25 July 2013 / SF News / Jay Barmann
Video: Swinging Chandelier Spooks Tour Guides At Winchester Mystery House
One of the only tourist attractions in San Jose, the Winchester Mystery House, is getting some fresh publicity by way of a video purporting to show a chandelier swaying of its accord. Tour guides at the house claim that chandeliers began moving like this in two separate rooms at the same time, unbeknownst to the people seeing the phenomenon, and one staffer, Chris Turner, took a cell phone video of what he saw. The video shows the chandelier in the Venetian Dining Room swaying for quite a while, and Turner says it went on for several minutes, despite there not being an earthquake.
Now, there's no telling if someone didn't just give the chandelier a push and then start filming, but such is the way with these ghost things. You either believe the witnesses, or you don't. The house was featured on Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel last winter, and perhaps they're just trying to drum up some extra attention during the summer tourist season.
The house, in case you're unfamiliar, is a sprawling, 160-room mansion built over the course of 38 years in a series of continuous additions and alterations by rich, eccentric old woman who thought she could talk to spirits. Sarah Winchester, widow of an heir to Winchester rifle fortune, was told by a psychic that she was being cursed by the spirits of dead people who had been shot by those rifles. The psychic told her to build a house and to keep on building it or else she would die. Build she did, squandering millions on this ridiculous house which is filled with staircases that lead nowhere and doors that open onto nothing. While some have come up with explanations for the strange design, like it was meant to confuse spirits, it's just as likely that it was all a result of the constant demolition and re-construction and complete lack of design sense behind the house, as Mrs. Winchester basically made it up as she went along, day by day, asking the advice of spirits every night. And she left behind no diary or any documentation to help explain what she was thinking through the process.
Interesting tidbit: The house reached seven stories in 1906, but some of the upper levels collapsed in the Great Earthquake. Winchester herself was trapped in one room for several hours after the earthquake, and because she slept in different rooms every night (to confuse the spirits), and because the house is so huge, her servants couldn't find her for a while. Also, because she was batshit, she thought the earthquake was all about her and was a message from the spirit world not to stop construction.
Below, the chandelier video.
[CBS]
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Jay Barmann
Jay C. Barmann is a fiction writer and web editor who's lived in San Francisco for 20+ years.