tell you anyway. And missus
Winchester didn't like people coming to our front door. And
apparently she she was thought to have exclaimed, who comes
to a front door? Well, you know, I guess Teddy
(14:05):
Roosevelt call them crazy. But he was turned away, and
he never got to see Mrs Winchester or her house.
And as much as people may the light and the
strangeness of the house, and as many people as may
poke fun at the strange things that this woman conceived of,
it's very poignant to think about two quotations that are
(14:27):
inscribed in a grand ballroom. And she kept no diary,
she kept no records. We have anecdotal evidence from people
who lived on the grounds or people who came into work,
but we don't really know what she was thinking. And
so uh. The guides website that I mentioned before offers
some analysis into these lines from Shakespeare. One of which
(14:49):
is from Toilets and Cressida, and it's the line, part
of a line really that says wide unclasped the tables
of their thoughts, and it comes from a part in
the play where Krista is being berated for being a
little bit coy. But in the Victorian era the play
was rewritten to reflect that she was chased and she
(15:11):
was meant to be a heroine for having that very
Victorian attribute, and this may have been a way that
Mrs Winchester conceived of herself as a chased heroine who
was doing right by her deceased husband and daughter and
was going to be rewarded eventually. And then the other
one is from Richard the Second and it says, these
same thoughts people this little world, and this comes from
(15:33):
a moment in the play where the king has been
dethroned and he shut off into his own little microcosm
of society, his own little world, and he's making it
work for him, what works for him, the things that
occupy his time in his mind, And that would have
been the same from Mrs Winchester. You know, if anyone
understood one's own little world, I think it would be
(15:53):
Sarah Winchester, right, I mean, left alone to grieve the
death of her daughter, the death of her husband, fearing
day in and day out that she was going to
be gotten by spirit who were killed by the rifle
that her husband manufactured and made his mint off of.
And people sometimes second guess the fact that she threw
so much money into this house that today would be
(16:16):
valued around five point five million, but with such a
disaster when she died that it was bought up for
only one thirty five thousand dollars. You know what was
she doing with the money? Well? Who was she to
hang on to it if it was got from a
weapon that killed people during Civil War? She didn't even
mention it. In her will. She mentioned the furniture, I think,
and said that her niece I believe, could take what
(16:39):
she wanted and sell the rest. But the house was
never even brought up at all, not at all, and
people knew it was sort of the strange house on
the block and business meant saw their opportunity to make
it into a tourist attraction. And in addition to being
a real tourist attraction, it was also pretty innovative. I mean,
it was no Bill Gate smart house, but it's supposedly
(16:59):
had one of the first water hot water heaters in
the state of California, so that was pretty cool, and
had a you know, an elevator system and all sorts
of interesting and novel ideas that she came up with
with her contractor. And so eventually, you know, evolved over
time from this strange tourist attraction that just had arrows
painted on the floor to guide people through to UM.
(17:21):
At one point it was a wax museum, and today
it's a veritable tourist attraction. It's a museum. You buy
your ticket, I think maybe around what twenty dollars is
that right? Sounds about it? It sounds about right, And
then you you walk through and you're taking on a
very detailed and guided tour and UM. Again, I keep
referring to this website because I just found it so helpful.
(17:42):
The guide was explaining that if you want a good
tour guide and a good tour guy can make or
break the tour. You need to go in the fall
of the winter because in the summertime there are so
many people who flocked to San Jose to the Mystery
House that they hire a lot of students. And Molly Edmunds,
our colleague, actually had a drama student who she said
(18:02):
was wonderful. You can imagine how much fun it would
be to have the drama kid from your high school
taking you through this creepy, haunted house. And that's the
experience she had. So when you go, no matter what
you marvel at, whether it's the stairs or the ghosts
that may be lurking around, be sure stop and really
think about the historical aspects of the house, how the
money was required to build it, what the Victorian era
(18:25):
did to influence Mrs Winchester and her ideals. And I
think you'll find that history will enrich any ghostly experience
you have. And that's our philosophy. A leis because we're,
you know, for history nerds, But that's that. If you
want to learn more about the Winchester Mystery House, you
can read why is the Winchester Mystery House? How Stairs
Leading to Nowhere? On how stuff works dot com for
(18:47):
moralns and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
works dot Com And be sure to check out the
stuff you missed in history class blog on the house
stuff works dot com home page. Do Do
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Tracy Wilson
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