page_title: Winchester Mystery House
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Winchester Mystery House / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Otis elevator instruction sheet
context_page_description: The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearm magnate William Wirt Winchester. Located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, the Queen Anne Style Victorian mansion is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan. It is a designated California historical landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is privately owned and serves as a tourist attraction.
  Since its construction in 1886, the property and mansion were claimed by many to be haunted by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles. Under Winchester's day-to-day guidance, its "from-the-ground-up" construction proceeded around the clock, by some accounts, without interruption, until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased. Sarah Winchester's biographer, however, says that Winchester "routinely dismissed workers for months at a time 'to take such rest as I might'" and notes that "this flies in the face of claims by today's Mystery House proprietors that work at the ranch was ceaseless for thirty-eight years."
context_section_description: After her husband's death from tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited more than US$20.5 million (equivalent to $543 million in 2019). She also received nearly fifty percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to $26,000 a day in 2019. These inheritances gave her a tremendous amount of wealth which she used to fund the ongoing construction.
  After her infant daughter died of an illness known as marasmus, a children's disease in which the body wastes away, and her husband died of pulmonary tuberculosis, a Boston medium told her (while supposedly channeling her late husband) that she should leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles.
  Winchester left New Haven and headed for California. Although it is possible she was simply seeking a change of location and a hobby during her lengthy depression, other sources say that Winchester came to believe her family and fortune were haunted by ghosts and that only by moving West and continuously building them a house could she appease these spirits.
  In 1884, she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began building her mansion. Carpenters were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven-story mansion. She did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so the home contains numerous oddities such as doors and stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms and stairs with odd-sized risers. Many accounts attribute these oddities to her belief in ghosts. Environmental psychologists have theorized that the odd layout itself contributes to the feeling of the house being haunted today.
  Before the 1906 earthquake, the house had been seven stories high and carpenters may have been brought in initially to repair damages caused by the quake. Today it is only four stories. The house is predominantly made of redwood, as Mrs. Winchester preferred the wood; however, she disliked the look of it. She, therefore, demanded that a faux grain and stain be applied. This is why almost all the wood in the home is covered. Approximately 20,500 U.S. gallons (78,000 L) of paint were required to paint the house. The home itself is built using a floating foundation that is believed to have saved it from total collapse in the 1906 earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. This type of construction allows the home to shift freely, as it is not completely attached to its brick base. There are roughly 161 rooms, including 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms (one completed and one unfinished) as well as 47 fireplaces, over 10,000 panes of glass, 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two basement levels and three elevators. Winchester's property was about 162 acres (66 ha) at one time, but the estate has since been reduced to 4.5 acres (1.8 ha) – the minimum necessary to contain the house and nearby outbuildings. It has gold and silver chandeliers, hand-inlaid parquet floors and trim, and a vast array of colors and materials. Due to Mrs. Winchester's debilitating arthritis, special "easy riser" stairways were installed as a replacement for her original steep construction. This allowed her to move about her home freely as she was only able to raise each foot a few inches. There was only one working toilet for Winchester; it has been said that "all other restrooms were decoys to confuse spirits" and that this is also "the reason why she slept in a different room each night".
  The home's conveniences were rare at the time of its construction. These included steam and forced-air heating, modern indoor toilets and plumbing, push-button gas lights, and Mrs. Winchester's personal (and only) hot shower from indoor plumbing. There are also three elevators, including an Otis electric and one of which was powered by a rare horizontal hydraulic elevator piston. Most elevator pistons are vertical to save space, but Winchester preferred the imp
caption: The manual and emergency tools for the Otis Automatic Electric elevator.
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