A house of mystery in San Jose

This past weekend we traveled 90 minutes north to San Jose to visit a friend of Jane's. She was attending a conference and had an afternoon free. By coincidence, we all went to tour an incredible house that has interesting links to a famous family from New Haven, Connecticut.

The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion that was under construction continuously for 38 years. It once was the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William W. Winchester. The mansion is renowned for its size and utter lack of any master building plan. Under Sarah Winchester's personal and direct day-to-day guidance, its "from-the-ground-up" construction proceeded around-the-clock, without interruption, from 1884 until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased. The cost for such constant building has been estimated at about US $5.5 million (this would be equivalent to almost $70 million in 2008 dollars).

An aerial view of the massive Winchester House. Click on the photo to see it in a larger size.

 
Here is a little background edited from the website of the house that explains who built the house and why.

Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in 1840, the daughter of Leonard Pardee and Sarah Burns, a carriage manufacturer in New Haven, Connecticut.  Known as the "Belle of New Haven," Sarah enjoyed all the advantages of a cultured upbringing, including an education at the best private schools. She spoke four languages and played piano beautifully.  In 1862, Sarah married William Wirt Winchester, son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, owner of the company that made the famous Winchester repeating rifle. 

 

The couple's life together was happy, and they moved in the best New England society. However, in 1866, disaster struck when their infant daughter, Annie, died of then mysterious childhood disease. Mrs. Winchester fell into a deep depression from which she never fully recovered.  Fifteen years later, in March 1881, her husband's premature death from tuberculosis added to Mrs. Winchester's distress.  Deeply saddened by the deaths of her daughter Annie in 1866, and her young husband in 1881, and seeking solace, Winchester consulted a medium on the advice of a psychic.  According to popular history, the medium told Winchester that she believed there to be a curse upon the Winchester family because the guns they made had taken so many lives.   The psychic told Winchester that "thousands of people have died because of it and their spirits are now seeking deep vengeance." Although this is disputed, popular belief holds that the Boston Medium told 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 must never stop building the house. If you continue building, you will live forever. But if you stop, then you will die."

Winchester inherited more than $20.5 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 about $22,000 a day in 2010.  All of this gave her a tremendous amount of wealth to fund construction.


Mrs. Winchester packed her bags and left Connecticut to visit a niece who lived in Menlo Park, California. While there she discovered the perfect spot for her new home in the Santa Clara Valley. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farm house just three miles west of San Jose. She immediately hired carpenters to work in shifts around the clock. By the turn of the century the eight-room house had grown into a seven-story mansion.

Old postcard view of the mansion prior to the 1906 earthquake.

 
The house was badly damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent repairs removed the top three stories leaving it as it is today with only four stories. After 38 years of non-stop, unrelenting construction the mansion had grown to such a size to ramble over six acres. The house contained 160 rooms, including 40 bedrooms and 2 ballrooms, one completed and one under construction, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens. There were over 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces linked to 17 chimneys. Several of the doors and stairways lead nowhere as the house lacked a coordinate plan. 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 20,500 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. 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.

Mrs. Winchester's elegant Grand Ballroom is built almost entirely without nails. It cost over $9,000 to complete at a time when an entire house could be built for less than $1,000.  The silver chandelier is from Germany, and the walls and parquet floor are made of six hardwoods – mahogany, teak, maple, rosewood, oak, and white ash. The most curious element of the Grand Ballroom are the two leaded stained glass windows, each inscribed with a quote from Shakespeare. The first, "Wide unclasp the table of their thoughts," is from Troilus and Cressida (IV:5:60). The lines are spoken by Ulysses, and refer to Cressida's sometimes flirting nature. The second, "These same thoughts people this little world," is from Richard II (V:5:9). The imprisoned Richard means that his thoughts people the small world of his confinement. Nobody knows for certain what these lines meant to Mrs. Winchester. While they apparently held some special meaning for Mrs. Winchester, their significance remains a mystery today. Ironically, the ballroom was probably never used to hold a ball. According to one story, Mrs. Winchester once heard that a celebrated orchestra was performing in San Francisco. She invited the musicians to play at her home, but scheduling conflicts prevented the visit. In any case, Mrs. Winchester sealed off the ballroom after the earthquake of 1906.

 
While she sometimes drew up simple sketches of the building ideas, there were never any blueprints….or building inspectors. In the morning, she would meet with John Hansen, her dutiful foreman, and go over new changes and additions. During the early years of construction, this resulted in some awkward and impractical concepts such as columns being installed upside down. John Hansen stayed with Mrs. Winchester for many years, redoing scores of rooms, remodeling them one week and tearing them apart the next. This resulted in many features being dismantled, built around, or sealed over. Some rooms were remodeled many times. It is estimated that 500 rooms to 600 rooms were built, but because so many were redone, only 160 remain. This naturally resulted in some peculiar effects, such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, doors that go nowhere and that open onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof!

 

The only known photo of Sarah Winchester.  Insistent on privacy, this photo was reported to have been taken by a gardener hiding in the bushes.


Mrs. Winchester passed away in her sleep from heart failure on September 5, 1922. At the time of her death, all work abruptly stopped. Carpenters even left nails half driven when they learned of Mrs. Winchester's death. She was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut beside her beloved husband. According to the provisions of her will, Mrs. Winchester's personal property, including the furnishings, household goods, pictures, jewelry, and papers were left to her niece, Mrs. Marian Merriman Marriott, who promptly had the furnishings auctioned off. It is said to have required six trucks working six weeks to cart the furnishings away. The mansion and farm were not mentioned specifically in the will. They became part of Mrs. Winchester's estate and were sold by her trustees, the Union Trust Company of San Francisco. Sarah Winchester made no mention in her will of the mansion, and appraisers considered the house worthless, probably due to the un-repaired earthquake damage as well as the impractical nature of its design. It was sold at auction to a local investor for $135,000 and in February 1923, five months after Mrs. Winchester's death, the house opened to the public. Today the home is owned by Winchester Investments and it retains unique touches that reflect Winchester's beliefs and her reported preoccupation with warding off malevolent spirits. These spirits are said to have directly inspired her as to the way the house should be built. The number thirteen and spider web motifs, which had some sort of spiritual meaning to her, 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 stained glass window contains 13 colored stones. The sink's drain covers also have 13 holes.

  The tour was fascinating, bizarre, and an incredible wander through a unique monument to mental illness. The tour guide warned people not to stray from the group or they could be lost for hours. We walked well over a mile through twisting hallways, made even more intriguing by secret doors and passageways in the walls. We were told that Mrs. Winchester traveled through her house in a roundabout fashion, supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might be following her. I was left with the impression that she was certainly a very rich but also very troubled woman. Her legacy is a house unlike any ever built, or likely ever to be built in the future. If you are ever in San Jose, I highly recommend a visit and tour of the Winchester Mystery House.