For example, the Friday the 13th Flashlight Tour focuses on the paranormal and takes ghost fans around the property after dark. "The House is many things to many people." One solution is to segment the audience. "Every door hinge in the house is different," said Tim - and the house has 2,000 doors.Īs an attraction, the Winchester Mystery House must satisfy visitors with interests ranging from home remodeling to history to hauntings. Inside was some hair and the funeral notices of Sarah's husband and daughter, dead for decades. The "Grand Ballroom" features a hinged wall behind it is a wooden door, then a steel door, then a safe, then a safe inside the safe. Sarah would shut herself in the Hall and light all the hearths, slowly roasting herself. The "Hall of Fires," for example, includes multiple fireplaces (The house has 47 fireplaces but only 17 chimneys). Winchester rifles, "The Gun That Won the West" by killing the losers. She was a very intelligent lady, but her house doesn't make any sense." Winchester didn't work from blueprints, she didn't keep a diary. I still get lost," said Tim O'Day, marketing director for the House. The Grand Ballroom: plenty of floor space for the dead to dance. The public wanted to see it, and on June 30, 1923, only nine months after Sarah died in the house, it opened as a tourist attraction. Spirit-plagued Sarah's question might have been: "If I can't get rid of ghosts, can I at least drive them nuts?" Her answer might have been to live in a house so confusing that the dead, befuddled, left her alone.įor over 35 years Sarah was a recluse, paying millions of dollars to expand her former simple farmhouse into a 160-room labyrinthine mansion. Sarah Winchester never explained why she wanted these structural peculiarities, but accounts after her death fed the legend that she built her crazy home out of fear - fear of the vengeful spirits of the people killed by her late husband's Winchester rifles. There’s safety in numbers.Sarah Winchester spent most of her life as a widow, dressed in black.Ī funhouse ahead of its time, Winchester Mystery House has doors that open onto walls, stairs that go nowhere, windows that appear in ceilings, rooms that lack floors. The best way to experience the haunted house? With a candlelight tour. The house is designed to confuse-staircases lead nowhere and end at ceilings cabinets and doors open on to walls small rooms are built within big rooms balconies and windows are inside rather than out chimneys stop floors short of the ceiling and floors have skylights. From 1886 until her death in 1922, construction never ceased on the strange new mansion, which at its peak included 200 rooms, 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces and 2,000 doors, trap doors and spy holes. Winchester came to believe her family and fortune were haunted and started to build a house as a way to elude the ghosts of all the people who had fallen victim to the Winchester rifle. The bizarro began when the lady of the house, Sarah Winchester, inherited a vast fortune from her father-in-law, Oliver Winchester, manufacturer of the famous rifle, and she moved from New Haven, Connecticut to San Jose. The Bay Area’s most famous haunted home, the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, was once the largest private residence in the United States.
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