Winchester Mystery House

Jill's Journal: It was another day of rain today, but yesterday the girls got to experience the extremely bizarre Winchester Mystery House for the first time. They were definitely intrigued by the eccentric Victorian mansion. In 1884, Winchester rifle heiress Sarah Winchester was reeling from the deaths of her only child and her husband. The diminutive 4’10” tall woman who spoke four languages had once been the “Belle of New Haven,” but a Boston “spiritualist” convinced her to leave Connecticut and move out West. She settled in San Jose, purchased an eight-room farmhouse, and feared the spirits of people killed by Winchester rifles – everyone from American Indians to Civil War soldiers – might be after her. The spiritualist told her the only way to ward off the vengeful spirits would be to confuse them by building a grand home for them. She did just that for the next 38 years, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until her death. The result can only be described as a labyrinth.

The mansion tour goes through 110 of the 160 rooms (over a mile walk), but this is no run-of-the-mill mansion. There’s a staircase that leads to the ceiling. Doors less than five feet tall. Windows in floors. Doors that open to solid walls. A chimney that rises four floors and then stops just over a foot short of the ceiling. A séance room with handle-less “escape” doors. And many, many more oddities, like narrow hallways with switchbacks and hundreds of “stairs” only about two inches high. One staircase has seven flights and yet only rises a total of nine feet from bottom to top.

The front 30 rooms of the house were severely damaged in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. (The front of the house went from seven stories to three in an instant). Winchester was trapped in one of those rooms, and upon being freed, she had the 30 rooms sealed off until after her death. Unfortunately, this included the front door. When President Teddy Roosevelt came calling (he was a huge fan of the Winchester rifle), he supposedly knocked on the front doors, only to be told by a grounds worker he could only enter through the servants’ quarters like everyone else. He was so offended he left.

For all its craziness, the house (which rambles over six acres – that’s not the size of the estate, but the size of the house alone) is also really beautiful in many places. Some of the Tiffany stained glass, imported chandeliers, and hand-inlaid parquet floors are amazing. Winchester spent over $5.5 million building the home, an unbelievable amount at that time. She also had the home about three-quarters furnished…at the time of her death, the furniture not kept by relatives, friends, and employees was auctioned off. It took six trucks six weeks to finally empty the home of its furnishings.

Photographs aren’t allowed inside, but the girls thought the whole place was pretty cool. With three elevators, 47 staircases, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, secret passageways, and miles of twisting hallways, it’s like a maze and the girls really, really wanted to play hide and seek there. Thank goodness there's a "no hike and seek policy" (yes, I told them that). I don’t think I would have ever found them again.