The Beautiful Secrets Of The Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester House, also known as The Winchester Mystery House is a large mansion located in San Jose, California. The house was built by Sarah Winchester and served as her personal residence while she lived; it eventually became a highly frequented tourist attraction and today is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
To understand the story of this amazing place, we must first travel back to the origins of the name and the motivations of Sarah Winchester for building the house in the first place.
Everything began with a clothing manufacturer in New York City by the name of Oliver Fisher Winchester, who saw an investment opportunity in a division of Smith & Wesson firearms that was failing financially. Winchester along with other stockholders acquired the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company and eventually relocated it to New Haven, Connecticut changing the name to the New Haven Arms Company. Along with the company came the brilliant engineer Benjamin Tyler Henry, who was responsible for creating the Henry rifle, an improvement to the Volcanic rifle that was the reason Smith and Wesson had to sell their rifle manufacturing division. The Henry rifle was the basis for the iconic Winchester lever-action repeating rifle, one of the most successful firearms of its day and the reason the Winchesters became famous.
Sarah Lockwood Pardee was the daughter of Leonard Pardee, a carriage manufacturer in New Haven, Connecticut and Sarah Burns. She was known for her beauty, education and aptitude for languages and playing the piano. In 1862, Sarah married William Wirt Winchester, son of Oliver Winchester. They lived their lives happily until their newly born daughter Annie, died of marasmus in 1866. Sarah never fully recovered from her devastating loss and her depression was only made worse by the death of her father-in-law in 1880, quickly followed by her husband’s demise a few months later in 1881 of tuberculosis. Sarah was left with roughly 50% ownership of the Winchester Company, an outrageous amount of money even by today’s standards.
It is not known with certainty why she did it, but it was a common practice of the Victorian era to make use of mediums and spiritualist to celebrate séances with the purpose of contacting the dead. It is said that Sarah believed her family to be cursed and while inquiring about the fate of her loved ones and her fortune, she was told that the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifles, were targeting her as their next victim after taking her child and husband. Nonetheless, the medium mentioned a convenient alternative to ensure that she would left in peace by the vengeful spirits; she was told to build a mansion for the restless souls and to make certain never to stop building for as long as she lived. Sarah Winchester left Connecticut for the West Coast and did just that.
Mrs. Winchester bought a 162-acre property with a home still under construction and begun her project mansion. She hired workmen who labored day and day out and soon the small house became a seven-story building, which never stopped growing in size and complexity. This extravagant labyrinth of Victorian design is as beautiful as it is bizarre, but regardless of its oddity, many of the mansion’s features were extremely innovative for their time and served a real purpose to make living in the home, quite comfortable.
There are approximately 160 rooms, 40 of those are bedrooms, 2 ballrooms, 47 fireplaces, more than 10,000 panes of glass, 17 chimneys, two basements and three elevators. The home included amenities that were not common in its time, such as forced-air heating, modern plumbing and gaslights activated by push buttons. The wooden floors are beautiful pieces of art displaying mosaics made of mahogany, rosewood, teak, maple, oak and white ash. The almost never-ending fortune of the Winchesters, allowed Sarah to build without any qualms and let her imagination run wild and display her exquisite taste. Many of her artistic glass windows were made to order in Austria and imported by Tiffany’s of New York. All rooms are richly furnished, once again revealing her late owner’s extravagant yet tasteful style.
The number thirteen as well as spider web motifs are present everywhere in the house, contrasting with odd contradictory features such as stairways that lead nowhere, doors that open into walls, windows that spy into other rooms and strangely spaced stair steps.
Just like during the time of its construction, the house is constantly being worked on. The restoration efforts never stop in order to maintain the house in pristine condition for visitors young and old, who flock to see the odd mansion with their own eyes every year, eagerly trying to find out if the stories are indeed true and the spirits inhabit the lavish abode.
