In 1862, Sarah Pardee married William Wirt Winchester, the only son of Oliver Winchester, who had invented the famous Winchester “repeating” rifle. This invention allowed the Winchester's family to amass a vast fortune. Sarah and William, however, only had one child who sadly, died in infancy.
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| Hand-tinted ambrotype of Sarah Winchester taken in 1865 |
Sarah's husband, William, died of tuberculosis in 1881and Sarah inherited the estate of about $20 million (equivalent to $521 million in 2017 or $25,000 a day).
In 1884, Sarah moved to the San Francisco Bay area, to be closer to her relatives. Later she bought an eight-room farmhouse owned by Dr Robert Caldwell, in the Santa Clara Valley (now San Jose). Sarah then hired about 20 carpenters and began a vast, building project creating a Queen Anne revival mansion until an earthquake in 1906 caused so much damage that she moved to another of her many houses, for the last sixteen years of her life..
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| Sarah Winchester, circa 1920 |
Soon Sarah became a recluse, as her 8 room home morphed into a 160 room, seven-story mansion, with 2000 doors and 40 staircases; some that went nowhere -one set of stairs ending abruptly at the ceiling. One door led to an 8-foot drop into a kitchen sink and another opened onto a 15-foot drop into bushes. One room has a normal-sized door, next to a child-sized door; one cupboard extended through 30 rooms in the house. One. of the builders who worked on the house once recalled, “Sarah simply ordered the error torn out, sealed up, built over or around, or … totally ignored.” Eventually, the house had 13 bathrooms and 6 kitchens. Sarah also had a preoccupation with the number 13, throughout the house, most notably in the panels of the distinctive "spider web" windows.
According to an article in The New York Times, dated, June 1911, Sarah's building mania was motivated by "a message from the spirit world warning her that all would be well so long as the sound of hammers did not cease in the house or on the grounds."
And whether fact or fiction, who can say, but the story goes that Sarah felt haunted by the ghosts of those that had been killed with Winchester rifles and that she was trying to appease these spirits. One of Sarah's relatives later said that Sarah was “under the thrall” of a medium who warned her about evil spirits. Others claim that Sarah was merely depressed and grieving and building the house, disorienting, monstrous and strange as it was, was simply an outlet for her loneliness and grief.
Sarah Winchester is portrayed by Helen Mirren in a supernatural horror film called Winchester (2018). You can also visit the real Winchester Mystery House, located in San Jose, California; the house which grew and grew and grew, so that it could house the ever-increasing number of Winchester rifle victims. Or, so it is said.
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| Winchester House, 525 S. Winchester Blvd. San Jose |
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| Winchester-Mystery-House spider-web windows |
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| Stairs to nowhere |
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| The toilet doors replaced with glass windows |
