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A peculiar mansion built by the troubled heir to the Winchester gun fortune.
In 1886 an eccentric woman named Sarah Winchester traveled from New Haven, Connecticut, to San Jose, California, to start a new life. She purchased a small eight-room farmhouse and started a small renovation project that would take 36 years and $5.5 million (in the money of the time), only stopping when she passed away in 1922.
By the time she was done, the Winchester Mansion was a modern marvel with indoor plumbing, multiple elevators, a hot shower, and central heating. It had over 160 rooms and 40 bedrooms, 10,000 windows, and even 2 basements. Of course, that’s not all that’s unique about the house. Not all the 2,000 doors can be walked through—one leads to an 8-foot drop to a kitchen sink, another to a 15-foot drop into bushes in the garden below. Staircases lead straight to ceilings, expensive Tiffany stained-glass windows were installed in places where they would get no light, and there are more secret passages than Narnia. A particularly odd delight is a cabinet that, when opened, extends through 30 rooms of the house.
A House Built to Ward Off Ghostly Spirits
A massive earthquake struck the Bay Area in 1906 and toppled the top three stories of the house, damaging the other four stories along with it. Some say Sarah Winchester took this as a sign from the spirits that she was too close to completion and ordered the unfinished front half of the house to be boarded up. Though it’s open now, signs of damage from the earthquake are still clearly visible.
In response to the ongoing claims of ghostly encounters and other paranormal phenomena on the property, in the early 1990s the Winchester management had a parapsychologist and paranormal investigator named Christopher Chacon conduct a full-scale scientific assessment of the property. The month-long, round-the-clock investigation included interviewing over 300 people regarding their experiences on the property, and analyzed every aspect of the environment for any unusual phenomena. In 2018, a horror film was made about the infamous house and the spirits that live within.
Know Before You Go
A Mansion Tour, Garden Tour, and Behind the Scenes tour of the house are all available. (The Behind the Scenes tour is not available for children under nine.) There are also Flashlight Tours around Halloween and every Friday the 13th. The Winchester Antiques Products Museum and the Winchester Firearms Museum are also housed nearby. Note that although multiple news sources claimed that a new room, “Sarah’s Attic,” was found in 2016, this is not the case. “Sarah’s Attic” is a new shooting gallery in the courtyard.
Content originally created for Atlas Obscura.
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