The Winchester Mystery House: Sarah Winchester and the Legend She Never Explained

Few houses in America have accumulated as much mythology as the Winchester Mystery House.

There are staircases that seem to go nowhere.

Doors open where no sensible door should be.

Windows look into other rooms.

Hallways turn unexpectedly.

Rooms were built, altered and rebuilt.

And for decades, construction transformed what began as a relatively modest farmhouse into an enormous Victorian labyrinth.

The traditional explanation is irresistible.

Sarah Winchester, enormously wealthy heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, supposedly believed she was being haunted by the spirits of people killed with Winchester firearms. A medium warned her that she must travel west and build a house for the dead.

Construction could never stop.

If the building stopped, Sarah would die.

So carpenters supposedly worked day and night for decades while Sarah consulted the spirits during séances and followed their architectural instructions.

It is one of America’s greatest ghost stories.

Much of it is probably untrue.

The interesting part is that Sarah Winchester never really told us why she built the house. The lack of an explanation created a vacuum, and more than a century later, ghosts are still filling it.

Sarah Winchester

Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1839.

In 1862, she married William Wirt Winchester, son of Oliver Winchester, whose company manufactured the famous Winchester repeating rifle.

Their only child, Annie Pardee Winchester, was born in 1866.

She lived for little more than a month.

Then, in 1881, William died of tuberculosis.

Sarah was left a wealthy widow.

Popular versions of the story portray these deaths as destroying her emotionally and sending her searching for supernatural answers.

Perhaps grief did profoundly influence her later life.

That would hardly be surprising.

But the familiar story goes considerably further.

The Medium

According to legend, Sarah consulted a medium after William’s death.

The medium informed her that the Winchester family was cursed.

Thousands of people had been killed by Winchester rifles, and their restless spirits were seeking revenge against the family responsible for producing the weapons.

Sarah’s daughter and husband had supposedly been among their victims.

If Sarah wanted to escape the curse, she needed to leave Connecticut, travel west and build a house.

And she must never stop building it.

As long as construction continued, Sarah would remain alive.

Stop building and the spirits would finally claim her.

It is a magnificent beginning to a haunted-house story.

There is just one substantial problem.

There is no good evidence that this meeting ever happened.

Researchers have been unable to substantiate the supposed consultation with the medium traditionally named in later versions, and Sarah’s relatives and employees did not leave accounts describing her as obsessed with séances or frightened by the ghosts of rifle victims.

That doesn’t prove Sarah never consulted a medium. Spiritualism was enormously popular during her lifetime, including among educated and wealthy Americans.

It simply means we cannot responsibly say that she did.

California

Sarah eventually moved west.

In 1886, she purchased a two-story farmhouse near San Jose in California’s Santa Clara Valley.

She called the property Llanada Villa.

Then she began changing it.

And changing it.

And changing it.

The original house grew enormously during the following decades. At its greatest extent, portions reportedly reached seven stories before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake badly damaged the building and much of the upper structure was subsequently removed.

By the time Sarah died, the surviving house was extraordinary.

Today it contains approximately 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways and fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms and six kitchens within roughly 24,000 square feet.

Whatever motivated Sarah Winchester, she certainly didn’t think small.

Construction Until Death

One of the most famous claims is that construction continued twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, from Sarah’s arrival until her death.

That isn’t accurate.

Construction lasted for decades, but it stopped at various times.

Sarah sometimes suspended work for months. Construction also ceased for a lengthy period while relatives stayed at the property during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Even the official Winchester history now gives a more nuanced chronology.

The most intensive expansion occurred particularly during the 1890s, and the house was extensively altered following earthquake damage in 1906.

So the carpenters were not hammering away without interruption for thirty-six years because Sarah believed one silent night would kill her.

That part belongs largely to the legend.

But there really was an astonishing amount of construction.

And Sarah apparently did take an intense personal interest in architecture.

A House Without a Master Plan

This may explain many of the features later interpreted as supernatural.

Sarah was not simply constructing a mansion from a completed architectural blueprint.

She experimented.

Rooms were changed.

Sections were added.

Earlier portions became enclosed by later additions.

A window that originally faced outside might eventually face another room.

A doorway could lose its original purpose.

The house developed organically over decades rather than being executed as one unified architectural design.

Then came the earthquake.

In 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake seriously damaged Llanada Villa.

The seven-story tower and most of the fourth floor were subsequently demolished.

That history goes a long way toward explaining why parts of the house seem irrational today.

But not all of its peculiarities are quite so easily forgotten.

Stairs to Nowhere

The Winchester Mystery House became famous for architectural oddities.

Staircases appear to terminate unexpectedly.

Doors lead nowhere.

One notorious doorway opens above a substantial drop.

There are extremely shallow stairs.

There are interior windows.

There are strange changes in floor level.

For decades, guides and writers claimed these features were deliberately designed to confuse ghosts.

A pursuing spirit would follow Sarah down a corridor, encounter some architectural impossibility and apparently become hopelessly lost.

That assumes ghosts have a surprisingly poor sense of direction.

There are more practical explanations for many features.

Some resulted from repeated remodeling.

Others may reflect Sarah’s changing physical needs. Her health deteriorated as she aged, and shallow stairs would have made movement easier.

Earthquake damage and subsequent reconstruction further altered the building.

And some features that appear absurd when isolated on a modern tour may originally have made sense within an earlier configuration of the house.

The house is strange.

But strange architecture does not automatically mean supernatural architecture.

The Séance Room

Perhaps no room has contributed more to the legend than the supposed séance room.

Visitors have long been told that Sarah entered this room at midnight and communicated with spirits until approximately two in the morning.

The dead supposedly instructed her on what should be constructed the following day.

She then left through a different door so the spirits couldn’t follow her.

It’s wonderfully theatrical.

Unfortunately, Sarah’s employees apparently left no evidence that nightly séances occurred, and research into the room traditionally identified with these rituals indicates that it may actually have been used as a gardener’s bedroom.

That doesn’t absolutely prove Sarah never attempted to communicate with the dead anywhere in her enormous house.

It does make the nightly architectural conferences with Winchester rifle victims extremely doubtful.

The Number Thirteen

Then there is thirteen.

The Winchester Mystery House has become famous for supposedly incorporating the number throughout its architecture.

Thirteen bathrooms.

Thirteen windows.

Thirteen hooks.

Thirteen panes.

Thirteen steps.

Thirteen everywhere.

The implication is that Sarah possessed some elaborate occult fascination with the number.

Here again, later alterations complicate matters.

Some of the supposedly significant thirteen-related features appear to have been added or emphasized after Sarah’s death as the property’s supernatural reputation developed. Carpenter James Perkins later stated that several of the features used to support the superstition stories were constructed after Sarah died.

Other supposedly mysterious decorative motifs, including spiderwebs and daisies, were fashionable during the Aesthetic Movement rather than secret occult symbols.

Once a house is famous for mysteries, almost anything inside it can become evidence.

The Woman in Black

Sarah’s reputation didn’t help.

She was frequently portrayed as an eccentric widow dressed perpetually in black, wandering alone through her enormous house while avoiding human contact.

The reality was more complicated.

Sarah valued privacy, but she was not completely isolated.

Her niece Marion “Daisy” Merriman lived with her for approximately fifteen years. Sarah maintained relationships with relatives, employed numerous workers and managed considerable financial and property interests.

She was also an exceptionally wealthy woman directing an enormous architectural project during an era when women were not expected to behave that way.

That may have mattered.

Historian Christine R. Junker argues that the mythology surrounding Sarah and her supposedly “crazy” house reveals as much about cultural attitudes toward gender, wealth and domesticity as it does about Sarah herself.

A wealthy man endlessly expanding his estate might have been called eccentric.

A wealthy widow doing it alone made better newspaper copy.

The Newspapers Create a Legend

Importantly, the supernatural rumors did not begin decades after Sarah died.

They were circulating during her lifetime.

By 1895, newspapers were already suggesting that Sarah believed she would die when construction stopped. Sarah apparently never publicly explained her motives, allowing speculation to flourish.

In 1911, the San Francisco Examiner was calling the property a “House of Mystery.”

This is important because it prevents us from dismissing the entire legend as something invented by later tour operators.

Something about Sarah and her house genuinely fascinated and puzzled her contemporaries.

What we cannot safely do is assume that everything those newspapers printed was true.

Sensational journalism existed long before the Internet discovered clickbait.

Why Didn’t Sarah Correct Them?

This may be the most intriguing question.

Sarah Winchester apparently knew people were talking about her.

She could have explained the house.

She didn’t.

Perhaps she considered the gossip beneath her dignity.

Perhaps she valued privacy.

Perhaps she enjoyed allowing people to wonder.

Perhaps her reasons were entirely personal.

Or perhaps some portion of the story was true and she simply didn’t wish to discuss it.

That last possibility cannot be demonstrated.

But neither can we reconstruct Sarah’s private thoughts with certainty.

Her personal papers were left to her niece, and the Winchester Mystery House reports that their eventual fate is unknown. No surviving diary provides the explanation everyone wants.

Sarah took the answer with her.

Sarah Dies

On September 5, 1922, Sarah Winchester died at Llanada Villa.

She was eighty-three years old.

Construction stopped.

That fact naturally strengthened the legend.

The medium had supposedly warned that Sarah would die when construction ceased.

Construction ceased when Sarah died.

The direction of cause and effect became irrelevant to a good ghost story.

After her death, the property was sold.

In 1923, John and Mayme Brown leased the house and initially hoped to develop the grounds as a recreational attraction. Visitors, however, were far more interested in the strange mansion and the stories already surrounding Sarah Winchester.

The Winchester Mystery House was born.

And the legend grew.

But What About the Ghosts?

Correcting the mythology surrounding Sarah Winchester doesn’t answer a different question.

Is the house haunted?

Visitors and employees have reported strange experiences over the years.

Footsteps.

Voices.

Doors moving.

Cold areas.

Unexplained sounds.

The feeling of being watched.

Shadowy figures.

Some people have reported smelling food cooking when there was no obvious source.

None of these reports proves supernatural activity.

A 160-room Victorian house is an exceptionally good environment for producing mysterious sounds, drafts, shadows and disorientation.

But the experiences remain part of the building’s history.

And there is something wonderfully ironic about that.

Sarah may not have built her house because it was haunted.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it never became haunted afterward.

The Workers

If one wanted to speculate about ghosts at Llanada Villa, the Winchester rifle victims may not even be the most obvious candidates.

Sarah employed generations of craftsmen and servants.

Carpenters spent years altering the building.

People lived there.

People worked there.

People became intimately familiar with corridors and rooms that no longer exist in their original configurations.

Restoration work has even uncovered messages left behind walls by Sarah’s workers, including measurements, calculations, signatures and other traces of ordinary people who helped construct the house.

Perhaps the most interesting ghosts in the Winchester Mystery House aren’t victims of rifles at all.

Perhaps they are the people who actually knew the place.

Sarah Deserves Better Than the Legend

There is a danger in correcting the Winchester story too aggressively.

Strip away every legend and Sarah can become nothing more than a misunderstood amateur architect.

Accept every legend and she becomes a deranged widow terrified of imaginary ghosts.

Neither seems satisfactory.

Sarah Winchester was intelligent, wealthy, private and apparently deeply interested in architecture and beautiful objects. Scholarly work on her surviving home emphasizes the extraordinary quality of its decorative arts and her interest in architectural innovation.

She was also a woman who experienced profound loss.

She lived during the great age of American Spiritualism.

She constructed one of the strangest private residences in the country.

And she chose not to leave us an explanation for it.

We don’t need to turn her into a madwoman to preserve the mystery.

Maybe the Wrong Story Became Famous

The traditional Winchester legend asks:

Was Sarah building to escape the ghosts?

Perhaps the more interesting question is:

What was Sarah actually trying to build?

Maybe Llanada Villa was an enormous architectural experiment.

Maybe construction gave purpose to her life.

Maybe she enjoyed solving architectural problems.

Maybe employing workers was important to her.

Maybe the constant remodeling reflected nothing more supernatural than an extraordinarily wealthy woman who could afford to change her mind.

Or perhaps there was something deeply personal behind the design that disappeared with her papers.

There may even have been some Spiritualist influence that historians simply cannot recover.

The evidence doesn’t permit certainty.

And uncertainty is not the enemy of mystery.

Sometimes it is the source of it.

The House Remains

The Winchester Mystery House still stands in San Jose.

Its official history now openly distinguishes between what is known and what remains legendary, while acknowledging that Sarah herself never publicly explained why she kept expanding Llanada Villa.

That seems appropriate.

We can discard the claim that carpenters worked every minute for decades.

We can question the medium.

We can doubt the nightly séances.

We can explain many of the doors, stairs and windows without invoking spirits.

We can recognize how newspapers and later tourism enlarged the legend.

And after doing all of that, we are still left with Sarah Winchester and her extraordinary house.

Perhaps that is the real mystery.

The legend has been repeated so often that we sometimes mistake disproving the legend for solving the woman.

It isn’t.

Sarah spent more than three decades transforming an ordinary farmhouse into something almost impossible to describe. She had the money to build virtually whatever she wanted.

And this is what she chose.

Why?

Sarah Winchester had thirty-six years to tell everyone.

She never did.

And perhaps somewhere among those 160 rooms, staircases, doors, windows and passages, the answer is still hiding in the house she left behind.

The Earthquake May Explain the Mystery

There is another explanation for many of the Winchester House’s most famous architectural oddities, and unfortunately for the legend, it may be the strongest one.

The house that visitors see today is not the house Sarah Winchester originally built. The devastating 1906 earthquake badly damaged the enormous residence, which had grown to as many as seven stories in places. Large portions of the upper structure were subsequently removed rather than reconstructed. Other sections were altered, abandoned, enclosed or repurposed.

Seen in that context, some of the mansion’s supposedly supernatural architecture begins to make considerably more sense. A staircase that once continued into another portion of the house might suddenly lead nowhere. A doorway could lose its destination. An exterior window might become an interior window after later construction surrounded it. What appears to have been deliberately designed as a labyrinth may instead preserve the scars of decades of remodeling followed by catastrophic earthquake damage.

After Sarah’s death in 1922, the house quickly became a tourist attraction, and the strange architecture provided physical evidence for stories already circulating about its eccentric owner. Features that could be explained by construction, alteration and earthquake damage were far more intriguing when attributed to séances and spirits.

That does not necessarily mean every Winchester legend was deliberately fabricated. Stories about Sarah’s unusual house were circulating during her lifetime, and she did remarkably little to correct them. Later owners inherited both the mansion and its mythology. Over time, the two became almost impossible to separate.

Perhaps Sarah Winchester never built staircases to confuse ghosts at all.

Perhaps an earthquake created the labyrinth, and the ghosts moved in afterward.

About the Author

Laura Wright

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