The Winchester Mystery House is a well-known California mansion that was under construction continuously for 38 years and is reputed to be haunted. It once was the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester, but is now a tourist attraction. Under Sarah Winchester's guidance, construction on the house continued 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, until her death 38 years later on September 5, 1922.^[1] The cost for such constant building has been estimated at about US $5.5 million.^[2] If this cost were paid entirely in 1922, it would be equivalent to almost $70 million in 2007 dollars.^[3] This article is about the U.S. state. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... Sarah Winchester (1837 - September 5, 1922), born Sarah Lockwood Pardee, was an heiress and the builder of the Winchester Mystery House. ... William Wirt Winchester (1837 – March 7, 1881) was the second president of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company from 1880 to 1881. ... is the 248th day of the year (249th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1922 (MCMXXII) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... USD redirects here. ...

View of the mansion from the southeast.

The mansion is renowned for its size and lack of a master building plan. According to popular belief, Sarah Winchester thought the house was haunted by the ghosts of individuals killed by Winchester rifles, and that only continuous construction would appease them. It is located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, California. Download high resolution version (910x722, 96 KB)This image is from HABS/HAER, the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record collection at the Library of Congress. ... Download high resolution version (910x722, 96 KB)This image is from HABS/HAER, the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record collection at the Library of Congress. ... This article is about the paranormal. ... Winchester Model 1894 The Winchester rifle has become synonymous with the word repeating rifle (multishot rifle) which was manufactured by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and was commonly used in the United States during the latter half of the 19th century. ... For other uses, see San José. Nickname: Location of San Jose within Santa Clara County, California. ...

Inspiration

Deeply saddened by the deaths of her daughter Annie in 1866 and her husband in 1881, and seeking solace, Sarah Winchester consulted a medium on the advice of a friend. According to popular history, the medium, who has become known colloquially as the "Boston Medium", told Winchester that she was crazy, but she had the feeling that there was a curse upon the Winchester family because the guns they made had taken so many lives. She told Winchester that "thousands of people have died because of it and their spirits are now seeking vengeance."

Although this is disputed, many believe^{[attribution needed]} the Boston Medium told Sarah Winchester that she had to leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must "build a home for yourself and for the spirits who have fallen from this terrible weapon, too. You can never stop building the house. If you continue building, you will live. Stop and you will die." Whether this tale is true or not, Winchester did move west, settling in California, where she began construction on her mansion. “New Haven” redirects here. ... Regional definitions vary from source to source. ...

Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20 million upon her husband's death. She also received nearly 50 percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, none of which was taxable until 1913. This amount is roughly equivalent to $21,000 a day in 2006. All of this gave her a tremendous pool of wealth from which to draw to fund construction on the mansion. The Winchester Repeating Arms Company was a prominent American maker of repeating firearms during the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century. ... Amendment XVI in the National Archives Amendment XVI (the Sixteenth Amendment) of the United States Constitution was ratified on February 3, 1913. ...

The house today

One of the house's curious doors which lead to nowhere (except a ten foot drop).

Prior to the 1906 earthquake, the house had been built up to seven stories tall, but today the highest point is the fourth floor. The house is predominantly made of redwood frame construction, with a floating foundation that is believed to have saved the estate from total collapse in both the 1906 earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. There are about 160 rooms, including 40 bedrooms and two ballrooms. The house also has 47 fireplaces, 10,000 window panes, 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two basements and three elevators. Winchester's property was some 162 acres (650,000 m²) at one time, but now the estate is just 4.5 acres (24,000 m²) — the minimum necessary to contain the house and nearby outbuildings. It has gold and silver chandeliers and inlaid parquet floors and trim. There are doors and stairways that lead nowhere and a vast array of colors and materials. Before the availability of elevators, special "easy riser" stairways were installed to allow Winchester access to every part of the mansion, to accommodate her severe arthritis. Roughly 20,000 gallons (76,000 liters) of paint were required to paint the house. Due to the sheer size of the house, by the time every section of the house was painted, the workers had to start repainting again. ^[4] Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... San Francisco Earthquake redirects here. ... This article needs to be wikified. ... The Loma Prieta earthquake was a major earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay Area of California on October 17, 1989 at 5:04 p. ... A paned window is a window that is divided into sections known as panes. ...

The house also has many conveniences that were rarely found at the time of its construction, including steam and forced-air heating, modern indoor toilets and plumbing, push-button gas lights, a hot shower from indoor plumbing and even three elevators, including one with the only horizontal hydraulic elevator piston in the United States. A Forced-air heating system is one which uses air as its heat transfer medium. ... Gas lighting is the process of burning piped natural gas or coal gas for illumination. ... Hydraulics is a branch of science and engineering concerned with the use of liquids to perform mechanical tasks. ...

The house retains unique touches that reflect Winchester's beliefs and her reported preoccupation with warding off malevolent spirits. The number thirteen and spider web motifs, which she considered to be lucky, reappear around the house. For example, an expensive imported chandelier that originally had 12 candle-holders was altered to accommodate 13 candles, wall clothes hooks are in multiples of 13, and a spider web-patterned Tiffany window contains 13 colored stones. In tribute, the house's current groundskeepers have created a topiary tree shaped like the number 13. Also, every Friday the 13th the large bell on the property is rung 13 times at 1 o'clock in tribute to Sarah Winchester. Tiffany Blue seen here on a Tiffany gift box. ... A topiary dinosaur at Epcot Topiary is the art of creating sculptures in the medium of shrubbery, after the Latin word for an ornamental landscape gardener, toparius. ...

Today, several different tours of the house are available, including flashlight tours at night on dates around Halloween and each Friday the 13th. This article is about the holiday. ... Friday the 13th is considered a day of bad luck in English-, French- and Portuguese-speaking countries around the world, as well as in Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Bulgaria, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. ...

Depictions in popular culture

• In the 1950s the house became well known throughout the United States due to multiple presentations on the television show You Asked For It.

• Stephen King's Rose Red story features a house with a history similar to that of the Winchester Mystery House. The film was also going to be filmed there but because of the small space, busy street and construction going on next door, they had to film the movie in a mansion that sits on American Lake in Lakewood, Washington.

• Tim Powers' novel Earthquake Weather incorporates the legends of the Winchester House and suggests that Sarah Winchester built the structure as a deliberate effort to capture and channel ghosts as a "mask" to protect her from detection by otherworldly forces.

• One chapter of Hirohiko Araki's manga The Lives of Eccentrics covers the construction of the Winchester mansion.

• One issue of Swamp Thing written by Alan Moore (#45, 'Ghost Dance') is set in a fictionalized version of the Winchester house.

• The xxxHolic anime film A Midsummer's Night Dream takes place in a dimension-bending haunted house with an interior design very similar to the Winchester mansion.

• The Winchester House is also referenced in Shirley Jackson's novel, The Haunting of Hill House.

• Kage Baker's short story, "Nightmare Mountain" in Mother Aegypt and other Short Stories, deals with a similar house and history, based in San Jose, CA.

• Sarah Winchester and her Mystery House is the subject of one chapter in The Big Book of the Unexplained.

• Several special issues of Dennis the Menace comics appeared in the 1970s, including a book-length story of Dennis and his parents visiting the Winchester Mystery House.

• Michaela Roessner's science fiction novel Vanishing Point centers around the community that settles in the Winchester Mansion after a global catastrophe, and the house serves as a center of changes to the laws of space and physics.

• Jeremy Blake's video Winchester Trilogy, centered on the house, was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005.[1]

• In the Japanese anime Ghost Hunt, in episode 18 the main characters come to a mansion that is very similar to the Winchester. Even one of the characters mentions how the haunted house they are in is very much like the Winchester. ^[5]

• In Babylon 5, in the episode "Rumors, Bargains and Lies", during a conversation with Capitan Sheridan Londo Mollari stated that there were many things about humans he didn't understand, including Winchester Mansion.

• In Sci-Fi Channel's Ghost Hunters the TAPS crew investigates the Winchester mansion to try and find the ghosts rumored to haunt the mansion.

• On October 19, 2007, the team from UK Living TV's Most Haunted investigated the Winchester Mystery House for ghosts in a seven-hour live broadcast.

• A book by Lisa L. Selby entitled The Inscrutable Mrs. Winchester and Her Mysterious Mansion was published in 2005. It tries to separate fact from fiction about Sarah Winchester's story and the house she built.

• Nancy A. Collins' 1995 story "Paint it Black" features a mansion known as "Ghost Trap", which has odd archetectural features resembling those of the Winchester house.

The 1950s decade refers to the years 1950 to 1959 inclusive. ... You Asked for It was a popular television show in the early years of mass presentation (the 1950s). ... For other persons named Stephen King, see Stephen King (disambiguation). ... Rose Red is a 2002 horror movie with mystery and thriller elements, based on a plot written by Stephen King. ... Tim Powers at the Israeli ICon 2005 SF&F Convention Timothy Thomas Powers (born February 29, 1952) is an American science fiction and fantasy author. ... Hirohiko Araki (荒木飛呂彦 Araki Hirohiko, born June 7, 1960 in Sendai, Japan) is a manga artist. ... This article is about the comics published in East Asian countries. ... For other uses, see Swamp Thing (disambiguation). ... For other persons named Alan Moore, see Alan Moore (disambiguation). ... Serialized in Weekly Young Magazine Original run February 24, 2003 – No. ... “Animé” redirects here. ... Serialized in Weekly Young Magazine Original run February 24, 2003 – No. ... The Haunting of Hill House is a 1959 novel by author Shirley Jackson. ... Sarah Winchester (1837 - September 5, 1922), born Sarah Lockwood Pardee, was an heiress and the builder of the Winchester Mystery House. ... Dennis the Menace is a daily syndicated newspaper comic strip originally created, written and illustrated by Hank Ketcham since March 12, 1951, which made its debut in only 16 newspapers. ... Michaela Marie Roessner, born in San Francisco in 1950, is an American science-fiction writer publishing under the name Michaela Roessner. ... Jeremy Blake--American artist, born 1971, known for his innovations in expanding the meaning and conceptions of painting by incorporating digital technology into the field via his inventive and vividly beautiful digital C-prints, films and videos. ... San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2004). ... Ghost Hunt is also a ride at Lake Compounce. ... Babylon 5 is an epic American science fiction television series created, produced, and largely written by J. Michael Straczynski. ... Rumors, Bargains and Lies is an episode from the fourth season of the science-fiction television series Babylon 5. ... Londo Mollari is a fictional character in the universe of the science fiction television series Babylon 5, played by Peter Jurasik. ... For other uses of the name, see Ghosthunters (disambiguation). ... Most Haunted is a British paranormal television programme based on investigating purported paranormal activity. ... Nancy A. Collins (born 1959) is a horror fiction writer that is best known for her series of vampire novels featuring her character Sonia Blue. ...

References

External links

• Winchester Mystery House website
  • Winchester Mystery House press images
• The Mystery House Blog features regularly updated images of the mansion (most recent update November 2005)
• Strangetastic.com has room-by-room commentary on the mansion.
• The History of One of America's Most Haunted Houses by Troy Taylor

• Winchester Mystery House is at coordinates 37°19′05″N 121°57′04″W / 37.318138, -121.95115Coordinates: 37°19′05″N 121°57′04″W / 37.318138, -121.95115
  • Maps from WikiMapia, Google Maps, Live Search Maps, Yahoo! Maps, or MapQuest
  • Topographic maps from TopoZone or TerraServer-USA

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