![]() Sometimes, she would have features built and plastered over the next day.Įxactly why Winchester embarked on this dizzying cycle of building, undoing and rebuilding is impossible to say. The designs, wrote Pamela Haag for Zócalo Public Squarein 2016, were Winchester’s she sketched them onto napkins or pieces of brown paper, then handed them over to a team of carpenters. The construction project continued until Winchester’s death in 1922, producing an enormous, labyrinthine mansion filled with logic-defying features: staircases that end at the ceiling, indoor balconies, skylights built into floors, doors that open onto walls. In San Jose, she purchased an eight-room farmhouse that she began to renovate in 1886. Winchester decided to leave her home in New Haven, Connecticut, and head to California, where two of her sisters lived. This staircase in the Winchester Mystery House leads to the ceiling. Her husband, William Wirt Winchester, died in 1881, leaving his widow with a vast fortune: 50 percent ownership in the Repeating Arms Company and a $20 million inheritance. Four years later, she gave birth to a daughter, Annie, who died about a month later. ![]() Sarah Lockwood Pardee married into the Winchester family in 1862. The narrated video tour spans more than 40 minutes, providing insight into the property and the mysterious woman who built it: Sarah Winchester, wealthy and reclusive heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which manufactured an innovative rifle that became a fixture of Westward expansion. But as Michele Debczak reports for Mental Floss, you can now explore the Winchester House from afar via a detailed video tour posted on the mansion’s website. Built by a millionaire widow over the course of 36 years, the sprawling mansion features more than 200 rooms, 10,000 windows, trap doors, spy holes and a host of other architectural oddities.Ī popular tourist attraction, the house, along with many other cultural institutions in the United States, has closed to help curb the spread of coronavirus. Schrader said that this previous tour ended in the mansion’s bowling alley when suddenly the bowling balls began to roll uphill, prompting Schrader to say, “Time to go.” Unfortunately, no spirits attended the tour this Halloween.The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, is one of the nation’s most curious landmarks. The staff then told Schrader that the room is home to the spirit of a little girl who likes to tug on people’s ears. Here, Schrader calmly recounted a visit to an upstairs room on a past Halloween, where she felt a strong tug on her ear. The hourlong tour ended with Greystone Mansion, a popular site for the film industry and the home of a gruesome murder-suicide in Beverly Hills, California. It contains oddities like switchback stairs leading to the ceiling and stained-glass Tiffany windows set in interior walls. The Winchester Mystery House is full of Middle Eastern influences that were popular during the Victorian Era. If she ever ceased construction, she would die. “She spent four decades transforming the eight-room farmhouse that she originally bought into this scrolling 160-room complex, hoping to outrun the ghosts of those who had been killed by the Winchester rifles,” Schrader said.Īccording to legend, Winchester believed that construction on the house would stave off the spirits. She explained that Sarah Winchester, the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, purchased property there in 1884 after being told by a medium that vengeful victims of her family’s weapons would seek her out. Schrader also shared stories from the famous Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. It began with the Queen Mary Hotel, a retired ocean liner turned floating hotel that’s permanently docked in Long Beach, California. ![]() Schrader’s tour combined history, architectural details, and ghost stories covering landmarks in six states. Schrader seemed completely unfazed by her paranormal encounters, casually mentioning being locked in by spirits at the Olde Pink House Tavern in Savannah, Georgia, and the time she yelled at an unknown entity in the closet to let her sleep at the Jailhouse Inn in Newport, Rhode Island. And I can also verify that they are haunted,” Schrader said matter of factly. “Most of the places that I’m going to be sharing with you tonight, I have visited. (HONOLULU) - A dozen or so brave architecture fans and ghost-story lovers gathered on Halloween afternoon for a virtual tour of 11 of the most haunted buildings around the United States.Įleanor Schrader of LA Architecture & Art Tours led a virtual “walk” around the country, visiting spots like the Queen Mary Hotel, the Winchester Mystery House, and Greystone Mansion while telling stories about the paranormal activities reported at each site. ![]()
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