![]() ![]() It’s also an appropriate time for a brief cautionary digression. This is where history ends and speculation begins. Shortly thereafter, Sarah Winchester moved from New Haven, Connecticut to San Jose, purchased a modest farm house, and began building. But the fortune was no consolation to Sarah, who began to believe there was a curse on her family. Not too shabby even by today’s standards, these figures were astronomical in the late 1800s. This left Sarah the only heir to the Winchester fortune, an inheritance of US$20 million, plus nearly 50 percent ownership in the company, which paid her $1,000 per day. But the following year, William died of tuberculosis. In 1880 Oliver Winchester died, leaving his fortune to his son William. ![]() Annie’s death affected Sarah deeply, and for years she withdrew from the public and her family alike. She gave birth in 1866 to the couple’s first and only child, Annie, who died before she was two weeks old. Sarah was a diminutive woman at 4 feet, 10 inches (147cm) tall, but was reputed to be charming, intelligent, and beautiful. ![]() His son and heir, William Wirt Winchester, married Sarah Pardee in 1862. With repeating rifles, a soldier could fire several times without reloading, and sales of the weapons soon made Winchester both wealthy and famous. The company, which would later be renamed Winchester Repeating Arms Company, was responsible for revolutionary advances in rifle design. ![]() Civil War broke out, Winchester took over the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was the co-owner of a successful shirt manufacturing business. The story begins a century and a half ago. All of this and more was due to an inexplicable obsession that drove its erstwhile owner, Sarah Winchester, to keep the building continuously under construction for 38 years. Stairs lead to nowhere floors have doors and windows in them doors open into solid walls. And in fact, that’s pretty much what happened. The entire house seems to have been randomly assembled, disassembled, and reassembled numerous times, with no master plan or design. What makes it most interesting, though, is what it doesn’t have-any rhyme or reason. The Winchester House has 160 rooms, with a total of more than 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 52 skylights, 47 fireplaces, 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 6 kitchens, 3 elevators, 2 basements, 1 shower, and 349.7 other impressive-sounding numerical statistics. But once inside, you forget all about that. Tickets are surprisingly expensive, and there’s sometimes a long wait for your guided tour to begin. But the interior of the building and the story of its construction are bizarre and fascinating. It’s pretty, though not particularly shocking. Our House Is a Very, Very, Very Strange Houseįrom the outside, the building appears to be nothing more than a sprawling Victorian mansion surrounded by meticulously groomed gardens, soothing fountains, and lots of tour buses. The Winchester Mystery House is undeniably interesting, though whether it lives up to its hype is another question. Even after reading a brochure about the house, I didn’t quite grasp what it was all about until I visited for myself. When I first lived in northern California, these signs puzzled me. About five miles (8km) from downtown, the Winchester Mystery House draws huge crowds almost every day of the year for a simple walking tour of what may be the country’s strangest residential building.Įveryone in the Bay Area seems to know about the Winchester House, to the extent that billboards advertising the attraction don’t give any information other than its name. But San Jose’s biggest tourist attraction was built long before computers made their mark on the area. It’s an attractive small city with some excellent museums, parks, and restaurants. Lots of high-tech companies are based in or near San Jose, and of the dozens of times I’ve been there, all but one or two were for a technology-related conference of one sort or another. San Jose, California-about an hour’s drive south of San Francisco-is the unofficial center of Silicon Valley. ![]()
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