Jump to content

Winchester Mystery House

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 82.11.153.175 (talk) at 03:16, 30 December 2007 (→Depictions in popular culture). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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.[2] If this cost were paid entirely in 1922, it would be equivalent to almost $70 million in 2007 dollars.[3]

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.

Inspiration

Deeply saddened by the deaths of her daughter Annie in 1866 and her husband in 1881, 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 she was crazy, but she had the feeling 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 people have died because of it and their spirits are now seeking vengeance."

Although this is disputed, many believe[who?] the Boston Medium told Sarah Winchester that she had 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, where she began construction on her mansion.

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. All of this gave her a tremendous pool of wealth from which to draw to fund construction on the mansion.

The house today

One of the house's curious doors which lead to nowhere (except a ten foot drop).

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 about 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, to accommodate her severe arthritis. Roughly 20,000 gallons (76,000 liters) of paint were required to paint the house. Due to the sheer size of the house, by the time every section of the house was painted, the workers have to start repainting again. [4]

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, a 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. Also, every Friday the 13th the large bell on the property is rung 13 times at 1 o'clock in tribute to Sarah Winchester.

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

  • In the 1950s the house became well known throughout the United States due to multiple presentations on the television show You Asked for It.
  • 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.
  • One chapter of Hirohiko Araki's manga The Lives of Eccentrics covers the construction of the Winchester mansion.
  • Several special issues of Dennis the Menace comics appeared in the 1970s, including a book-length story of Dennis and his parents visiting the Winchester Mystery House.
  • Michaela Roessner's science fiction novel Vanishing Point centers around the community that settles in the Winchester Mansion after a global catastrophe, and the house serves as a center of changes to the laws of space and physics.
  • In Sci-Fi Channel's Ghost Hunters the TAPS crew investigates the Winchester mansion to try and find the ghosts rumored to haunt the mansion.
  • On October 19, 2007, the team from UK Living TV's Most Haunted investigated the Winchester Mystery House for ghosts in a seven-hour live broadcast.
  • A book by Lisa L. Selby entitled The Inscrutable Mrs. Winchester and Her Mysterious Mansion was published in 2005. It tries to separate fact from fiction about Sarah Winchester's story and the house she built.
  • The team from UK Living TV's Dead Famous investigated the Mystery House as one of three locations to try find the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock.

References

  1. ^ A Mystery House, Frommer's San Jose, retrieved Oct. 30, 2006.
  2. ^ Amazing Facts, Winchester Mystery House, retrieved Nov. 7, 2007
  3. ^ CPI Inflation Calculator, Bureau of Labor Statistics, retrieved Nov. 19, 2007
  4. ^ Expansive photograph of the house from a Winchester postcard
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Winchester Mystery House.

Template:Geolinks-US-buildingscale

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Winchester_Mystery_House&oldid=180912967"