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By Carrie Ellingson
The Winchester House in San Jose, Calif., looks decepitvely calm from the outside. Stairs leading to the ceiling, doors opening to nowhere or into walls, a room with three doors and only one way out, twists and turns, secret passages and windows on the floor you would think it's a fun house, but it's not. It's the house of Sarah L. Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune. The Winchester House is the second World's Creepiest Destinations according to the TravelChannel. "I saw an episode about the Winchester House on the Travel Channel, they were rating the Top 10 Creepiest Destinations," Lisa Poulsen recalls. "I was very intrigued by it because of the design of the house and the mysteries it holds." The Winchester House, in San Jose, Calif., sits on four acres. The house has 160 rooms, or so they think, 40 bedrooms, once stood seven stories tall but after the 1906 earthquake is now four stories with two basements. The cost of the house to build was $5.5 million and began construction in 1884 and ended Sept. 5, 1922 -- that's 38 continuous years of construction with workers building 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. After the sudden death of Sarah's daughter in 1866 from an illness known as "marasmus" and 15 years later her husband's, son of Oliver Winchester inventor of the Winchester rifle, death Sarah inherited over $20 million. Before her husband's death, he warned her that those who died from the Winchester rifle cursed the family and they would seek revenge. Sarah being a very superstitious person sought help from a Spiritualist Medium. The medium told her that she must start a new life and move from her home in New Haven, Conn., and head towards the setting sun. Being led by what Sarah believed was her husband, she reached Santa Clara Valley in 1884 and found a six-room home under construction and entered into negotiations to buy the house that sat on 162 acres at the time. She tossed away any previous plans for the house and started building whatever she chose to. She had her pick of local workers and craftsmen and for the next 36 years, they built and rebuilt, altered changed and constructed and demolished one section of the house after another. The sound of hammers and saws sounded throughout the day and night. Each morning Sarah would meet with her foreman and they would go over her hand-sketched plans for the days work. There are no blue prints of the house. As an idea would come to Sarah she would draw them wherever she was, on napkins and even table clothes. It is still unknown how many rooms exactly there are, each time a count is taken the number changes. Each night at midnight Sarah held a seance for the spirits to communicate with her how to build the house. The bell in the bell tower was rung at midnight to summon the spirits to the seances and rung again at 2 a.m. to send the spirits away. That was the only time the bell was ever rung. It's in her seance room where there are three doors into the room with only one way in and out. One door to enter the room, another to leave the room and a third that opened to a six-foot drop into one of the kitchens. In her seance room there is also a window in the floor so Sarah could keep a close watch on her servents in the kitchen. Sarah had an incredible fascination for the number 13 or multiples of 13. Her favorite flower was a daisy because the perfect daisy had 13 petals. In the house there are 13 bathrooms with the 13th bathroom, the only one with a shower, having 13 windows. A sink in one of the six kitchens has 13 drainage holes. There are 52 skylights and the grand staircase has 13 steps. Nearly all the windows contained 13 panes of glass; the walls had 13 panels, the greenhouse had 13 cupolas; many of the wooden floors contained 13 sections. Sarah's other favorite numbers were seven and 11. There is one stairway in the house in which has seven steps down and then 11 steps up. And the switchback staircase that turns seven times and has 44 steps but only goes up nine feet. The house began to grow as construction went on for days, weeks and months. Rooms were added to rooms and then turned into entire wings; doors were joined to windows, levels turned into towers and peaks. Eventually the house grew into seven stories, three elevators were installed as were 47 fireplaces. There were countless staircases that led to nowhere and a chimney that stops short of the ceiling, closets that opened to blank walls, trap doors, double back hallways, skylights above another and the stair posts were installed upside-down and many of the bathrooms had glass doors on them. These oddities were done to confuse the ghosts so they couldn't get her. Rumor has it that she slept in a different bedroom each night so the spirits could not find her. It was her way to control the spirits who came to the house for evil purposes, or who were outlaws or vengeful people in their past life. While passing through San Jose, President Theodore Roosevelt decided to stop and visit Sarah Winchester. When he went to the front door he was told to use the servants' enterance. President Roosevelt was so offended that he left. Rumor has it that only two people have ever been through the front door, the two men who installed the expensive original Tiffany glass double doors. Sarah had her own private enterance off of the garage. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake the top three floors of the house had collapsed into the rest of the house. Sarah was trapped in the daisy room, called the daisy room because of the daisy Tiffany windows. It took workers over an hour to find her because she slept in a different room each night. Sarah took the earthquake as a sign that the spirits were not pleased that she was spending so much money on the front of the house, so she boarded up the front 30 rooms of the house and focused on the rest of the house. After the earthquake Sarah began sleeping in only one bedroom, the Blue Room with an organ that she played on sleepless nights and where she died in 1922. Upon Sarah's death all construction ceased on the house and the workers walked away, leaving nails partly nailed into the wall and rooms only half painted. Sarah's will was divided into 13 parts and signed 13 times. She left the house to her niece who auctioned most of the furnishings for money. It took eight truckloads and six and a half weeks to load all the furniture and take it away. There is only one picture of Sarah Winchester in existance; it's of her in her carriage. Sarah never kept a dairy or notes on her methods of her madness with the house. The Winchester Mystery House is now opened to the public for tours. Every Friday the 13th and on Halloween there are flashlight tours. Touring the mysterious mansion at night with only the moonlight and a flashlight. Two years ago Tara Myers and her family went to San Jose to tour this mysterious house on one of the flashlight tours on Friday the 13th. "It was kind of creepy because we were group 13 to go on the tour and it was close to midnight when we went. I was scared that I would get lost and never be found with all the twists and turns the house has," Myers said of her experience. "The architecture of the house is amazing! Some of the ideas Sarah had about how to build the house were well before her time and the details are breathtaking." Marnae Jensen recently returned from touring the Winchester House, of her experience she said, "The house was amazing. Forever rooms and hallways that went to nowhere. I was amazed at the unfinished parts of the house, and the mystery behind it all." When asked if she would consider ever wanting to live there Jensen said, "I would not want to live there myself. I would need a map just to get from one room to the next." The Winchester Mystery House has quite the reputation to those who grew up near San Jose. Anne Barlow grew up just an hour from the Winchester House. The stories she has heard about the hauntings are to her urban legends. "I've heard about the organ in the Blue Room where Sarah Winchester died in her sleep, I guess there's been stories about it playing by itself while there are tours," Barlow continued to say, "growing up those stories were told to us to scare all the little kids since it is the only haunted house near by." Does she believe that it is possibly haunted by Sarah Winchester and other spirits? Barlow said, "No, they're just stories, if you hear it enough and believe it, I guess things can happen." Whether it's haunted or not, you'll have to be the judge of that. The Winchester Mystery House has been declared a California Historical Landmark and is registered with the National Park Service as "a large, odd dwelling with an unknown number of rooms." For more information about the Winchester Mystery House visit their website. NW |
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