The Legend of Sarah Winchester (The Winchester Mystery House)Įverything you need to know about the Winchester Mystery House (The San Francisco Chronicle) Where the mystical meets the bizarre (The New York Times) Sarah Winchester: Beyond the Mystery (Bennett Jacobstein)Ĭaptive of the Labyrinth (Mary Jo Ignoffo) The estate opened for public visits nine months later and remains a Santa Clara Valley tourist destination to this day. By the time she died at age 83 in 1922, the 160-room house had become something of a local legend. She believed these touches would ward off the evil spirits.įor the next 40 years, Sarah lived alone in the house, constantly constructing new rooms and installing “tricks” like switchback staircases, phantom elevators and interior windows. She refused the help of an architect and insisted on building spider imagery into the house, along with designs revolving around the number 13. Historians today say she probably invented several home decorations and improvements, but Sarah never officially recorded a patent or trademark for her creations. The Winchester Rifle fortune funded her eccentric building project: a multi-story “mystery house” with secret passageways, hiding places, booby traps and more, all designed to elude the ghosts Sarah believed were chasing her. In 1884, desperate to escape the ghosts and her overwhelming guilt, she purchased a 140-acre estate in Southern California. They were plaguing her dreams to take revenge on the Winchester family, and Sarah would have to move West to escape their clutches. Sarah visited a Boston psychic to help her decipher the nightmare visitations, only to learn something dreadful: the medium told her the visions were the ghosts of the millions of victims who’d died at the hands of a Winchester rifle. Soon after, her infant daughter passed away, leaving Sarah entirely alone, the sole remaining member of the Winchester clan. When her husband suddenly died in 1882, however, Sarah began seeing mysterious people in her dreams, bloody and anguished. The two made their life on the East Coast, preparing to one day inherit the multi-million-dollar arms company. In 1862, 23-year-old Sarah married William Wirt Winchester, the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune.
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