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In honor of her paternal grandmother, Sarah Winchester, often known as Sallie, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1839.
In 1862, she wed William Wirt Winchester. Annie Pardee Winchester was Winchester's daughter, born in 1866. She lived a month after being diagnosed with marasmus and did not flourish. The husband, father-in-law, and mother of Winchester passed away in the fall of 1880 and the spring of 1881. Her husband left her with a sizable inheritance.
Mary Converse, her elder sister, passed away in 1884. Her doctor advised that she move to a warmer, dryer place since her rheumatoid arthritis started to flare up about this time. At forty-six, Winchester left New Haven, Connecticut, and relocated to California in 1885.
In her book Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune, Mary Jo Ignoffo suggests that among the possible reasons behind Winchester's decision to relocate were her doctor's advice, her fond recollections of visiting San Francisco with her husband in the 1870s, and advertisements touting the state's favorable climate and health advantages.
The three sisters that Winchester still had invited to accompany her to California accepted her invitation. In 1886, Winchester Repeating Arms Company agent in San Francisco Edward "Ned" Rambo gave Winchester a tour of the Santa Clara Valley in search of a place to call home. He took her to a 45-acre ranch in San Jose that was up for sale.
She bought the land from John Hamm, which comprised an eight-room, two-story farmhouse. She called her new house Llanada Villa since the land reminded her of Llanada Alavesa in the Basque region. Winchester welcomed her niece Marion Merriman, also known as Daisy, who was about twenty-one years old, into her home in 1890.
Merriman took on the administrative assistant role for Winchester, handling banking and commercial communications. Together, they participated in philanthropic events and paid dues to the Red Cross and Associated Charities. Winchester covered the cost of Daisy's marriage to Frederick Marriott III in 1903.
Winchester bought several houses and other assets in Atherton that same year. Daisy and her new husband were given the option to reside in one of the houses, which they took. After that, Winchester bought the couple a house nearer to the train station so Fredrick could get to work.
Instead of erecting a house, Winchester bought a houseboat, or ark as they were called at the time, in 1904 after purchasing a sizable plot of land north of Coyote Point, close to the hamlet of Burlingame. At the age of 83, Winchester passed away on September 5, 1922.
While constructing a house on Prospect Hill in New Haven, Winchester and her spouse had grown interested in interior and architectural design. Winchester recruited at least two architects with plans to extend the farmhouse, but she decided to handle the planning herself and fired them.
She oversaw the work, carefully planned each room, and consulted with the carpenters she employed. She drew inspiration for the house from the then-common world's fairs. Although the house was comparable in size to other houses constructed at the time, Colin Dickey writes in his book Ghostland: an American History in Haunted Places that it was unusual for a woman to oversee a project of this nature and that she may have been an architectural pioneer of her day.
The design is a labyrinth since she was known to reconstruct and stop work if the progress did not satisfy her. Sixteen times a seven-story tower was demolished and rebuilt, according to an 1897 San Jose News article. Her extensions resulted in walled-off outside windows and doors that were left in place when the house became larger.
Up to five levels were built to various sections of the house. With hints of Gothic and Romanesque elements, the design was mainly Victorian. Wood carvings adorned the ballroom's ceiling and walls. The ballroom floor had an elaborate design made of woods like mahogany, teak, and maple.
Shakespeare lines framed two windows that overlooked a big brick fireplace. The bedrooms on the second level each had sewing rooms and sitting rooms attached. The wall coverings were called Lincrusta wall coverings because they looked like metal or leather. There were false finishes, stencils, and moldings on the ceilings.
There were paintings from France, Asian furnishings, Austrian art glass, and German chandeliers. For calling attendants, a popular fixture of large homes during this era was an annunciator, an early type of intercom. Water was supplied to the outdoor flowers through pipes in an interior garden with sloped floors that collected excess water and trapped doorways.
For electricity and a water pump, a generator was erected. A ten-foot stair with forty-four steps was constructed because of Winchester's health problems and four feet, ten-inch height. The windows are unique because of their sharp bevels, asymmetrical form, and pastel colors.
A prominent design at the time, the windows on the top floors had a spider-web tracery. Shakespearean quotations from Troilus and Cressida and Richard II can be seen in the windows to the right and left of the brick fireplace.
Tour guides and newspapers have claimed for years that Tiffany & Co. made the windows, even though the business hardly ever used beveled glass. Jim Wolf, an architectural historian, believes that the windows at Craigdarroch Castle in British Columbia, Canada, are likewise of this style, and thus came from the same manufacturer.
Wolf concluded that the most likely craftsman of the windows was glass artist, John Mallon of Alexander Dunsmuir's business, the Pacific American Decorative Company. This notion was verified when, in the wall of one of the dining rooms during restoration, an envelope with the seal of Dunsmuir's company and a handwritten message appearing to be written by Winchester was found. The envelope was postmarked July 1894.
Numerous art glass windows that were acquired were kept in a storage room since they were never installed. Because Winchester became weary easily, she would frequently take months-long pauses from construction to relax. It significantly slowed down development and refutes reports from publications and tour guides that she had the mansion built nonstop for 38 years until she died in 1922.
About 500 rooms made up the house when it was at its largest. According to Bruce Spoon, a San Jose State College student who chose to do a master's thesis on Winchester in 1951, she built her palatial mansion to both express her creative vision and to keep laborers employed. After speaking with those who knew her and reading stories from newspapers and magazines, he came to this conclusion.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake caused significant damage to the Llanada Villa. There is no proof that Winchester was in the San Jose house, despite the rumors that she was confined there. After the earthquake, she primarily stayed at her Atherton house, though she had multiple properties throughout California.
Most of the chimneys fell, as did the seven-story tower. Along with the third and fourth story expansions, one full wing was destroyed. Following the earthquake, Winchester had the debris removed but minimal additional work was done to the property.
Where balconies had formerly stood, there were now empty doors, pipes sticking out of window boxes, and staircases that had once gone to higher stories that ended abruptly. Winchester's health began to deteriorate after 1910, so he stopped working on the San Jose house save for sporadic maintenance tasks and the 1916 addition of an elevator.
She was spending all of her time on money matters and accumulating an investment portfolio at this point. It is said by Mary Jo Ignoffo, "She was far more successful constructing an investment portfolio than a mansion." The mansion featured 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens when Winchester passed away in 1922.
Nine months after Winchester's death in 1922, the mansion was turned into a tourist destination. The house was deemed to have no monetary value due to its state of decay. After being bought by a consortium of investors, the mansion was leased to John and Mayme Brown, who made it into a tourist destination. In 1931, they went on to buy the house.
After Winchester's passing, the house underwent numerous room additions and removals. Mayme Brown was the first tour guide at the residence. When former neighbors, friends, and Winchester employees learned about superstitious allegations made about the mansion and Winchester, they became alarmed and dissatisfied that the Browns were profiting from lies.
They said of Winchester that he was more business-savvy and level-headed than other guys. Harry Houdini is said to have been captivated by the house's odd layout and architectural surprises during his brief visit in 1924, but he was unable to conduct a thorough inspection due to more urgent obligations.
Some reports claim that Houdini advised tour operators to use the term "Winchester mystery house" to advertise the property. The mansion was dilapidated when former Disneyland and Frontier Village employee Keith Kittle took over as general manager in 1973.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he created a museum dedicated to Winchester rifles and had the house refurbished. In addition to starting an advertising campaign with big billboards beside the highways, he applied for the designation of historical landmark.
The billboards depict a house that appears to be in shadow, suggesting that a ghost encounter may have occurred. As he played off the history and superstition that were already in the air, attendance grew. Until 1996, Kittle served as general manager.
As of September 2022, Winchester Mystery House, LLC—a private enterprise that stands in for the Brown family—owns and runs the mansion. Author of Captive of the Labyrinth, Mary Jo Ignoffo, stated that tour guides must adhere to a script that highlights falsehoods and misrepresentations.
One guide bemoaned, "I feel so torn because I have to tell people lies!" to Ignoffo. My heart bleeds a little for Sarah every time I visit the house and have to bring up 13s and other "kooky" subjects. Every time I hear a guest utter anything like, "What a nutcase," I have to bite my tongue.
Over time, several rumors, exaggerations, and myths have added to the legend surrounding Winchester. Popular writers have either created or exaggerated facts about the home and its owner. Tourist brochures available at the Winchester Mystery House purport to show that Winchester inherited up to $20 million and made $1,000 a day in royalties.
According to Ignoffo, her husband's fortune was valued in 1881 at $362,330, or $10,987,345 today. However, this figure included over $300,000 in stock that Winchester would not get until her mother-in-law passed away, which was not until 1898. She acquired 777 shares of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, valued at $77,700 after her husband's shares were added.
The company paid $7,770 in average dividends yearly from 1880 to 1885. Legends surrounding her choice to relocate from the East Coast to California are believed to have started with author Susy Smith's 1967 book Prominent American Ghosts.
According to Smith's account, Winchester went to see a Boston medium called Adam Coons, who informed her that the ghosts of those slain by Winchester rifles were haunting her and her family, that she had to build a mansion for them, and that she would never be able to finish the project.
Since then, brochures and publications have consistently stated that Winchester met with a medium. Ignoffo claims that although it is possible that Winchester met with a psychic medium—as was customary for women in her position at the time—there is no proof that she did.
Scholar Emily Mace and others have searched through editions of the spiritualist publication Banner of Light and the Boston city directories, which featured local spiritualists, but they were unable to locate any mention of Adam Coons.
Winchester first appeared in newspapers in about 1895. These local papers carried pieces rife with conjecture regarding Winchester and the ongoing building of her house in San Jose.
Despite the reality that wealthy people typically build large, elaborate mansions, her lack of social interaction with neighbors and the knowledge that her income came from the weapons industry contributed to a superstitious narrative.
The newspapers said that Winchester was afraid she would suffer bad luck if the construction stopped. This was the reason why the construction continued. Eventually, rumors circulated that she thought she would perish if building ceased.
The elegant home was reportedly ready for occupancy ten years ago, but upgrades and additions are being undertaken regularly since the owner feels she would pass away before the mansion is finished. Due to this superstition, a complex network of domes, turrets, cupolas, and towers encompassing enough land for a castle have been built.
When the Winchester mansion was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) falsely reported that the construction took 38 years and reaffirmed Winchester's belief that she had to keep building or else she would not survive.
Additionally, according to county records, the acquisition was not made until 1886, but HABS mistakenly reported the date of purchase as 1884. A few essays were published that refuted the superstitious viewpoint.
In one, an anonymous acquaintance dismissed these superstitious charges, calling them all nonsense and asserting that Winchester was a very reasonable woman. She should be allowed to construct a castle on her property close to Campbell if she so desires, without having to justify her actions with baseless beliefs.
We might as well erect the bars if wealthy residents of Santa Clara are to be made fun of for their extravagant spending. After a while, the woman might decide she doesn't want a nail driven because she's afraid someone would write a cock-and-bull article for a newspaper.
Winchester resided at the Atherton residence throughout 1915, but her family spent nearly a year in San Jose to attend the nine-month-long Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. During this period, no building took place, and the workforce took a week off to visit the fair.
According to Ignoffo, there is no proof that Winchester felt pressured to continue with her construction project and would have rather concentrated on estate planning. Since Winchester died in the mid-1890s, there has been a growing body of work supporting the notion that her sanity was doubtful and that she constructed her bizarre, maze-like home to confound and ward off spirits.
Winchester's spirituality and mental state are validated by the doors and windows that lead nowhere, the remarkably short steps, the stairs that terminate in the ceiling, the inner barred windows, and the trap doors in the floor. Paranormal investigators Nickell and Ignoffo claim that there are straightforward explanations for these peculiarities in homes.
The windows that were barred were once outside windows that were closed off when the house's expansions expanded. The 1906 earthquake caused significant damage to the house, including the doors and windows that opened to nothing. Winchester's health was deteriorating, therefore the little steps were constructed.
A greenhouse chamber with built-in trap doors allowed excess water to drain off and be piped to an outdoor garden. Winchester decided not to reconstruct the house following the earthquake. The tower bell functioned as both a fire alarm on the property and a means of summoning laborers.
Joe Nickell claims that later on, there were wild allegations that it was used to "summon spirits". Joe Nickell says that Winchester's habit of playing the pump organ in the Grand Ballroom when she couldn't sleep explains reports that neighbors heard "ghostly music" emanating from the mansion.
Joe Nickell says there is no evidence to support the outlandish stories that Winchester hosted sumptuous dinner parties for the spirits in her home, complete with gold plates kept in a safe. When the safe was opened after her passing, according to Nickell, all that was discovered were sentimental items and a lock of her infant's hair rather than gold plates.
When the twentieth century began, the most widely held misconception about Winchester's home construction was that she was deeply ashamed of all the fatalities brought about by Winchester guns and of having inherited such a large sum of money from the armaments firm.
Since the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was regarded as successful in the 1800s and weapons were thought to be necessary for survival, Ignoffo argues that it is doubtful that Winchester was guilty in any way. According to Ignoffo and paranormal investigator Joe Nickell, Winchester grew more solitary and reclusive as she grew older, especially after 1900 as her health problems—which included arthritis, missing teeth, and neuritis—grew worse.
Her unwillingness to interact with her peers or appear in public created a mysterious character that fueled rumors about her superstition in the local press and community. Miss Henrietta Severs, Winchester's longtime friend, claims that Winchester was superstitious.
Winchester's family, coworkers, and gardeners never asserted that she was insane, superstitious, or consumed with guilt. In her will, every employee was listed as a beneficiary. Winchester turned down two invitations from US presidents.
First, a committee was established to make arrangements for President William McKinley's stay in 1901, but Winchester declined to send an invitation. Without pausing, the president and his official coaches passed the home in their car.
Second, tradition has it that when President Theodore Roosevelt came to the area in 1903, Winchester refused to unlock a locked gate to let him in. However, this was untrue, since the president had no desire to see Winchester because the visit might have been utilized to advertise rifle sales. He was not interested in seeming to support any brands.
Even though she had good reasons not to entertain the presidents, these incidents added credence to the suspicions that she was a lunatic and not of sound mind. Legend has it that Winchester's apparent love of the number thirteen is the reason for architectural features like thirteen bedrooms, thirteen bathrooms, and thirteen windows in specific areas.
But these things, along with "the more irregular features, which have made the house a world-famous oddity," were added after Mrs. Winchester passed away, claims carpenter James Perkins. This seeming superstition was initially documented in a 1929 paper.
It has since been brought up in the majority of publications concerning Winchester and her home. The employees of Winchester, who worked with her every day, claimed she had no interest in séances and that there was no documentation of any having taken place in the home.
However, a false urban legend has surfaced, saying that she used to hold solo séances in the blue room or a closet from midnight until two in the morning, during which she would converse with ghosts about what needed to be built the next day. Not only were there no records mentioning seances at Llanada Villa, but the closet séances were improbable because seances were often sociable gatherings rather than private affairs, and documents indicate that the blue room was the gardener's bedroom.
Claims about footsteps, strange noises, talking, slamming doors and windows, cold areas, cooking odors, and a sense of being watched have been made by both visitors and tour guides.
According to investigator Joe Nickell, the reason behind them might be publicity and hearsay about the house being the most haunted in the world or the United States, or that more than a thousand spirits call it home. These could lead to suggestibility and confirmation bias.
In one instance, according to Nickell, a shadowy figure that was initially believed to be a ghost turned out to be a member of the house staff. Nickell asserts that there is no proof the house is haunted and that any whispers that have been reported are either wind-related or imagined.
Furthermore, temperature variations are prevalent in large, rambling, drafty ancient houses, and strange noises may be explained by the house's settling and variations in the outside temperature.