The Winchester Mystery House

There is a staircase in San Jose that climbs seven steps and ends at the ceiling.

There is a door on the second floor that opens onto nothing — a sheer drop to the garden below. There is a cabinet that, when you open it, reveals not shelves but thirty more rooms. There are windows set into floors, a chimney that stops a few feet short of the roof, a hallway that doubles back on itself like a nervous thought. And there is the number thirteen, everywhere: thirteen panes in a window, thirteen hooks in a closet, thirteen drain holes in a sink.

For more than a century, people have walked through the Winchester house trying to understand the woman who built it. Most of them leave believing a story that she would almost certainly not recognize.

The Rifle Fortune

Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven, Connecticut, around 1839 — a small, bright, musical young woman who spoke several languages and was considered one of the belles of the city. In 1862 she married William Wirt Winchester, the only son of Oliver Winchester, a shirt manufacturer who had bought into a struggling firearms company and was about to transform it.

The Winchester Repeating Arms Company made the rifle that would come to be called “the gun that won the West.” It made the Winchesters staggeringly rich.

It did not make them lucky.

In June of 1866, Sarah gave birth to a daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester. The baby could not keep down food. She wasted away, and in July, at just over a month old, she died of what the doctors called marasmus — a slow starvation. Sarah never had another child.

Fifteen years later, in 1881, her husband William died of tuberculosis. His father had died only months before. At roughly forty years old, Sarah Winchester found herself alone, grief-stricken, and in possession of one of the largest fortunes in America: about twenty million dollars and nearly half the shares of the Winchester company, which paid her an income often described as a thousand dollars a day.

In 1885 or 1886, she left New Haven forever, traveled across the continent, and bought an unfinished eight-room farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley of California.

Then she began to build.

The Legend

Here is the story you will hear, in some form, from almost anyone who has heard of the house.

After her husband’s death, so it goes, the widow Winchester went to a Boston spiritualist. The medium told her that the deaths of her daughter and husband were not accidents. They were the work of spirits — the ghosts of every person ever killed by a Winchester rifle. Soldiers, settlers, Native Americans, outlaws, lawmen. Thousands upon thousands of angry dead, and they had come for her family. She would be next.

There was only one way to survive, the medium said. She must move west and build a house for the spirits. And she must never stop building. As long as the hammers kept sounding, she would live. The day construction stopped, she would die.

So, the legend continues, Sarah Winchester hired carpenters to work around the clock — twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for thirty-eight years. She built the staircases to nowhere and the doors into walls to confuse the vengeful ghosts. She slept in a different bedroom every night so the spirits couldn’t find her. Every night at midnight, a bell in the tower would ring, and she would retire to a secret séance room — painted blue, with one entrance and three exits — to receive the next day’s building plans from the dead.

It is a magnificent story. It has inspired novels, films, and millions of tickets sold.

The problem is that almost none of it can be traced back to Sarah Winchester herself.

The Woman Behind the Story

The most thorough research on Sarah Winchester’s life, by biographer Mary Jo Ignoffo, paints a very different picture. There is no surviving record of a visit to a Boston medium, no diary describing ghostly instructions, no letter mentioning angry spirits of the rifle dead. The tale of the twenty-four-hour carpenters seems to have grown in newspapers and gossip during her own lifetime and swelled after her death. Work on the house, as far as records show, started and stopped over the years like any wealthy person’s endless remodeling project. She owned other properties. She spent long stretches living elsewhere.

What the records do show is a fiercely private, intelligent widow who suffered from severe arthritis that twisted her hands and made climbing stairs agony — which is one explanation for those strange switchback staircases with steps only two inches high. She was an enthusiastic, untrained architect who sketched her own plans and changed her mind constantly. She was generous to her employees, many of whom stayed with her for decades. And she was intensely, almost painfully shy. She hid her face behind a veil. She would not be photographed if she could help it. Rumors flourished because she offered the world nothing to replace them with.

But here is where the story turns strange again, and why I couldn’t leave it out of this book.

Even if you strip away the legend, the house itself remains deeply, inexplicably odd. The doors that open onto walls are real. The staircase into the ceiling is real. The fixation on thirteen is real — it is built into the very fabric of the place, including a stained-glass window with thirteen colored stones, and Sarah’s own will, which was reportedly divided into thirteen parts and signed thirteen times. Some of it may be the result of her habit of building over earlier construction rather than tearing it down. Some of it may be the 1906 earthquake, which toppled the house’s seven-story tower and trapped Sarah in her bedroom; afterward she boarded up the damaged front portion and simply built around it.

And some of it has never been explained at all.

The House at Night

Sarah Winchester died in her sleep at the house on September 5, 1922. She was eighty-two or eighty-three years old. Her death, legend insists, came on a day when the carpenters had stopped work. (Records suggest there hadn’t been much building in some time.)

When her belongings were removed — it took movers about six weeks — the house was left as a strange, empty shell of roughly 160 rooms, with around 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces and six kitchens. Within months it had been leased and opened to curious visitors. By 1924, the great escape artist and fraud-buster Harry Houdini, who spent his later years exposing fake mediums, toured the house at night. It is often said that he gave it the name “Mystery House.” Whatever he felt walking those corridors in the dark, he did not publicly debunk it.

Staff and visitors have been telling stories ever since.

They describe footsteps in hallways with no one in them. Doorknobs that turn on their own. The faint sound of hammering, a few blows, then silence — coming from rooms that have not seen construction in a century. Organ music, which matters because Sarah was an accomplished musician who loved to play late at night. Tour guides report sudden cold spots on the narrow switchback stairs, the ones Sarah climbed on her bad knees.

Some of the most persistent accounts involve a small, dark-haired woman glimpsed in the upper rooms, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing at a window. Others describe a man in overalls pushing a wheelbarrow through the basement, who is never there when you turn to look — a figure that staff have nicknamed after one of Sarah’s real workmen.

Are these the spirits Sarah Winchester was supposedly trying to hide from? Or is this simply what happens when a house is so strange, so full of dead ends and false doors, that the human mind starts to supply what isn’t there?

The Thirteenth Bathroom

There is one detail I keep returning to. In her final years, Sarah Winchester was a lonely woman in a vast house, surrounded by rooms she rarely entered. Her arthritis had grown so bad that she could barely walk. The servants who loved her had grown old. She had outlived almost everyone who knew her when she was young and laughing in New Haven.

She had lost her only child at six weeks old. She had lost her husband. And she built, and built, and built.

Maybe the medium is a fiction, and the ghosts of the rifle dead never followed her across the country. But I don’t think you need a ghost story to understand a woman who couldn’t stop. Grief has its own architecture. Some of us build walls. Some of us build staircases that go nowhere.

Sarah Winchester built both.