The website makes much of the architectural "oddities" of the house, such as doors and flights of stairs leading into walls, and how they were supposedly built to confuse vengeful ghosts. Sarah Winchester constructed weird features in order to confuse spirits. It is highly unlikely that Sarah Winchester felt responsible or guilty for the manufacture of firearms-and she did not hesitate to invest and spend the money she earned from them."ģ. "A sense of pride was more likely than one of guilt. "People associated with the company and those who wrote about it most often looked at it as an American success story," she says. Ignoffo suggests we are viewing those stories with 21st century eyes, and that, at that time in history, shame would have been far from Sarah's mind. Tour guides say that Sarah felt consuming guilt over deaths caused by the firearms. This photo shows a small Winchester gun museum contained within the house. Sarah Winchester was ashamed of the Winchester Rifle legacy. "Winchester's own letters explain that she sent workers away for months at a time." Requests for an interview with officials at the Winchester Mystery House have not been answered at this time.Ģ. According to the website, construction lasted day and night for 38 years. The legend as reported on the Winchester Mystery House website: A medium told Sarah that she was being haunted by spirits of people killed by the famous gun, and she would die unless she started building a house and never ceased. They did not start the rumors-many began while Sarah was alive-but according to Ignoffo, they embellished the stories wildly and made up new ones in order to sell tickets.
Five months after she died the Brown family, long-time carnival workers who rented the house, held a public tour and kept on going, eventually buying the property and making it one of the state's top tourist attractions. Here's the history in a nutshell: Sarah Winchester, the wife of William Wirt Winchester and heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune, moved to San Jose in 1886 and began building a house-a very large house whose rooms numbered 160 at the time of her death (although before the 1906 earthquake, it was much larger). The house was under construction for 38 years. In her tell–all book, Captive of the Labyrinth, Mary Jo Ignoffo lays out her research and findings, and today she shares the biggest deceptions surrounding one of California's top tourist attractions.ġ. Winchester Mystery House in San Jose is everyone's favorite haunted house, where candlelit tours and all the lore suggest that you might run into ghosts.īut here's the rub: According to a book by a local historian, the “mysteries" that attract thousands of people each year were manufactured by a family of 1920s-era carnies who first leased and then later purchased the property.
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