Sarah Winchester married into a vast empire built upon rifles. She wed William Wirt Winchester at the height of the Civil War. Winchester was the shrewd businessman from whom Winchester Rifles had gained their name. Needless to say, between the Civil War and the cavalry on the frontier fighting off hostile Indians, quality rifles were in high demand. Winchester filled that demand and became ridiculously wealthy in the process.
Soon though, tragedy struck. The couple’s only child, Annie, died a month after birth. Fifteen years later, William Winchester died of tuberculosis. Sarah was unable to handle the loss of her family. Unsure of why these dual tragedies had struck her, she visited a psychic..
The spirit medium informed Mrs. Winchester that she was being punished. The rifles that provided her with her vast fortune had taken the lives of many people. The spirits of these soldiers and Native Americans held the producer of the rifles that killed them responsible for their deaths. In short, the entire Winchester family was being punished by beings in the afterlife, and Sarah was bearing the brunt.
The psychic didn’t merely bring this bad news to Sarah, she offered her a solution which could end her ghostly torment. She told her to move west and build an elaborate house. The house would have to be huge--big enough to provide the good, friendly spirits with a home of their own and immense enough to confuse the evil, vengeful spirits enough that they couldn't find her.
For the next thirty eight years, twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year, Sarah built more and more onto her house. There were anywhere from ten to twenty-two carpenters working at any given time. Besides the craftsmen, there were between eighteen and twenty domestic servants and twelve to eighteen gardeners working at any given moment. When she started building, the house sat upon one hundred and sixty one acres. At the time of her death, the house covered all but four of these acres.
In the center of the house Sarah had a Seance Room built. The only entrance to this room was hidden and only Sarah knew how to access it. She spent every night from midnight to two in the room, attempting to contact the dead to see exactly what she should be building the next day. Sarah’s spirit-inspired construction methods were by no means an exact science. She often felt that she was not satisfying the ghosts’ desires with her projects. It’s estimated that over six hundred rooms were added on to the house and immediately knocked down in the thirty-eight year building process.
When Sarah Winchester died in 1922, workers hammers finally fell silent for the first time in 38-years. There are many spots where nails are only half driven into a wall, as workers quit immediately upon hearing of Sarah’s passing. Today, tours are given throughout portions of the house. Tour guides and tourists alike often report strange sounds coming from hidden portions of the house. One famous incident involved a visitor thanking her guide for the realistic actors portraying Winchester and her staff--unfortunately, no actors were employed at the house.
I finally fulfilled a lifelong dream during my last CA trip; my best friend Liz and I got to explore the twisting halls of the amazing, perplexing structure known as the Winchester Mystery House, which I have longed to visit since first hearing it's story when I was a very young child. I was awestricken at the sight of the Winchester House the second it came into view--the sheer, massive size of it was unbelievable. And, the weirdness started almost immediately...
As we waited for our Mansion Tour to begin, I decided to shoot a few pictures of the place. I used my LCD screen to line up the shot, but the second I aimed the camera at the house, my LCD went wacky and I got this bizarre effect. As soon as I panned the camera away from the house, the screen would clear up perfectly. Yet every time I aimed it at the house again, it started giving a static-like, almost negative effect. I called Liz over to verify what was happening, and she couldn't believe it either--she even took a picture of my camera's LCD screen for good measure, and we kept exchanging confused looks as we tried to figure out what was causing the camera's weird behavior.
Once we entered the house for our tour of 160 of the mansion's rooms, the camera weirdness continued. We had three fully charged batteries between the two of us, yet we both started losing battery power as soon as we entered the house. I continued to snap pictures inside the house, but I kept getting completely blacked-out shots, or this strange, colored negative-like effect. I have never before or since seen my camera do anything remotely like this. It almost seemed like a serious camera problem, except for the fact that I was getting some perfectly normal, good shots in between the weird ones.
Liz was also having problems with her camera... many of her pictures were blown-out (i.e: too much light, despite the shadowy interior), and her battery power was draining at an unnatural rate. Also, my camera's power kept switching off. We both felt goose-bumpy when our guide explained to us that when Sarah Winchester dwelled here, she did not allow any photographs to be taken of her. Perhaps she was hanging around during parts of our tour, letting us know that she was still the lady of this house!
It took over an hour to make our way through all of the rooms, and without our guide, I feel sure that we would have gotten hopelessly lost. There are so many twists and turns, false passageways, and hidden doorways--it's unbelievable! We moved through the Blue Seance Room, the bedroom where Sarah Winchester died, and the Grand Ballroom where she used to "entertain" her ghostly guests at the stroke of midnight. We saw the bizarre stairway that lead literally into the ceiling, the bathrooms with windows in their doors, and the Daisy Room where Sarah was trapped during the earthquake that leveled the top three floors of the house, leaving only four floors standing.
Sarah's Mystery House is filled with cryptic messages and meanings. The number 13 can be found hidden throughout the house; curtain rods have 13 rings, windows and ceiling panels have 13 panes, sink drains have 13 holes, and so on. The symbol of the daisy (which in it's perfect form has 13 petals) can also be seen everywhere--in rugs, chandeliers, windows, and walls. There are two very mysterious messages written in the stained glass windows that Sarah herself designed for the Ballroom. The left window reads, "Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts," while the right says, "These same thoughts people this little world." Although the words are Shakespeare's, no one knows why these particular enigmatic phrases were chosen for the windows.
Time seems to stand still in the Winchester House; an air of secrecy permeates every wall and every floorboard. The confusing, mind-bending twists and turns and perplexing mysteries inside it's walls left Liz and I puzzled and intrigued when we stepped back out into the warm California sunshine with three completely dead camera batteries, a handful of bizarre photos, and a whole bunch of questions.
– Shady
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