Here's a haunting tale for Halloween.
A grief-stricken widow with great wealth visits a psychic who tells her that spirits have cursed her. Unless she builds a house — and keeps building it — she will die when the hammer stills. So in 1886, she buys a small farmhouse on 142 acres and begins building. For the next 38 years, a small army of craftsmen build and rebuild, 24 hours a day, constructing a strange house with spooky winding corridors, hidden chambers, odd features like staircases that go nowhere and doors that open to walls.
She built her house as a maze to trap the spirits that haunted her, they say.
Or did she? In the 100 years since her death, stories about Sarah Winchester, heiress of the Winchester Rifle fortune, have grown bigger than her house.
In fact, serious biographers suggest a more prosaic story: She was a wealthy widow who lived alone and made a hobby out of construction, and with her immense fortune, she could absolutely afford to build anything.
According to Brian Dunning of skeptoid.com, Winchester is the victim of a slanderous mythology portraying her as mad when, in fact, she was a pioneer.
Her immense house was at one point seven stories high with hundreds of rooms, thousands of windows and dozens of fireplaces and stairways. Much of it was destroyed in a 1906 earthquake. Some of the anomalies in the house are due to subsequent repairs, not attempts to trap ghosts, Dunning says.
She never hired an architect because she liked to imagine for herself what could be built. She hired hundreds of workers who lived with their families rent-free on her property. Employees interviewed for a book in the 1950s said she was respected and paid workers well in a sort of personal employment project. She didn't need the house, but unemployment was high at the time.
The idea that she thought she would die when she finished the house came from a gossipy 1895 newspaper article. The story of the psychic appears to have been invented for a 1967 book.
While she was something of a recluse, she also had severe arthritis that kept her in the home, although she did travel between five other houses. She was a generous philanthropist and a businesswoman who bought and sold property.
Her house in San Jose is now privately owned and is open for tours.
