Sarah Winchester and the Mystery House

 

The House of Winchester

The Spring side of the family is remembered for two notable manors; the first is Cockfield Hall, which they built and lived in for many years; and the other is Newe House, which is known to be haunted by Lady Elizabeth Spring, the wife of Sir William Spring, 1st Baronet. 
The Winchester side of the family is known for the house that became known as the Winchester Mystery House, which was built by Sarah Winchester.

William Wirt Winchester was the only son of Oliver Fisher Winchester and Jane Ellen Hope and was born on June 22nd 1837 in Baltimore, Maryland. William married Sarah Lockwood Pardee on September 30th, 1862.  William was the treasurer of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company founded by his father. 
Sarah Winchester was born Sarah Lockwood Pardee, daughter of Leonard Pardee and his wife Sarah W. Burns, in 1837 in New Haven, Connecticut. Sarah and William had one daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, who was born on June 15, 1866, but died after a few weeks on July 25, 1866 from the childhood disease marasmus. Sarah fell into a deep depression following the death of her daughter, and the couple had no more children. Oliver Winchester died in 1880, quickly followed in March 1881 by William, who died of tuberculosis, giving Sarah approximately 50 percent ownership in the Winchester company and an income of $1,000 a day. (This amount is roughly equivalent to $23,400 a day in 2013.) Lost in her grief, Sarah sought out spiritualists to determine what she should do overcome her sorrow and what steps she needed to take to protect her from further loss. A Boston psychic told her that the Winchester family was cursed by the spirits of all the people who had been killed by the Winchester rifle, and she should move west to build a house for herself and the spirits. The medium told Sarah that if construction on the house ever stopped, she would join her husband and infant daughter and die a painful death. In 1884, Sarah moved west to California with her sister and her niece, and in 1886 she purchased an eight-room farmhouse from John Hamm. It stood on 161 acres of land in what is now San Jose, California. Immediately, she began spending her $20 million inheritance by renovating and adding more rooms to the house, with work continuing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the next 36 years. She was fascinated with the number 13 and worked the number into the house in many places. (There are thirteen bathrooms, many windows have thirteen panes, chandeliers have 13 candles, and so forth.). For 38 consecutive years, except for brief periods after the 1906 earthquake, Sarah personally oversaw the non-stop construction of her California mansion.

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Sarah was trapped in one of her bedrooms for several hours. However, when she got out, she told the construction crews to stop working on the nearly completed front part of the house and had her carpenters board it up, leaving much of the extensive earthquake damage unrepaired. Sarah believed the spirits were angry with her this time because she was spending too much time decorating and working on the front rooms. Construction resumed on new additions and remodeling the other parts of the structure. Sarah Winchester's full-time address from the earthquake until her death was in Atherton, California. She visited the ranch and house in San Jose only periodically.

Due to constant construction and the lack of a master plan, the house became very large and quite complex; many of the serving staff needed a map to navigate the house. The house also features doors that open into walls, staircases that lead nowhere, the recurring number thirteen, and windows that look into other walls. There are two theories as to why Mrs. Winchester built such an unusual house. The first is by far the most popular and states that she built the house to confuse the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles. The second, much less popular, is that while Mrs. Winchester was an exceedingly wealthy woman and could build her house any way she wanted, she had no architectural training at all, so some of the oddities could be simple design error. 

In the 1920s Sarah also maintained a houseboat on San Francisco Bay at Burlingame, California, which became known as "Sarah's Ark" as it was kept there as insurance against her fear of a second great flood, such as the Biblical one experienced by Noah and his family, but a more mundane answer is that many people of her social standing in California at that time had house boats or yachts. The "Ark" was located near the eucalyptus grove at Winchester Road, south of what was to become the intersection of Anza Boulevard and U.S. Highway 101. The ark was destroyed by fire in 1929.

On September 5th, 1922, Sarah died in her sleep of heart failure at the age of 83, and construction on the Winchester Mystery House stopped. A service was held in Palo Alto, and her remains lay at Alta Mesa Cemetery until they were transferred, along with those of her sister, to New Haven, Connecticut. She was buried next to her husband and infant child in Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut. Sarah Winchester left a will written in 13 sections, which she signed thirteen times. The belongings in Winchester Mystery House were left to her niece, Mrs. Marian I. Marriott, who took what she wanted and auctioned the rest off. It took movers eight truckloads a day for six and a half weeks to empty the entire house of furniture.They did not mention the former home of the furniture at the auction, which makes it impossible to track down today. The home was then auctioned to the highest bidder who then turned it into an attraction for the public; the first tourists walked through the house in February 1923, 5 months after Sarah died.