Winchester Mystery House

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The Winchester Mystery House is a well-known California mansion that was under construction continuously for 38 years and is reputed to be haunted. It once was the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester, but is now a tourist attraction. Under Sarah Winchester's guidance, construction on the house continued 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, until her death 38 years later on September 5, 1922 ^[1]. The cost for such constant building has been estimated at about US $5.5 million.

View of the mansion from the southeast

The mansion is renowned for its size and lack of a master building plan. According to popular belief, Sarah Winchester thought the house was haunted by the ghosts of individuals killed by Winchester rifles, and that only continuous construction would appease them. It is located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, California.

1 Inspiration
2 The house today
3 Depictions in popular culture
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Inspiration

Deeply saddened by the deaths of her daughter and husband, and seeking solace, Sarah Winchester consulted a medium on the advice of a friend. According to popular history, the medium, who has become known colloquially as the "Boston Medium", told Winchester that there was a curse upon the Winchester family because the guns they made had taken so many lives. She told Winchester that "thousands of persons have died because of it and their spirits are now seeking vengeance."

Although this is disputed, many believe the Boston Medium told her she needed to leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must "build a home for yourself and for the spirits who have fallen from this terrible weapon, too. You can never stop building the house. If you continue building, you will live. Stop and you will die." Whether this tale is true or not, Winchester did move west, settling in California. Some believe Winchester followed the medium's directions to distract the spirits she believed were hunting her, and commenced construction on her new home. Urban legend states that Sarah slept in a different room each night for some time. However, this is not true. She had two main bedrooms-- the daisy bedroom at the front of the house where she slept prior to the 1906 earthquake (and, was subsequently trapped in when the chimney collapsed), and the bedroom where she died. The second bedroom is featured on the tour, and is one of the few fully-furnished rooms in the estate, though none of the furniture is authentic.

Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20 million upon her husband's death. She also received nearly 50 percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, none of which was taxable until 1913. This amount is roughly equivalent to $21,000 a day in 2006 dollars. All of this gave her a tremendous pool of wealth from which to draw to fund construction on the mansion.

[edit] The house today

Prior to the 1906 earthquake, the house had been built up to seven stories tall, but today the highest point is the fourth floor. The house is predominantly made of redwood frame construction, with a floating foundation that is believed to have saved the estate from total collapse in both the 1906 earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. There are 160 rooms, including 40 bedrooms and two ballrooms. The house also has 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two basements and three elevators. Winchester's property was some 162 acres (650,000 m²) at one time, but now the estate is just 4.5 acres (24,000 m²) — the minimum necessary to contain the house and nearby outbuildings. It has gold and silver chandeliers and inlaid parquet floors and trim. There are doors and stairways that lead nowhere and a vast array of colors and materials. Before the availability of elevators, special "easy riser" stairways were installed to allow Winchester access to every part of the mansion, despite her severe arthritis. Roughly 20,000 gallons (76,000 litres) of paint are required to paint the house. Due to the sheer size of the house, by the time every section of the house is painted, the workers must start repainting again.

The house also has many conveniences that were rarely found at the time of its construction, including steam and forced-air heating, modern indoor toilets and plumbing, push-button gas lights, hot shower from indoor plumbing and even three elevators, including one with the only horizontal hydraulic elevator piston in the United States.

The house retains unique touches that reflect Winchester's beliefs and her reported preoccupation with warding off malevolent spirits. The number thirteen and spider web motifs, which she considered to be lucky, reappear around the house. For example, an expensive imported chandelier that originally had 12 candle-holders was altered to accommodate 13 candles, wall clothes hooks are in multiples of 13, and a spider web-patterned Tiffany window contains 13 colored stones. In tribute, the house's current groundskeepers have created a topiary tree shaped like the number 13.

Today, several different tours of the house are available, including flashlight tours at night on dates around Halloween and each Friday the 13th.

[edit] Depictions in popular culture

In the 1950s the house became well known throughout the United States due to multiple presentations on the television show You Asked For It.

Issue #45 of Alan Moore's run on the classic Vertigo comic series Swamp Thing, titled Ghost Dance, featured a haunted house clearly based on the Winchester House, both in its history and its construction. The house is described as covering six acres, having 160 rooms, 13 bathrooms, 13 fireplaces, and 47 chimneys.

Stephen King's Rose Red story features a house with a history similar to that of the Winchester Mystery House.

Tim Powers' novel Earthquake Weather incorporates the legends of the Winchester House and suggests that Sarah Winchester built the structure as a deliberate effort to capture and channel ghosts as a "mask" to protect her from detection by otherworldly forces.

In one story arc of the manga and anime series Ghost Hunt, the setting is a mansion in Japan similar in construction to the Winchester House; additionally, the actual Winchester House is referenced by several characters during the story arc.

One chapter of Hirohiki Araki's manga The Lives of Eccentrics covers the construction of the Winchester mansion.

The xxxHolic anime film A Midsummer's Night Dream takes place in a dimension-bending haunted house with an interior design very similar to the Winchester mansion.