The next time you find yourself in the Bay Area make sure that you add the Winchester Mystery House to your wandering to-dos.  This incredible victorian mansion and peaceful gardens are a living example of the expression, “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover”.  Inside the walls you’ll find literally hundreds of tales about how and why Sarah Winchester was compelled to build on this property for 38 years.   Sarah was the wife and heir to the Winchester firearms fortune.  After the death of her husband she sought advice from a medium who, as the story goes, contacted her departed husband who sent a message from the afterlife.  Sarah was to use the fortune to build a home for the spirits of those who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles, lest she be haunted by them for the rest of her life.  Fact or fiction, the stories that surround Sarah and her mystery house are intriguing.  As we approach another all hallow’s eve, let’s take a peek behind the doors and find 13 eerie facts about the Winchester Mystery House…

 

 

  1. If you are a numbers fan, then get ready!  The Winchester Mystery House has 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens,  2,000 doors, 10,000 window panes, 52 skylights, 47 fireplaces, three elevators, and two basements.
  2. If there are 47 fireplaces in the house, you’d think there’d be 47 chimneys, right? Wrong. There are only 17.
  3. Mrs. Winchester holds the Guinness World Record for the most extended continuous house construction – 38 years! The only time work slowed down was after the 1906 Earthquake.  Before that event, the house had topped out at 7 stories; however, the earthquake took care of a few of those, and they were never rebuilt.
  4. There was never an official room count; however, the consensus is that the mansion is 24,000 square feet and has a modest 160 rooms. The house Sarah Winchester originally bought was just an eight-room farmhouse.
  5. Sarah was the sole architect and placed many bizarre requests on her building crew, including the building of trap doors, secret passages, a skylight in the floor, spider web windows, and staircases that led to nowhere. Some doors open to blank walls, and the famous second-floor door opens to the garden below. Some rooms had windows and balconies located inside instead of outside. Other rooms were created to look like boxes inside of other boxes, with smaller rooms built inside bigger rooms.
  6. Sarah Winchester is also known for her innovations. Some historians say she was the first person to use wool for wall insulation and created indoor cranks to open windows.
  7. In total, Sarah spent $5.5 million on the house. After she died in 1922, the house was valued at just $5,000 and was sold at an auction to Thomas Barnett for $135,531.50.
  8. In 1975, workers discovered a new room inside the house with a lock on the door. It contained two chairs and an early 1900 phonograph speaker. The theory is that Sarah may have forgotten about the room and built around it
  9. There is only one known photo of the widow Winchester. Though she was reclusive, she was never alone. She had 18 servants, 18 gardeners, and the ever-present construction team working on the grounds. Every morning, Sarah met with the foreman to discuss the always-evolving building plans. And it’s said that each night, she visited the Séance Room to speak with the spirits, who weighed in on plans for the house’s unusual design
  10. She held séances every night at midnight so that she could receive the next day’s building instructions from the ghosts. It is said that Mrs. Winchester was the only person who held a key to her “séance room,” which featured one entrance and three exits
  11. The lady of the manor slept in a different bedroom every night, never repeating rooms two nights in a row
  12. Harry Houdini visited the mansion to attend a seance on Halloween night in 1924.  His mission was to try and debunk the myth that there were ghosts in the house. He failed but just may have been the person that gave the home its now permanent moniker – the Mystery House
  13. Not surprisingly, Sarah Winchester had an obsession with the number 13. Several of the stairways have 13 steps, many of the ceilings have 13 panels, 13 lights in the chandelier, 13 blue and amber stones in a special window she designed, 13 hooks in the seance room for the 13 robes Sarah wore while contacting the spirits, 13 overflow drain holes in the sink in the Hall of Fires, 13 bathrooms, with 13 windows in the 13th bathroom (but there was only one shower in the whole house), and 13 parts to her will, which she signed 13 times

More on the Mansion

In early February 2018, the movie Winchester was released in theaters. The movie stars Academy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren, who portrays Sarah Winchester in this supernatural thriller. The movie explains the life of Mrs. Winchester and her obsession with endless construction on her now-famous mansion. The movie opened to $9.3 million at the US box office, and has grossed nearly $46 million as of this writing. If you missed it in theaters, it’s currently available to stream on various platforms.  Check out the official trailer below:

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