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 Winchester Mystery House Nobody ever accused Sarah Winchester of playing with a full deck. But because she was wealthy (in pre-tax days, she had an income over $1,000 a day), she was labeled eccentric rather than crazy. Today the tangible results of her derangement—the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California—is a major tourist attraction.
Mrs. Winchester became depressed when her only child died in 1866. After her husband William died fifteen years later, Sarah sought comfort from spiritualists. The widow came to believe that continuous building onto her house would grant her eternal life. Having inherited twenty million dollars from the Winchester Rifle fortune, she had the means to keep construction going 24 hours a day for 38 years. She had not only the means, but also the drive. It mattered not that much of the construction made no sense; it was important only that it not stop. The clatter of hammers and saws punctuated the air throughout the days. And the nights. In the late 1800s, Santa Clara Valley was rural and uncrowded. Sarah had room to build on the 160+ acres she owned.
Mrs. Winchester was her own architect, using no blueprints or plans, aided only by the spirits she consulted in the Séance Room she had built. Nightly, she went there to talk to them and get guidance on what to build next. Did Mrs. Winchester design the house? Or did spirits? Was she compulsive? Possessed? Inspired? Or just plain crazy? No one knows. And perhaps it doesn't matter. What she left was a legacy that enthralls visitors from around the world.
The Winchester Mystery House is a quirky, captivating, and pixilated place that appeals to all ages. Youngsters love the doors that open into walls, a staircase that reaches the ceiling with no outlet, and bizarre twists and turns throughout the house. Adults chuckle at the upside down posts, the window built into a floor, and the cupboard that is only half an inch deep. Bathrooms have transparent glass doors. One bathroom for servants can be locked—but only from the outside. A switchback stairway that climbs only nine feet has seven turns and 44 steps. A chimney ascends four floors yet stops a foot and a half from the roof, rendering it useless. It didn’t matter; most rooms in the house were never used.
Sarah lived with a few servants in a house with 40 bedrooms, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, two basements, 52 skylights, half a dozen kitchens, 10,000 windows, 467 entry doors, 361 stairsteps (some in gradations of only two inches), and only 3 mirrors.
Thirteen was an important number to Sarah. One sink has 13 drain holes, windows have 13 panes, the house contains 13 bathrooms, the Séance Room has 13 hooks for her 13 robes, the greenhouse has 13 glass cupolas, 13 gas jets are on the ballroom chandelier, and on and on.
Interspersed among the oddities that cause visitors to smile and shake their heads are exquisite touches, such as ornate glass doors (imported from Europe by the Tiffany Company) costing $3,000 that were installed at the front entrance but never used, silver chandeliers from Germany, beautiful doorknobs, and inlaid floors. A beautiful Tiffany-imported glass window that was once on an outside wall soon was built around and now is blocked forever from sunlight.
Several storerooms containing treasures worth millions today (valued at $25,000 at the time of Sarah’s demise) hold imported wallpaper, crystal light fixtures, furnishings, and hardware.
After the 1906 earthquake that toppled the seven-story observation tower and caused other damage to the house, Mrs. Winchester had the front half of the house sealed off. She feared the spirits were angry because that part of the house was nearly finished.
She employed dozens of carpenters and was generous with them (sometimes paying double the going wages). At the Winchester house, there was always plenty of work. Woodworkers would finish a room one week and rip it apart the next. One carpenter spent his entire working life on the floors—crafting them from fine woods like oak, mahogany, and rosewood, installing them, and then tearing them up. At the time that an entire house could be built for $1,000, one of Sarah’s grand ballrooms cost $9,000. All in all, she spent $5.5 million dollars transforming a simple eight-room farmhouse into an outlandish and delightful 160-room sprawling mansion.
The cacophony of hammers and building equipment stopped only when Sarah died at the age of 82, in 1922. Except for maintenance and restoration, the house remains today in the same condition it was on the day that Sarah took her last breath.
The house is a California Registered Historical Landmark and is also on the National Register of Historic Places, thus ensuring that generations to come will enjoy this one-of-a-kind dwelling.
Visitors can tour 112 of the 160 rooms, along with 4-1/2 acres of gardens, as well as the Winchester Firearms Museum and Winchester Antique Products Museum. The house tour has one mile of walking through the labyrinthine house. The gardens hold trees from around the world, a large variety of flowers, herb, vegetables, and decorations of statues and fountains.
A mansion tour and a behind-the-scenes tour of the Winchester Mystery House are given seven days a week year round. On Fridays the thirteenth and Halloween they offer a nighttime flashlight tour.
Winchester Mystery House
525 South Winchester Blvd.
San Jose, CA 95128
408/247-2000
www.winchestermysteryhouse.com The Staup House The Staup House (pronouced "Stop") is a old, run down house along Staup Road in Fairfield Township, MI. The property consists of a delapidated house, several old sheds, rusty/aged farming equipment a large barn with an old trailer inside. It is a local site for legend tripping, as many teens from around the Lenawee County area make visits to the "haunted house" at night. Often they will carry flashlights and visit in large numbers, but it is said to be much more eerie to visit in a small group. Many stories have spread about the old and convincingly creepy house, sheds, and giant barn. Claims have been made that teenagers have gone to the old house with baseball bats, and smashed many of the fragile parts of the house. The actual house has several holes in the floor and walls, including one room in which the entire floor is gone. Also, the stairs to the upper level and basement are both in severely bad shape. All of this could be the result of vandalizing teens, or possibly just decades of aging. One certainty that makes the house so mysterious and spookish is that in order to get to the house from any urban area the traveler must turn on and off of two dirt roads. Staup Rd. is off of Arnold Hwy., both of which are dirt roads lined with tall corn fields and desolate storehouses. Recently, Arnold Hwy. comes to a dead end and its bridge is out, with Staup Rd. being at the immediate left. It is commonly claimed that the Staup House is in fact an actual haunted house. Numerous stories have been proclaimed over sights of ghosts and horrid images. Also many stories involve guests hearing sounds of screaming voices and loud, ghoulish breathing. Most stories are very far-fetched and mostly fabrications passed around among teenagers in order to make the experience more frightening.
One widely spread tale is that the original and only owner of the house, the farmer, went crazy one night and killed off his entire family. It is said that he shot his family members with a shotgun, chopped them to pieces in his basement, buried them, and then hung himself.
Another legend is that the owner of the farm during the 19th century disguised his farm house as a "safe house" or a "station" of the Underground Railroad, leaving a light on in his basement at night. When escaped slaves would wander into his house for shelter, he would slaughter them one by one. This myth has also been told with the farmer committing suicide after he finished the killings.
Borley Rectory
In England, a country often associated with ghosts and haunted mansions and castles, Borley Rectory makes the claim of being "the most haunted house in England." And there's quite a bit of anecdotal evidence to support that claim. The rectory was built in 1863 next to Borley Church as a home for Reverend Henry Bull. Over the years it was the site of intense poltergeist activity, including spontaneous displacement of objects, strange odors, cold spots, the sound of galloping horses and ghostly apparitions. Even after the rectory was destroyed by fire in 1939, photos taken around the ruins of the building and the adjacent church continued to contain unexplained elements. One of the last residents of the house, Capt. W. H. Gregson, reported that the spirit of a nun had been seen wandering the grounds on several occasions. After the nun was seen peering out of a window a few times, the window was bricked up. "The disastrous fire at the Rectory may have had some disturbing influence," Gregson wrote, "because during the night of the fire, several people report having seen me, accompanied by two 'strangers,' one, a 'lady, dressed in a grey cloak,' the other, 'a gentleman with a sort of bald head, dressed in a long black gown.'" Some of the most chilling experiences took place around Marianne, the wife of Reverend Lionel Foyster who took residence in the house on October 16, 1930. An entity attempted to communicate with Marianne through scrawled handwriting on the walls - an event documented in photographs. Other mysterious photos show a floating brick, an unknown floating ribbon-like thing and other ghostly figures. Anomalous images continue to appear on photos taken on the rectory grounds up to the present day. Just last July, 2000, a photo taken behind the church shows a mysterious orb.
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