Even Sarah herself has appeared posthumously in the earthquake-devastated Daisy bedroom and the ornate music room.īut one final, supreme irony hangs over the spirit-built house. Winchester’s long-dead servants and workmen. Many seances have been held in the strange “blue room.” Mediums have seen unearthly lights bobbing along the endless halls and have felt the presence of Mrs. The house is a natural magnet for psychic investigators, and such famed occult detectives as legendary magician Harry Houdini have visited the house. Winchester had joined her friends and foes in the spirit world. It’s said that you can still see half-driven nails in some of the walls, marking where carpenters stopped work when they heard that Mrs. There she remained until her death in 1922 at the age of 85. Terrified by the quake (she thought it was caused by the spirits), she moved temporarily onto a houseboat, but soon returned to her monstrous mansion. After the 1906 earthquake struck San Jose, it took servants almost an hour to find her in the house’s recesses, trapped in a room by a blocked door. Sarah roamed all over the massive house and never slept in the same bedroom more than one night at a time. Winchester included it in such house fixtures as the 13-pane windows, the 13-paneled doors, 13-hole drains, 13-globe chandeliers, and 13-step stairways. Believing that the number had powerful occult significance, Mrs. It was said that she installed these strange features to confuse and thwart the many evil spirits who arrived at the house courtesy of the Winchester ’73 rifle.Ī recurring motif throughout the house was the number 13. Stairways led nowhere, undulated like roller coasters, or compressed 42 steps into a nine-foot climb with two-inch-high rises. Corridors tapered from normal width down to inches-wide crawlspaces. Doors opened onto dead-end hallways, blank walls, or three-story drops. Sarah designed most of the features herself, and many of the additions and improvements reflected her own bizarre superstitions and fears, as well as the chaotic randomness of the building project. At the end of the four-decade construction binge, the Winchester House contained 160 rooms, 47 fireplaces, nine kitchens, 10,000 windows, and 2,000 doors. Winchester made sure her busy staff got all the spirits’ latest instructions a primitive intercom system linked by miles of copper wire sent messages around the huge, ever-expanding building. Barns were engulfed and observation towers blocked by the unplanned, uncontrolled growth. Balconies, fireplaces, rooms, and whole wings sprouted up from nowhere like fungi. The bell would be rung again at 2AM to dismiss the spirits who she would confer with on the next day’s building plans. She would summon the spirits to the séance room by ringing a bell in a nearby tower at midnight. Winchester held court with the spirits nightly, whose constant demands for more room guaranteed an ever-changing floor plan. Sitting in a secret, blue-walled séance room deep in the house’s interior, Mrs. The hammering and sawing never stopped at chez Winchester Sarah’s immense wealth and total obsession made sure that a well-paid workmen were busy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Sundays and holidays included. There, she dedicated her $21 million inheritance and rifle-royalty payments to granting the spirits’ wishes.įor the next 38 years, she and an army of artisans in her employ expanded, rebuilt and remodeled the house to hold the ghosts of Winchester rifle victims. Migrating to California in 1884, she bought an eight-room farmhouse on what were then the outskirts of San Jose. Sarah took the medium’s counsel literally, and to epic extremes. He also told Sarah that she must never stop building and expanding the house. He told her that her loved ones’ lives had been taken by the restless spirits of the many men killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, “The Gun That Won The West.” The spirits would turn on her as well, he said, unless she moved west and built a home big enough to house all of them. Half-crazed with grief, Sarah sought comfort and advice from a spiritualist. Wealthy, attractive, and talented, Sarah was one of the bright lights of New Haven society, until both her husband and her only child went to early graves. Wife of Connecticut firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |