Eccentric widow’s quirky mansion
It’s one of America’s biggest and creepiest houses. The reclusive widow who created Winchester House had no architectural training – instead she reportedly held séances to ask the spirits for advice on how to build her mansion. Now almost 100 years later Oscar-winning actress Helen Mirren is bringing eccentric Sarah Winchester back to life on the big screen
STAIRCASES leading nowhere, turrets where séances used to be held and corridors so labyrinthine staff need maps to navigate them . . . Winchester House in San Jose, California, definitely is no ordinary home. But while the sprawling Victorian mansion may not be to everyone’s taste, its creation was a true labour of love. For almost four decades eccentric widow Sarah Winchester poured her heart and soul into the ambitious construction project, adding rooms and embellishments. Having inherited a fortune after the death of her husband, money was no object – so for 365 days a year the American heiress had a dedicated team of builders working around the clock in shifts.
The result: one of America’s mosttalked-about homes, a sprawling 160room maze in which visitors often get lost. But some maintain there was something else driving Winchester other than the desire to own the area’s largest house. Dogged by the terrifying belief that she was cursed, she reportedly embarked on the never-ending construction project in a bid to appease the spirits whom she maintained held a grudge against her. So for 38 years until her death in 1922 she worked tirelessly on the house which ballooned to 2 230m2.
It’s no wonder that this peculiar story has caught the attention of Hollywood. Winchester, starring Helen Mirren, hits movie theatres this month, shining a spotlight on the recluse’s sad and strange life.
RAISED in New Haven, Connecticut, Sarah Lockwood Pardee was one of seven children born to Leonard Pardee and Sarah Burns. Considered something of a child prodigy, by age 12 in addition to English she was fluent in Latin, Italian, Spanish and French.
At age 22 she married into a weapons dynasty when she wed William Winchester whose father had founded the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.
Four years into their marriage they welcomed the birth of a daughter, Annie, but sadly within just six weeks the infant died from marasmus – an extreme protein deficiency. It usually occurs due to poverty, but can sometimes be caused by viral or bacterial infections, or chronic diarrhoea.
The tragedy didn’t stop there for Winchester, who remained childless. Her husband died from tuberculosis in 1881 after working with her to build their expansive home in New Haven.
After his death his widow, then 41, inherited half of the fortune from the Winchester company, which amounted to $20 million – the equivalent of about $515 million (or more than R6 billion today). Suddenly, she was one of the wealthiest women in America.
Winchester embarked on a three-year world tour during which she’s believed to have visited key architectural landmarks, before eventually settling in San Jose, California – then a small area known for its agricultural lands. She purchased an eight-room farmhouse, and immediately set to work on it.
Then, the stories began circulating. Her relentless efforts puzzled her family and neighbours and her silence and reclusiveness only served to intensify suspicion about her.
“It fed all the legends and rumours – she wouldn’t talk about herself so people made things up,” says Winchester House historian Janan Boehme. “She was Bill Gates-rich from this famous family, so people watched her, talked about her and speculated.”
According to one theory Winchester was so distraught after her husband’s
death that she consulted famous Boston medium Adam Coons. During a séance in which he channelled her husband, he reportedly told her she was cursed because of all the people who’d been killed by the Winchester guns that built her family’s fortune. He told her the only way to atone for it was by building the spirits a house.
After purchasing the farmhouse with its 65 hectares of farmland she hired a crew of 20 builders and carpenters to start work on her vast construction project which was to go on for 38 years. They apparently worked in rotating shifts, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Over time the house mushroomed outwards and upwards, growing to more than 160 rooms and reaching a height of seven storeys in some places. She eventually chose to paint the mansion bright yellow and red.
Although Winchester was a highly accomplished woman, capable of speaking five languages and playing three instruments, she had no architectural training. But she didn’t let this stop her. After parting ways with several architects who were reluctant to carry out her wishes, she took over the draughtsmanship herself. Rumour has it she held nighttime séances in a peaked turret of the house known as The Witch’s Cap – and would deliver new building plans to her foreman in the morning.
“Wherever these plans came from they came at night,” says Winchester tour guide Nicole Calande with an excited gleam in her eye.
All over the house you’ll find the numbers seven and 11 reflected in the architecture – Winchester reportedly believed them to be lucky. She also included unlucky number 13 as she hoped it would ward off evil spirits. Rumour has it she also took the precaution of sleeping in a different room every night to throw them off her trail.
Mirren (72) believes Winchester’s fascination with spiritualism was sparked by her all-consuming grief. For decades after her husband’s death the heiress continued to mourn him, wearing stifling long black dresses in the baking hot San Jose sun.
“She went into mourning and stayed in mourning for the rest of her life,” says Mirren, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen (2007).
Mirren believes Winchester’s attempts to communicate with the spirit world and her grand building project were ways of helping her cope with her loss.
“When you lose someone the losses can be so unbearable, so difficult, that the only way you can deal with your grief is by feeling they’re still with you in some way or another,” she adds.
Regardless of what inspired Winchester, what took shape on her property became increasingly jarring over the years. Hidden within the Winchester house is an old farm bell and a giant water tower, which once resided in the backyard, but as building expanded were simply covered up with walls and swallowed into the home.
Among its many quirks is a staircase that goes up to a ceiling and then just stops dead – this is because at one point Winchester decided to have a passage built over it and couldn’t be bothered tearing it down.
“I’m constantly having to make an upheaval for some reason,” Winchester complained in a letter to her sister-inlaw 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 some-
‘This house looks like it was built by a crazy person'
thing to be done.”
Another oddball feature is the Door to Nowhere – a second-storey door that opens to a six-metre drop to the concrete floor below.
“It definitely got weirder over the years,” Boehme says. “After 1906, she herself said in a letter, ‘This house looks like it was built by a crazy person.’ So many things got boarded up, and were unfinished and unrepaired.”
FOR the 38 years that the house was under construction, it cost an estimated $5 million (about $73 million – or R876 million today). Yet some historians have speculated there was another reason for Winchester’s endless renovations, and it had nothing to do with ghosts or mourning her dead husband. They say quite simply she was an eccentric with too much money.
Some believe she had such a strong social conscience that she couldn’t stand to see the job done because she knew it would mean putting her loyal team of builders out of work – so instead she kept on finding ways to extend her house to keep them busy.
“We may never know why she built like she did,” Boehme says. “But people do certainly conjecture.”
Winchester lived in the house for most of her life and for 15 years was joined by her favourite niece, Marian Marriott, who kept her company and staved off conmen trying to swindle the elderly widow out of her vast fortune.
In 1906 disaster struck in the form of an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7,8 that ripped through northern California. It caused fires in nearby San Francisco where approximately 3 000 people died.
The Winchester house, about 80km away, wasn’t hit nearly as hard but still experienced the earthquake’s effects. More than a century later many rooms remain unrepaired from the damage. Winchester was terrified – rumour has it she became trapped in one of the many rooms she rotated as her bedroom, and the mansion’s staff had to pry open the door with a crowbar to rescue her.
She died in her sleep of heart failure at the home on 5 September 1922. After her death all construction immediately ground to a halt. There was a small funeral ceremony in Palo Alto, California, and she was buried next to her husband and infant daughter at Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut.
A fiercely private person for her entire life, there’s little to remember her by apart from her now famed home. To this day only two photographs of her exist: one as a chubby-cheeked young woman in her 20s, the other as a stern widow in black Victorian garb sitting in a horsedrawn carriage in front of her mansion.
Mirren developed a deep respect and affection for Winchester while filming her haunted-house thriller. Although her portrayal is bound to send shivers down cinemagoers’ spines, the veteran British actress describes it as more of a “ghost story” than a horror flick.
Having spent so much time on the grounds of the Winchester Mystery House – as it’s now known – while filming the movie, she remains sceptical about the theory that the mansion is home to restless spirits.
“If it’s haunted l feel it’s something very benign. I feel sort of a great . . . I feel a sweetness in the house, not a horror. There’s a sweetness in it. It’s haunted by something sweet. If it’s haunted.”
She enjoyed playing Winchester because she was such a nuanced character.
“There are many understandings of her. Was she haunted? Was she crazy?”
That question has puzzled historians for decades.
After her death Winchester’s lawyer, Samuel Leib, defended her, saying she was “as sane and clear-headed a woman as I have ever known”.
“She had a better grasp of business and financial affairs than most men,” he added.
Boehme theorises that instead of being possessed or mad, the diminutive widow was reclusive because of her debilitating rheumatoid arthritis that left her hands disfigured, and her gnarled teeth which required her to wear dentures. One thing she does know for sure is that Winchester’s home is full of secrets.
“I’ve heard things I can’t explain – footsteps, voices. You’ll hear whispers and stuff sometimes,” she says. “But I think whatever is here has always been positive. She was such a good person.”
Sometimes visitors tell her they’ve spotted what she calls the “wheelbarrow ghost” – a spirit trotting around the property in overalls, carrying a toolbox and pushing a wheelbarrow.
TODAY the Winchester House is one of San Jose’s more prominent tourist attractions, with visitors paying $ 40 (R480) to visit it. Its exterior façade and gardens have been meticulously restored but many of its rooms lie unfinished.
After Winchester died the estate was divided up among a number of charities and the people who’d faithfully spent years in her service. The house was sold in 1922 on condition that it be preserved as a “living” museum. The family who own it now have expressed their desire not to be named
Boehme thinks giving tours of the home is, in a way, allowing Winchester to be philanthropic from beyond the grave.
“She had a social conscience and she did try to give back,” she says. “This house, in itself, was her biggest social work of all.”