Psychic Detective
Each month, ex-cop and psychic Nicky Alan teams up with her spirit guides to investigate an unsolved mystery. This month she considers the Winchester Mystery House...
Awidow, heiress to a gun manufacturing fortune, visits a psychic. She’s told her wealth is cursed and that she must appease the spirits of all those slain by the weapons made by her family – by building a house for them. Construction of a chaotic and labyrinthine home continues nonstop for the next 38 years, right up until the woman’s death, with instructions for the build apparently coming from the ghosts themselves...
Even if you hadn’t heard the story, you’d likely think 525 South Winchester Boulevard, San José, California a pretty odd place: the staircases and doors that lead nowhere, the odd levels and unexpected drops, the windows that look back into other rooms...
Some have called the Winchester Mystery House a ‘monument to madness’, but what’s the truth behind The mansion designed by spirits?
Born around 1839, its creator, Sarah Winchester, was by all accounts both beautiful and clever. Fluent in several languages, well-read and a talented musician, she gained a place at Yale, one of America’s most prestigious universities.
In 1862, she married fellow Yale alumni William Wirt Winchester, son of Oliver Winchester, owner of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, famous for their Winchester rifles.
Four years later William and Sarah’s baby daughter, Annie, arrived, but she died at just a few weeks old. Sarah never had another child.
In May 1880 Sarah lost her mother and just seven months later Oliver died, leaving his gun company to William. Three months later William died of tuberculosis.
Sarah inherited the company and $20.5 million – around £380 million in today’s money.
After a few years in Europe, Sarah moved nearer to relatives in California, buying 525 South Winchester Boulevard an eightroom farmhouse set in 161 acres, which she started turning into something grander...
It’s said construction on the new building took place 24/7, with builders working shifts around the clock.
Ten years into the project, on 24th February 1895, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about the house, reporting that: “The sound of the hammer is never hushed... The reason for it is in Mrs Winchester’s belief that when the house is entirely finished she will die.”
Another decade later the house had reached seven storeys high in some parts.
Then, in April 1906, the San Francisco earthquake struck and parts of the house were destroyed.
Repairs took place, with the house now capped at four storeys for safety.
Construction continued for another 17 years, right up until Sarah’s death on 5th September 1922, when she was thought to be 82.
Afterwards the mansion fell into the hands of John H
Brown, a theme park worker. He played up the strangeness of the house and just five months after Sarah’s death the mansion became a popular tourist attraction.
Tour guides told tales of Sarah’s nightly seances from which she would apparently emerge with ever more plans for the house, and the public lapped it up. Soon the newspapers were referring to the supernatural powers of the mansion too.
Parts of the house were destroyed
It was the famous magician Harry Houdini who dubbed the place the Winchester Mystery House after a visit in 1924 and, almost 100 years on, Sarah’s strange home has had more than 12 million visitors.
But over the years several researchers have cast doubt on the ‘spooky’ nature of the house.
Mary Jo Ignoffo’s biography of Sarah suggested there had been several breaks in the building work and that many of the house’s oddities could be rationally explained, due to parts of the house being sealed off after the earthquake and adaptations to accommodate Sarah’s petite stature and advanced arthritis. It’s also been argued that many of the seemingly haphazard additions were mistakes due to Sarah not being a trained architect, which then had to be worked around.
Others have expressed doubt that Sarah would have felt any guilt about the nature of her fortune, as guns were seen as necessary in America at the time.
Sarah’s nurse and closest companion of many years, Henrietta Severs, firmly denied that Mrs Winchester had any spiritualist leanings.
After her death Sarah’s lawyer, Samuel Leib, said Sarah was ‘as sane and clear headed a woman as I have ever known...’
It’s said she paid her workers three times the going rate and often housed them and their families while employed. Could the never-ending project have partly been an attempt to spread her wealth around? She also left most of her fortune to charity in her will.
Finally, some commentators believe the house is a deliberate labyrinth or puzzle, with cryptic clues and symbols linked to numerology, freemasonry and the ideas and secret codes of the Tudor philosopher and statesman, Sir Francis Bacon.
Research into a fourth dimension beyond the threedimensional world we are able to see had begun a century before Sarah’s birth, but was popularised in an essay by mathematician and science fiction writer Charles Hinton in 1880.
It’s been suggested that Sarah was exploring this concept in her home, creating a world where three-dimensional properties such as left, right, large, small and even insideand-out seem to dissolve.
So, was
Sarah a woman driven mad by grief or guilt? A keen amateur architect who happened to have enough money to put any whim into practice? Or a genius who left behind a puzzle for anyone smart enough to solve?
Theory 1
Was Sarah really trying to appease, confuse or trap ghosts in her maze-like mansion? It’s certainly true Sarah had her demons and was living with ‘ghosts’ of the past.
Theory 2
Was building and altering the house simply a rich woman’s hobby? I do sense that adding to the building helped keep Sarah’s loneliness at bay.
Theory 3
Was Sarah actually a misunderstood genius? There are indeed many cryptic, numerological – and interdimensional – clues throughout the house.