![]() Winchester invited her three remaining sisters to follow her to California, which they did. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune, her doctor's recommendation, her happy memories of traveling to San Francisco with her husband in the 1870s, and advertising about the weather and health benefits of California were possible factors in Winchester's decision to move. According to Mary Jo Ignoffo in her book Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. In 1885, at the age of 46, Winchester moved to California from New Haven, Connecticut. Around this time she began developing rheumatoid arthritis and her doctor suggested that a warmer and drier climate might help improve her health. In 1884 her eldest sister, Mary Converse died. ![]() She was left with a large inheritance from her husband. ![]() īetween the fall of 1880 and the spring of 1881, Winchester's mother, father-in-law, and husband died. Diagnosed with marasmus, she did not thrive and only lived a month. In 1866, Winchester gave birth to a girl named Annie Pardee Winchester. She married William Wirt Winchester in 1862. “Like many other businesses, closing our doors until April 7th will severely impact the employees who maintain the estate,” the website explains.Sarah Winchester, always called Sallie, after her paternal grandmother, was born in 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut. Though visitors can watch the video tour for free, the Winchester Mystery House is asking visitors to consider purchasing a voucher for use at a later date. Winchester loved to garden, so the conservatory featured an indoor watering system and wooden floorboards that could be lifted up to water plants resting below. Take, for example, the north conservatory. But as the video tour points out, the house she built was not only bizarre-it was innovative. The true nature of Winchester’s motivations is likely to remain a mystery. “This house, in itself, was her biggest social work of all.” “She had a social conscience and she did try to give back,” historian Janan Boehme told Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Timesin 2017. When she died, in fact, the heiress left most of her money to charity. Winchester could have been engaging in an eccentric brand of philanthropy, as she built her home during an economic depression, and the continuous construction project provided jobs for locals. If construction ever stopped, she would die.īut as Katie Dowd of SFGate points out, there is “scant proof” for this theory. The medium reportedly instructed her to constantly build a house for these ghosts. Popular lore has it that she was a keen follower of the Spiritualist movement, which was rooted in the idea that dead souls can interact with the living, and consulted a medium who told her she had been cursed by victims of Winchester rifles. Sometimes, she would have features built and plastered over the next day.Įxactly why Winchester embarked on this dizzying cycle of building, undoing and rebuilding is impossible to say. The designs, wrote Pamela Haag for Zócalo Public Squarein 2016, were Winchester’s she sketched them onto napkins or pieces of brown paper, then handed them over to a team of carpenters. The construction project continued until Winchester’s death in 1922, producing an enormous, labyrinthine mansion filled with logic-defying features: staircases that end at the ceiling, indoor balconies, skylights built into floors, doors that open onto walls. In San Jose, she purchased an eight-room farmhouse that she began to renovate in 1886. Winchester decided to leave her home in New Haven, Connecticut, and head to California, where two of her sisters lived. This staircase in the Winchester Mystery House leads to the ceiling. Her husband, William Wirt Winchester, died in 1881, leaving his widow with a vast fortune: 50 percent ownership in the Repeating Arms Company and a $20 million inheritance. Four years later, she gave birth to a daughter, Annie, who died about a month later. Sarah Lockwood Pardee married into the Winchester family in 1862. The narrated video tour spans more than 40 minutes, providing insight into the property and the mysterious woman who built it: Sarah Winchester, wealthy and reclusive heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which manufactured an innovative rifle that became a fixture of Westward expansion. But as Michele Debczak reports for Mental Floss, you can now explore the Winchester House from afar via a detailed video tour posted on the mansion’s website. Built by a millionaire widow over the course of 36 years, the sprawling mansion features more than 200 rooms, 10,000 windows, trap doors, spy holes and a host of other architectural oddities.Ī popular tourist attraction, the house, along with many other cultural institutions in the United States, has closed to help curb the spread of coronavirus. The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, is one of the nation’s most curious landmarks.
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