The Winchester Mystery House

The story says that Sarah Winchester went to a medium after William's death. The medium's name is given in some accounts as Adam Coons, though other sources dispute this. The medium is described as a Boston spiritualist.

The medium told Sarah that the Winchester family was cursed.

Specifically: cursed by the souls of all the people killed by Winchester rifles. All of them. Every soldier who had been shot. Every person on either side of any conflict where Winchester rifles had been present. Every person the gun had touched, in whatever direction the gun had been pointed.

The medium told Sarah that her husband and daughter had died because of this curse. That Sarah herself would die from it unless she acted.

The action required: Sarah must build. She must never stop building. She must construct a house large enough to contain and confuse and give quarter to the spirits, and she must do this continuously, because if construction stopped, the spirits would find their way to her and she would die.

This is, taken at face value, an enormous ask.

Sarah Winchester bought an eight-room farmhouse in San Jose, California in 1884. She began construction in 1886.

She employed a construction crew. Continuously. Seven days a week. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Hammers going. Saws going. Something always being built, somewhere in the house, at every hour.

The house grew.

The house grew in every direction at once.

Sarah did not use an architect. She drew her own plans. She drew them, apparently, every morning: new rooms, new corridors, new staircases. The construction crews built what she drew and then waited for the next morning's drawings.

She had the money for this. One thousand dollars a day in 1881 is approximately thirty thousand dollars a day in current money. The construction never became a financial problem. The construction was the financial plan.

By the time she died in 1922, the house had one hundred and sixty-one rooms. It had forty bedrooms. It had forty-seven fireplaces. It had seventeen chimneys. It had three elevators, which in the 1880s were still a luxury.

It also had stairs that ended at the ceiling. It had doors that opened onto walls. It had a window set into the floor of a room, looking down at the room below. It had corridors that turned back on themselves. It had a staircase that descended seven times and rose back almost to where it started, spending a great deal of structure going almost nowhere.

Why. This is the question everyone asks.

The explanations offered: to confuse the spirits, who presumably could not navigate nonsensical architecture. To provide infinite rooms so the spirits would always have somewhere to go that was not toward Sarah. To keep the workers busy so that construction never stopped, even when Sarah was not sure what to build next.

None of these explanations fully account for all of the decisions. Some of them might just be the architecture of a woman who had been planning alone for a very long time and had developed some unusual habits.

Every night at midnight, Sarah Winchester went to the Blue Room.

This was a specific room designated for the purpose. The Blue Room. She went at midnight. She held a séance. She communicated, as she understood it, with the spirits who had been killed by Winchester rifles.

Thirteen chairs around the table. Always thirteen. One for Sarah, twelve for the spirits. She served them, by some accounts, food: oysters and other dishes that she had prepared or arranged to be prepared. You do not want the spirits to be hungry. You want to show you are hospitable. You want to demonstrate good faith.

The séances were how she received her construction instructions. The morning drawings, the new rooms and staircases and corridors: these came from the midnight sessions. The spirits told her what to build. Or she understood that they did. Or she needed to believe that the building served a purpose that was not just: she could not stop.

Sarah Winchester's relationship with the spirits she believed surrounded her house is difficult to categorize simply. She was not terrified. She was not, as far as anyone could tell, suffering. She was doing something. She had a project and a purpose and a reason to wake up each morning and draw plans and check on the construction and set thirteen places for dinner at midnight.

Grief looks different from the outside than it does from the inside. This is worth remembering.

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was one of the most destructive natural disasters in American history. It reached San Jose. It reached the Winchester house.

The front portion of the house collapsed. Several rooms were damaged. Sarah Winchester was inside at the time; she was unhurt physically, but she was, by the accounts of servants present, extremely distressed.

Specifically about the spirits.

The earthquake had damaged the section of the house where Sarah had been conducting her séances. She apparently concluded that the spirits had caused the earthquake, possibly out of frustration with her, possibly as a warning. She was not sure which.

She had the earthquake-damaged rooms sealed. Nailed shut. She did not have them repaired or demolished. She had them closed, doors nailed closed, and she moved her séance room to a new location and resumed construction.

The sealed rooms stayed sealed until her death.

Sarah continued building for another sixteen years after the earthquake. She was in her late sixties during the earthquake. She kept building into her early eighties. The construction crew, which had been with her for years by this point, were, by contemporary accounts, extremely loyal to her. She paid well. She treated them well. She was a good employer who happened to also require them to work every day of the year building rooms that went nowhere.

They built the rooms. The rooms went nowhere. The crew came back the next day.

Sarah Winchester died on September 5, 1922. She was eighty-three years old.

She died in her sleep. In the house. Surrounded by the sound of construction.

When she died, the construction crews stopped. This was, depending on how you think about it, either the end of the project or the moment the project was complete.

The workers who were mid-nail, mid-board, mid-room: they stopped. Some accounts say they left their tools where they were. Nails half-driven. Wood cut but not placed. The work stopped in the middle of itself.

Sarah Winchester left the house to her niece. Her estate, which had been substantially reduced by thirty-six years of continuous construction, was still considerable. The contents of the house were auctioned. It took six weeks to remove everything, which tells you something about one hundred and sixty-one rooms of accumulation.

The house was sold and became a tourist attraction almost immediately. People had known about it for years. San Jose residents had watched it grow. Curiosity was not in short supply.

It is still a tourist attraction. You can visit it. You can walk the stairs that go nowhere. You can look out the window set into the floor. You can stand in the ballroom that was never used because Sarah never held a party, and think about what it means to build something for thirty-six years that you never intended to show anyone.

The midnight séances. The thirteen chairs. The spirits who needed rooms.

She was building for them.

She just happened to be the only one who could see them.