Immersive 360° Tour Winchester Mystery House

Table Of Content

• Winchester restored most of the damage inflicted by the earthquake.
• A peculiar mansion built by the troubled heir to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune.
• Odd design elements, like stairways that lead to nowhere, also make this house so well known.
• THE HOUSE WAS DESIGNED LIKE A LABYRINTH.
• The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture
• The next stop in the house is the south conservatory, which is the room with the most windows.
• THE HOUSE WAS UNDER CONSTANT CONSTRUCTION FOR 38 YEARS.
• The Winchester Mystery House

Though visitors can watch the video tour for free, the Winchester Mystery House is asking visitors to consider purchasing a voucher for use at a later date. Closing times vary, please check our Buy Tickets page for current tour times. Additionally, Winchester insisted that the home be built exclusively out of redwood – however, she didn’t like the look of the wood, so she insisted it be covered with a stain and a faux grain. By the time the house was completed, over 20,000 gallons of paint had been used to cover the wood.

Winchester restored most of the damage inflicted by the earthquake.

Santa Clara Valley Lives: Sarah Winchester and her famous house once surrounded by orchards - Los Altos Town Crier

Santa Clara Valley Lives: Sarah Winchester and her famous house once surrounded by orchards.

Posted: Wed, 05 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

However, none are quite as strange as the story of the Winchester Mystery House, which has captured popular imagination for its unusual and sinister past. There are also Flashlight Tours around Halloween and every Friday the 13th. The Winchester Antiques Products Museum and the Winchester Firearms Museum are also housed on-site. A massive earthquake struck the Bay Area in 1906 and toppled the top three stories of the house, damaging the other four stories along with it. Some say Sarah Winchester took this as a sign from the spirits that she was too close to completion and ordered the unfinished front half of the house to be boarded up.

A peculiar mansion built by the troubled heir to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune.

In the last couple of years, the house and Sarah Winchester herself have seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to the release of the horror film Winchester. Starring Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester, the film depicts a woman crippled by grief who builds a house to appease the spirits of her husband’s bloody business. Unfortunately, that’s the full extent to which the film matches up with reality. Some say the labyrinth layout was meant to confuse the ghosts, allowing Sarah some peace and a means to escape them.

Odd design elements, like stairways that lead to nowhere, also make this house so well known.

But that hasn’t stopped urban legends to continue to circle this curious building and drive thousands of people to see it every year. Some point to Sarah Winchester's reclusive nature as proof of her guilt. She also had a habit of sleeping in different rooms (to hide from ghosts perhaps?) which posed a problem after a 1906 earthquake caused three floors of her house to cave in.

Some folks say that she made the move because she needed a change and wanted to make a fresh start. But legend has it that a medium had told her to make the journey west and to atone to the spirits of all those who were gunned down by the Winchester rifles. To do that, required she find some land and build a mansion. The story gets more unusual in that it’s said she opted to keep the spirits at bay by making the house intolerable for them to haunt the home.

Sarah passed away in this room in her sleep in 1922 at the age of 83. Sarah relocated to this room after getting trapped inside of the Daisy Bedroom during the 1906 earthquake. One legend says that Sarah felt the earthquake was a warning from the spirits that she had spent too much money on the front section of the house. Once referred to as an “important” room to Sarah Winchester by world-renowned psychic-medium James Van Praagh, the Witches Cap had it’s doors opened on the Explore More Tour in 2017. Famous for its alleged paranormal activity and the odd shape, the Witches Cap is a popular favorite amongst guests.

The next stop in the house is the south conservatory, which is the room with the most windows.

Not all the 2,000 doors can be walked through—one leads to an eight-foot drop to a kitchen sink, another to a 15-foot drop into bushes in the garden below. Staircases lead straight to ceilings, expensive Tiffany stained-glass windows were installed in places where they would get no light, and there are more secret passages than Narnia. A particularly odd delight is a cabinet that, when opened, extends through 30 rooms of the house.

And rather than using my projects as a reason to be busy, I could take a break and start being a little more present in my actual life. I went to college only a few miles away from where the house is located. While Sarah Winchester did build the house to appease something, it was likely her own guilt rather than supernatural entities. Sarah Winchester did what she thought was right to atone for her husband’s sins, leaving behind a mysterious life in the process. From the time she moved to San Jose in the late 1800s, Sarah Winchester made quite the name for herself thanks to her obsession with the afterlife.

Her father-in-law Oliver Winchester, manufacturer of the famous repeater rifle, died in 1880, and her husband, Will, also in the family gun business, died a year later. After she moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to San Jose, Winchester dedicated a large part of her fortune to ceaseless, enigmatic building. She built her house with shifts of 16 carpenters who were paid three times the going rate and worked 24 hours a day, every day, from 1886 until Sarah’s death in 1922. Other than household staff, few saw the home’s interior during Winchester’s lifetime. She kept to herself following the deaths of her husband and infant daughter, Annie, from illness.

In this provocative and deeply-researched work of narrative history, Haag fundamentally revises the history of arms in America, and in so doing explodes the clichés that have created and sustained our lethal gun culture. After appraisers deemed the house worthless due to its strange design, damage from the earthquakes, and long-winded construction, Marion took everything in it and auctioned it off. The current owners of the house claim it took six weeks to empty the house of all furniture, though the report is uncorroborated. After her death in September of 1922, Sarah Winchester left all of her belongings to her niece, Marion, who had served as her personal secretary later in life. However, the Winchester Mystery House was never mentioned in her will, adding to the mystery of the home. In the years Sarah Winchester lived in the house, the residents of San Jose whispered about its strange construction and even stranger inhabitant, but it was in the years after her death that the wild stories became even wilder.

Please arrive 30 minutes before your scheduled tour time to find parking or use a ride share service. Since her death, little has been uncovered about Sarah Winchester and the reasoning behind her obsession with building the Winchester Mystery House. She gave no interviews, left behind no journals, and had no family willing to speak about her. A year later, rooms that were never opened to the public were put on display, including sections of the home that had remained unfinished at the time of her death.

In 1886, she left her home in New Haven, CT, for a new life in San Jose, CA. There, she bought a simple eight-room farmhouse that she would go on to transform into a marvelous, madcap, 160-room mansion that would come to be known as the Winchester Mystery House. The month-long, round-the-clock investigation included interviewing over 300 people regarding their experiences on the property, and analyzing every aspect of the environment for any unusual phenomena. In 2018, a horror film was made about the infamous house and the spirits said to live within.

The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, is one of the nation’s most curious landmarks. 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. Gold and silver chandeliers hung from the ceilings above hand-inlaid parquet flooring. Dozens of artful stained-glass windows created by Tiffany & Co. dotted the walls, including some designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany himself.

Stranger so was the fact that many of the alterations seemed pointless. Staircases would ascend several levels then end abruptly, doors would open to solid walls, and hallways would turn a corner and end in a dead-end. Tragedy befell Sarah – her infant daughter died of a childhood illness and a few years later her husband was taken from her by tuberculosis. But in truth, all these stories are just guesses as to why Sarah Winchester made the choices she did. She was a pretty private woman, which in turn added to all the suppositions. Next, check out the full story of Sarah Winchester’s Winchester Mystery House.