A California mansion once owned by the widow of a firearms magnate continues to stun tourists more than a century after its construction finally ceased.
The unnervingly strange San Jose home boasts 160 rooms and was built over nearly four decades, only stopping when its eccentric visionary, Sarah Winchester, died in 1922 at the age of 85.
The number of rooms in the four-story Victorian-style behemoth isn’t even close to the strangest thing about it.
While its size certainly puts it in the upper echelon of historically significant homes built in the Gilded Age, it doesn’t come close to the 250-room Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, an architectural marvel still owned by the Vanderbilt family.
And in terms of square footage, Winchester’s abode doesn’t hold a candle to Long Island’s Oheka Castle or Lynnewood Hall in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania.
What is truly unique about the Winchester Mystery Home, as its now known, is that it has dozens of twisting staircases that lead absolutely nowhere. It also has as many as 2,000 doors, many of which open to nothing but a wall.
The doors often open to a practically endless series of corridors and rooms with no coherent path.
Why Winchester decided to commission this maze of a residence has been the subject of myth ever since construction began on it in 1886.
Pictured: An aerial view of Sarah Winchester’s home, a giant estate that started out as a eight-room farmhouse and became a 160-room tourist attraction over 100 years later
The inside of the home is characterized by staircases that lead nowhere, which later inspired rumors that Winchester was trying to avoid the ghosts of people who were killed by guns made by her family’s company, Winchester Repeating Arms
Pictured: Builders who had worked on this chimney three stories high apparently quit their work before it cleared the roof
Through marriage, she became the heiress to Winchester Repeating Arms, a gun manufacturer that exists to this day. Some have said she was wracked with heartbreak over how her family’s company made deadly weapons.
Her guilty conscience, as the legend goes, is what inspired her to build the labyrinthine structure, a perfect way for her to hide from the ghosts of people who were killed by Winchester rifles.
Others believe the reclusive woman was driven mad by the many tragedies she faced throughout her life, including the deaths of her husband, father-in-law, mother and her infant daughter.
As the San Francisco Chronicle notes, many of these outlandish explanations originated around the turn of the century and were perpetuated by tabloid newspapers.
Experts who work at the Winchester Mystery House, now a museum that’s been open to the public since 1923, say most of the rumors about Winchester are just that: rumors.
Winchester Mystery House historian Janan Boehme, who has worked at the house for much of the last 40 years, doesn’t believe Winchester was guilty that her $20 million fortune came from gun sales, nor does she believe the stories about spirits haunting her.
‘People didn’t have the massive guilt complex over guns that they have now,’ Boehme told the Los Angeles Times in 2017. ‘They were a useful tool, something that people needed.’
Boehme added that Winchester was likely a recluse because she had extreme arthritis in her hands and had poor dental health.
And the reason Winchester continued building the home well beyond what was necessary or reasonable, was simply because she had tons of money to throw around and a huge staff she wanted to keep employed, Boehme has said.
Pictured: Winchester died in her sleep from heart failure in this bedroom at the San Jose estate
A notable feature inside the home are these stain glass windows, many of which have the same pattern depicting three spider webs. This and other design choices would later make the home a tourist hotspot on Halloween
Pictured: A staircase somewhere inside the 24,000-square-foot home
Pictured: The grand ballroom of the home, complete with a dancefloor and a towering organ
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, vivid imaginations of her being chased around a maze-like home of her own making by angry apparitions has endured.
Even the National Park Service, in its description of the house on the National Register of Historic Places, says Winchester built the home after receiving a consultation from a mysterious psychic.
‘This medium informed Mrs. Winchester that the victims killed by the Winchester rifles her family manufactured were seeking revenge by taking the lives of her family,’ the description reads.
‘The spiritualist also conveyed to Mrs. Winchester that the spirits had placed a curse on her, and that if she wished to live, she must appease them by moving out west and constantly, without ceasing, build a house for them night and day.’
The mystique surrounding Winchester has gone a long way in establishing the sustained interest in her house, which has drawn some 12 million visitors over its 102 years as a tourist attraction.
‘We still have to pay tribute to the legends, because most people know the house because of the legends,’ Susan DeLance, the tour manager at Winchester Mystery House, told the Chronicle.
Winchester was born Sarah ‘Sallie’ Lockwood Pardee in 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut. She was the daughter of Leonard Pardee, a craftsman who owned a mill and wood shop.
In 1862, 23-year-old Sarah (pictured left) married her childhood friend William Wirt Winchester, the son of the founder of Winchester Repeating Arms
Pictured: The only known photographic portrait of Sarah Winchester, who appears to be in a horse-drawn carriage
In 1862, 23-year-old Sarah married her childhood friend William Wirt Winchester, the son of the founder of Winchester Repeating Arms.
About four years later in 1866, the couple welcomed their daughter, Annie, who died a five-and-half weeks after her birth from marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition.
Oliver Winchester, William’s father, died in 1880 and left the rifle company in the hands of his son, who was already ill from tuberculosis by that point.
The devastating bacterial disease, now a treatable and rare ailment, was responsible for the deaths of one in seven people in the United States and Europe in 1882, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
In 1881, William succumbed to TB and passed away just three months after his father, which left Winchester as the sole heir to the family fortune.
She suddenly had access to $20 million, which is worth upwards of $620 million today. That level of wealth puts her on the level of modern-day celebrities such as Tom Cruise and Taylor Swift.
After Winchester’s oldest sister died in 1884, she moved away from Connecticut to California, hoping the more moderate climate would ease her worsening rheumatoid arthritis.
In 1886, she then bought a 45-acre ranch in San Jose that had an eight-room farmhouse she spent the next decade or so rapidly building into the sprawling mansion it is today.
While she was alive, she called it the Llanada Villa, and according to one estimate, it swelled to 26 rooms within the first six months of renovations.
Apartment buildings, parking garages and Interstate Highway 280 all surround the five acre property where the Winchester Mystery House sits
Pictured: The Winchester home before the 1906 earthquake demolished much of the construction
The majority of the work on it happened from 1890 to 1900. That’s when a seven-story tower was added, one that was rebuilt multiple times and later reduced to four stories.
Other notable features include two indoor greenhouses; outdoor ornamental gardens with mythological statues; and a storehouse filled with the extra windows, doors and other construction elements left over from prior renovations to the house.
The 1906 earthquake that rocked the San Francisco area severely damaged the mansion, which forced Winchester to reduce it in size to what it is today.
At its biggest, the Winchester home is thought to have had as many as 500 rooms.
All new work on the house ended on September 5, 1922, the day Winchester died. By December of that year, the home and its surrounding five acres was auctioned off to a group of investors who leased the property to John and Mayme Brown.
The Browns opened it as a tourist attraction in 1923, though they initially wanted to tear down much of the mansion and replace it with an amusement park. Public backlash prevented them from doing that.
They leaned into the legends surrounding Winchester and started leading tours throughout the property, taking guests inside the enormous home and outside into her gardens.
Glamorous fountains, neatly manicured hedges and mythological statues can be seen on the property’s expansive gardens
Harry Houdini, the famed magician and escape artist, visited the home in 1924 and is responsible for much of the mystique that surrounds it today
It is believed that the house truly attained its haunted status when famed magician Harry Houdini visited near Halloween in 1924.
At the time, Houdini was on a nationwide tour debunking fake spiritualists who he deemed con men.
There are varying accounts about his visit to the Winchester home with some saying he couldn’t shake the sense something was off about it, while others said he was merely impressed with the design.
What most agree on, however, is that he was the one who first suggested to tour organizers that they should use the name ‘Winchester Mystery House’ in their official advertisements.
The name stuck and a brand was born, even if it was untrue to who Sarah Winchester really was.
But those who care about the home for its value as a historical landmark acknowledge that without the myth, it likely would have been torn down decades ago.
‘The house could never be a nonprofit,’ said Boehme. ‘It just never would have lasted. You have to make money here. It’s the only way to keep it standing.’
