The Winchester Mystery HouseYet again, we here at Waylaid are proud to bring you only the best of Roadside Americana. The Winchester Mystery House is indeed a real place. If you know the way to San Jose and have $12, you can tour it.
The ornate, sprawling, and haphazard behemoth was the product of the more than slightly loony heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune, Mrs. Sarah Winchester. Following the deaths of her husband and daughter, the distraught Ma Winchester consulted a medium. Big mistake. Rather than comforting the poor woman, the medium warned Sarah that her family was cursed by the spirits of all those who had been killed by Winchester guns. To appease the spirits, she had to construct a place for them to live. A big place. An enormous place. And, the medium added rather forbiddingly, if construction on the house ever ceased, so would Sarah's life.
Burdened with this news and a tremendous fortune in cash, poor Sarah bought a simple, 8 room farmhouse in San Jose, and began building on to it in the spring of 1884. Construction continued, 365 days a year, round the clock, until her death on September 5, 1922.
Since Sarah was no architect, and since she was more than a trifle. . .eccentric. . .the resulting house is a bizarre and senseless labyrinth, complete with secret passages, ten-foot drops from doorways, hallways to nowhere, and monstrous staircases containing two inch high steps.
Contrary to what you may read in this chapter, tour groups are actually taken in to 110 out of the mansion's 160 rooms. But hey, there is a Good Guy's electronics store across the street.
To visit The Winchester Mystery House's Home page, click here.
For a personal account of visits to crazy Mrs. Winchester's, click here.