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News // Bay Area & State

Everything you think you know about the Winchester

Mystery House probably isn't true
Katie Dowd, SFGATE
Updated: May 16, 2018 6:01 p.m.

15
1 of 15
The Winchester Mystery House as it appears today.
Lance Iversen / The Chronicle

The story is so famous most locals can recite it by heart: An eccentric widow,
heir to an American rifle fortune, is tortured by the horrors wrought by the
weapon. She becomes convinced only building a labyrinthine house will keep her
safe and, if construction stops, the spirits will find and kill her. The result of her
delusion is the Winchester Mystery House, a monument to madness.

It’s a memorable explanation for the unfathomable strangeness of Sarah

Winchester’s mansion. But, as far as historical record goes, there’s scant proof
for any of it.

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The insanity of Sarah Winchester is, in short, a lie.

---

The myth of Sarah Winchester begins in 1895, over a decade after Winchester
bought a modest farmhouse in San Jose. Although legend would have you believe

Winchester was on the run from an army of ghosts, the reason for her move was
familial, not supernatural. After the death of her husband, William Wirt
Winchester, of tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah decided to leave the East Coast to be
with family. Her brother-in-law was the president of Mills College, and two of
her sisters already lived in the Bay Area. Some historians believe she initially
bought the San Jose farmhouse with an eye for expansion — as the family’s
wealthiest member, she could afford to build a place to house them all.

Upon the death of her husband, Sarah, a bright young woman from New Haven,
Connecticut, instantly became one of the wealthiest women in the world. Her
share of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company amounted to a $20 million
inheritance, 50-percent ownership in the company and an income of $1,000 per
day (over $25,000 in today’s money). Flush with cash and full of architectural
ideas, Winchester set out to renovate her new property.

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 A hand-tinted ambrotype of Sarah Winchester taken in 1865 by the Taber Photographic
Company of San Francisco. Winchester was about 25 when this was taken.
Taber Photographic Co./Public Domain

From the start, she had a hard time squaring her ambitions with conventional
architecture. She parted ways with several architects before deciding to start
drawing up plans herself. With no professional training, it didn’t always go
smoothly.

"I am constantly having to make an upheaval for some reason,” Winchester wrote
to her sister-in-law in 1898. “For instance, my upper hall which leads to the
sleeping apartment was rendered so unexpectedly dark by a little addition that
after a number of people had missed their footing on the stairs I decided that
safety demanded something to be done."

Far from an exercise in spiritualism, Winchester’s labyrinth arose because she

made mistakes — and had the disposable income to carry on making them. It
didn’t help her reputation that she was naturally reserved. While most Bay Area
millionaires were out in society, attending galas and loudly donating to charities,
Winchester preferred a quiet life with the close family who occasionally lived
with her. In the absence of her own voice, locals began to gossip.

By 1895, the house was large enough to draw the speculating eyes of the
community. The Feb. 24, 1895 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article
that almost single-handedly laid the foundation for the Winchester Mystery
House legend.

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"The sound of the hammer is never hushed,” it reported. “... The reason for it is in
Mrs. Winchester's belief that when the house is entirely finished she will die."

The ghostly motivation that is so famous today is never mentioned. Instead, Mrs.
Winchester is strictly concerned with the house as the source of her
immortality.

"Whether she had discovered the secret of eternal youth and will live as long as
the building material, saws and hammers last, or is doomed to disappointed as
great as Ponce de Leon in his search for the fountain of life, is question for time
to solve,” the story concludes.

The story was so popular it was picked up by newspapers around the state. But
the narrative is dubious at best. For one, the hammers did stop — and often. In
one letter to family, Winchester said she’d suspended construction for the
summer, as it was too hot to work.

"I became rather worn and tired out and dismissed all the workmen to take such
rest as I might through the winter,” she wrote.

Colin Dickey, author of “Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places,”

speculates the growing rumors around Winchester were rooted in economic
uncertainty. In 1893, America was hit with a years-long depression.
Unemployment soared, hitting over 40-percent in some states. In Sarah
Winchester, the Bay Area found a perfect villain: a reclusive widow, wasting her
money on a pointless mansion while people starved outside its gates. Her house,
Dickey writes was a "gaudy reminder of the haves versus the have-nots "
Dickey writes, was a gaudy reminder of the haves versus the have nots.

A view of the Winchester Mystery House from inside the mansion.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

With this in mind, it’s interesting to note the 1895 Chronicle piece focuses not
the fountain of youth aspect — that only gets a few lines in a two-column story
— but on the home itself. The majority of the article describes elaborate grounds
and luxurious furnishings. A 1909 article about Winchester that ran in the
Chronicle also notes not the supernatural, but the wastefulness of her
endeavors.
 "The lonely heiress to millions has found her sole pleasure during the last seven
years in directing the efforts of workmen who are called upon to construct one
month what they destroy the next,” the story reads.

Some modern-day historians speculate one of the reasons Winchester kept

building was because of the economic climate. By continuing construction, she
was able to keep locals employed. In her unusual way, it was an act of kindness.

"She had a social conscience and she did try to give back," Winchester Mystery
House historian Janan Boehme told the Los Angeles Times in 2017.
2017. "This house,
in itself, was her biggest social work of all."

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Of the dozens of articles we found about the heiress in California newspaper

archives, none written during her lifetime mention her desperately hiding from
ghosts. Often, she’s described as an eccentric with too much money. But in other
cases, she’s praised for her ingenuity. In 1905, the San Francisco Call wrote a
glowing article about another real estate project of hers: a medieval castle in San
Mateo County.

The house will be “an imitation of the beautiful baronies of feudal times,” the Call
proclaimed. It would be “one of the most unique estates in California.”

Although it was ultimately never built, Winchester planned to have a castle with
a moat and drawbridge — a novelty, not another escape from water-abhorring
spirits.

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---

When Sarah Winchester died in 1922, the news made barely a ripple. Back in
New Haven, her hometown paper wrote excitedly of the over $1 million gift she’d
bequeathed to a local hospital. In the Bay Area, only her small circle of friends
mourned her.

“A few days ago a quiet woman went quietly out of life leaving a fortune of some
A few days ago, a quiet woman went quietly out of life, leaving a fortune of some
millions, all of it for philanthropy,” an unsigned editorial in the Mill Valley Record
wrote. “She had no children, so she gave her stocks and bonds, her wealth of
whatever form, to the public, in the most advantageous manner possible... This
woman was Mrs. Winchester…

“How many thousands of lives will be blessed by Mrs. Winchester's bequest, yet
the newspaper accounts of her going and its attendant circumstances were brief
and unadorned.”
 Mrs. Sarah Winchester in only one of two known images of her. This was taken in San Jose.

Winchester’s will gave most of her wealth to charity, and all that remained went
to her niece. Her many real estate holdings — she lived in a different, more
modest home in her final years — were auctioned off. The famed Winchester
mansion fell into the hands of John H. Brown, a theme park worker who
designed roller coasters.

One of his inventions, the Backety-Back coaster in Canada, killed a woman who
was thrown from a car. After her death, the Browns moved to California. When
the Winchester house went up for rent, Brown and his wife Mayme jumped at
the chance and quickly began playing up the home’s strangeness.

Less than two years after Sarah Winchester’s death, newspapers were suddenly
beginning to write about the mansion’s supernatural powers.

“The seance room, dedicated to the spirit world in which Mrs. Winchester had
such faith, is magnificently done in heavy velvet of many colors,” the Healdsburg
Tribune wrote in 1924. “... Here are hundreds of clothes hooks, upon which hang
many costumes. Mrs. Winchester, it is said, believed that she could don any of
these costumes and speak to the spirits of the characters of the area
Skiprepresented
to main content by the clothing.” Sign In
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(I i h i h Th f Wi h
(It is worth noting here: There are no contemporary accounts of Winchester

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The myth took hold, though, and the home, with its dead ends and tight turns, is
easy to imagine as haunted. Although the spirits are fun, the ghosts shroud the
real life of a fascinating, creative woman. Winchester was "as sane and clear
headed a woman as I have ever known,” her lawyer Samuel Leib said after her
death. “She had a better grasp of business and financial affairs than most men."

The legend of Sarah Winchester, Dickey writes in "Ghostland," combines our

"uneasiness about women living alone, withdrawn from society" and "the gun
that won the West and the violence white Americans carried out in the name of
civilization."

"It's a compelling story, perhaps, because it's one in which Sarah Winchester is
punished for her transgressions," Dickey writes. "... We've projected shame on
her."

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 Written By
Katie Dowd

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Katie Dowd is the SFGATE Managing Editor. 

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