A spiritualist in the mid-1800s, when plenty of sane Americans believed they could communicate with the dead, Wincehster became terrified that her misfortunes, especially the death of her husband and one-month old daughter, were cosmic retribution from all the spirits killed by Winchester rifles. The answer: Her building is a ghost story of the American gun. In 1911, the San Jose Mercury News called Winchester’s colossus a “great question mark in a sea of apricot and olive orchards.” Over a century later, the San Francisco Chronicle was still baffled: “the Mansion is an ornately complex answer to a very simple question: Why?” She had apparently forgotten about it and built over it. It had two chairs, an early 1900s speaker that fit into an old phonograph, and a door latched by a 1910 lock. Winchester hastily sketched designs on napkins or brown paper for carpenters to build additions, towers, cupolas or rooms that made no sense and had no purpose, sometimes only to be plastered over the next day. She built her house with shifts of 16 carpenters who were paid three times the going rate and worked 24 hours a day, every day, from 1886 until Sarah’s death in 1922.Īn American Penelope, working in wood rather than yarn, Winchester wove and unwove eternally. After she moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to San Jose, Winchester dedicated a large part of her fortune to ceaseless, enigmatic building. Her father-in-law Oliver Winchester, manufacturer of the famous repeater rifle, died in 1880, and her husband, Will, also in the family gun business, died a year later. Winchester had inherited a vast fortune off of guns. In this provocative and deeply-researched work of narrative history, Haag fundamentally revises the history of arms in America, and in so doing explodes the clichés that have created and sustained our lethal gun culture. Take Caltrain to Santa Clara and then the VTA bus 60 to the Winchester Transit Center.The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture Special events, from wine walks to October “Fright Nights” are often offered (check the website for details and schedules. The Winchester Mystery House is open daily and offers an array of guided tours, ranging from 25 minutes to two hours (from $5 per person). And visitors are treated to the oddities as well as the spooks (there are reports of frequent ghost sightings). The house is painstakingly maintained and constantly restored, with lavish furnishings like those Mrs. Today, the legend and the legacy live on in Sarah’s bizarre Victorian beauty. When Sarah passed away in 1922, the still-incomplete (after 38 years of construction) house sprawled out over six acres and held 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 47 stairways, six kitchens… (you get the picture). The result is a maze of twisting hallways, secret passageways, stairways going nowhere, and even doors in the floor. Built to confuse the malicious spirits pursuing the widow, the house has no overarching rhyme or reason in its plans-except to make it impossible to navigate without knowing where you’re going. Winchester purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began her life’s work on a “house of spirits,” constructed with the assistance of friendly ghosts she contacted through her seance room. Rumored to be the most haunted mansion in the Bay Area, San Jose’s infamous Winchester Mystery House is both home to ghouls galore and an architectural road map to the psyche of its disturbed and eccentric creator, Sarah Winchester. After the 1881 death of her gun-magnate husband (whose family manufactured the famous Winchester repeating rifle), the distressed New England society wife was advised by a medium that she must move west to flee the ghosts of those who had fallen victim to rifle’s fire.
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