The Winchester Mystery Bouse
To Stave Of/ the Grim Reaper
Sarah Winchester Spent Three
Million Dollars Building the
World's Most Unusual House
As the first light of dawn began to streak
through the fog one morning last winter,
a shadowy figure floated out through a door
on the upper floor of the old Winchester
mansion in San Jose, California.
Tales of ghosts who inhabited the home
of the late Sarah Winchester, who spent
$3,000,000 in the 36 years the weird palace
was under construction, were revived by the
caretakers as they watched the mysterious
shadow disappear each dawn.
When a bat
was pulled
down from one
of the upper
rooms of the
160-room struc-
ture, the
"ghost" no
longer made its
morning ap-
pearance - but
the easy solu-
tion of the one
mystery only
strengthened
beliefs in other
unearthly hap-
penings in the
-place.
Custodian
John R. Brown
and his wife,
who moved
into the house
in 1923, pooh-
poohed the idea
that the spirit
of its deceased
-o wner, Mrs.
Sarah Win-
chester of. the
rifle manufac-
turing family, could cause them any
trouble.
They weren't afraid of the floating faces
and detached hands a parlor maid declared
materialized around Mrs. Winchester before
her death on September 5, 1922, at the age
of 85.
"But funny things are going on now,"
Brown said. "I've heard footsteps going
through the house at night. I get up and
look around and I can't find anything. It's
happened time and again.
"Another thing is that the door gets un-
latched. Something is unlatching it. One
,d ay it happened three times-unlatched
from the inside when I was the only person
in the house."
The odd mansion is now open to tourists,
some of whom wisecrack their way through
the place; others, particularly those who
visit the house on a dreary day, are de-
-cidedly impressed with the eerie atmos-
phere of the structure.
"Some of the people think they hear
voices in her old bedroom," one of the
guides said, "but we just hurry them
through ."
Reports of Mrs. Winchester's estate esti-
mated her fortune at $20,000,000, which had
shrunk at her death to $4,000,000, but
Brown does not believe any of the vanished
money is hidden on the grounds.
Brown said he didn't know of anything
around the place that would attract human
prowlers.
"She handled her money by checks," he
The Winchester Mystery House as it
stands today at San Jose, Califo rnia .
said.
Her will provided for a trust fund for the
majority of the beneficiaries only while they
live, the residuary estate to revert to the
General Hospital Society of Connecticut,
which also received a direct bequest of
$750,000.
Her husband, William Wirt Winchester,
son of the founder of the Winchester Arms
Company, died in Hartford, Conn., in 1886,
and she succeeded him as head of that
institution.
Mrs. Winchester was instructed by a
Boston psychic immediately after her hus-
•
by
DAN CAVANAGH
band's death to start building a spirit pal-
ace, according to local tradition, and was
told that as long as she kept b uilding, as
long as she could hear the sound of ham-
mers pounding, she would remain alive.
The resultant structure, each section of
its 160 rooms built at the whim of its own-
er-is an architectural hybrid spread over
six acres.
Outwardly the house has features that
might be classed as Roman, Greek, Orien-
tal, New Eng-
land, and half
a dozen other
styles and pe-
riods all com-
bined in one
mass.
Some have
declared that it
a pp ears to be
something out
of the 1890' s,
whose architec-
ture was
marked by its
highly orna-
mented build-
ing, attempting
to be surreal-
istic.
Inside, the
house offers
even more that
is far beyond
the understand-
ing of any of
its visitors.
There is no
plan, no fixed
arrangement of
any sort in the
house. In the
center of the second floor is a laundry
equipped with about half a dozen station-
ary tubs, adjoining a suite of drawing
rooms.
The tubs themselves have washboards
and soap trays molded into the porcelain,
of which the tubs are made.
There are 13 bathrooms. Some have
glass doors, some have screen doors.
One woman visitor, a guide related, who
saw a bathroom door of glass, said, "Our
landlady should have those put in. It
would save her so much mental anguish."
Window shutters can be opened or closed
by turning a crank. Many of the rooms
have 13 windows, chandeliers with 13 lights,
ceilings with 13 panels. The gas lights can
be lighted or turned off by pressing a
button .
Guides point out the $1000 artglass win-
dows, many of them in storerooms, the
"goofy stairs," tht doors opening against
blank walls, and many other odd features.
The 40 sta irways, most of them with 13
steps, have individual steps less than three
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