Everything you think you know about the Winchester Mystery House probably isn't true

The Winchester Mystery House as it appears today. The Winchester Mystery House as it appears today. Photo: Lance Iversen / The Chronicle Photo: Lance Iversen / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close Everything you think you know about the Winchester Mystery House probably isn't true 1 / 13 Back to Gallery

The story is so famous most locals can recite it by heart: An eccentric widow, heir to an American rifle fortune, is tortured by the horrors wrought by the weapon. She becomes convinced only building a labyrinthine house will keep her safe and, if construction stops, the spirits will find and kill her. The result of her delusion is the Winchester Mystery House, a monument to madness.

It’s a memorable explanation for the unfathomable strangeness of Sarah Winchester’s mansion. But, as far as historical record goes, there’s scant proof for any of it.

The insanity of Sarah Winchester is, in short, a lie.

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The myth of Sarah Winchester begins in 1895, over a decade after Winchester bought a modest farmhouse in San Jose. Although legend would have you believe Winchester was on the run from an army of ghosts, the reason for her move was familial, not supernatural. After the death of her husband, William Wirt Winchester, of tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah decided to leave the East Coast to be with family. Her brother-in-law was the president of Mills College, and two of her sisters already lived in the Bay Area. Some historians believe she initially bought the San Jose farmhouse with an eye for expansion — as the family’s wealthiest member, she could afford to build a place to house them all.

Upon the death of her husband, Sarah, a bright young woman from New Haven, Connecticut, instantly became one of the wealthiest women in the world. Her share of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company amounted to a $20 million inheritance, 50-percent ownership in the company and an income of $1,000 per day (over $25,000 in today’s money). Flush with cash and full of architectural ideas, Winchester set out to renovate her new property.

Photo: Taber Photographic Co./Public Domain A hand-tinted ambrotype of Sarah Winchester taken in 1865 by the...

From the start, she had a hard time squaring her ambitions with conventional architecture. She parted ways with several architects before deciding to start drawing up plans herself. With no professional training, it didn’t always go smoothly.

"I am constantly having to make an upheaval for some reason,” Winchester wrote to her sister-in-law in 1898. “For instance, my upper hall which leads to the sleeping apartment was rendered so unexpectedly dark by a little addition that after a number of people had missed their footing on the stairs I decided that safety demanded something to be done."

Far from an exercise in spiritualism, Winchester’s labyrinth arose because she made mistakes — and had the disposable income to carry on making them. It didn’t help her reputation that she was naturally reserved. While most Bay Area millionaires were out in society, attending galas and loudly donating to charities, Winchester preferred a quiet life with the close family who occasionally lived with her. In the absence of her own voice, locals began to gossip.

By 1895, the house was large enough to draw the speculating eyes of the community. The Feb. 24, 1895 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article that almost single-handedly laid the foundation for the Winchester Mystery House legend.

"The sound of the hammer is never hushed,” it reported. “... The reason for it is in Mrs. Winchester's belief that when the house is entirely finished she will die."

The ghostly motivation that is so famous today is never mentioned. Instead, Mrs. Winchester is strictly concerned with the house as the source of her immortality.

"Whether she had discovered the secret of eternal youth and will live as long as the building material, saws and hammers last, or is doomed to disappointed as great as Ponce de Leon in his search for the fountain of life, is question for time to solve,” the story concludes.

The story was so popular it was picked up by newspapers around the state. But the narrative is dubious at best. For one, the hammers did stop — and often. In one letter to family, Winchester said she’d suspended construction for the summer, as it was too hot to work.

"I became rather worn and tired out and dismissed all the workmen to take such rest as I might through the winter,” she wrote.

Colin Dickey, author of “Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places,” speculates the growing rumors around Winchester were rooted in economic uncertainty. In 1893, America was hit with a years-long depression. Unemployment soared, hitting over 40-percent in some states. In Sarah Winchester, the Bay Area found a perfect villain: a reclusive widow, wasting her money on a pointless mansion while people starved outside its gates. Her house, Dickey writes, was a "gaudy reminder of the haves versus the have-nots."

Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP A view of the Winchester Mystery House from inside the mansion.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to note the 1895 Chronicle piece focuses not the fountain of youth aspect — that only gets a few lines in a two-column story — but on the home itself. The majority of the article describes elaborate grounds and luxurious furnishings. A 1909 article about Winchester that ran in the Chronicle also notes not the supernatural, but the wastefulness of her endeavors.

"The lonely heiress to millions has found her sole pleasure during the last seven years in directing the efforts of workmen who are called upon to construct one month what they destroy the next,” the story reads.

Some modern-day historians speculate one of the reasons Winchester kept building was because of the economic climate. By continuing construction, she was able to keep locals employed. In her unusual way, it was an act of kindness.

"She had a social conscience and she did try to give back," Winchester Mystery House historian Janan Boehme told the Los Angeles Times in 2017. "This house, in itself, was her biggest social work of all."

Of the dozens of articles we found about the heiress in California newspaper archives, none written during her lifetime mention her desperately hiding from ghosts. Often, she’s described as an eccentric with too much money. But in other cases, she’s praised for her ingenuity. In 1905, the San Francisco Call wrote a glowing article about another real estate project of hers: a medieval castle in San Mateo County.

The house will be “an imitation of the beautiful baronies of feudal times,” the Call proclaimed. It would be “one of the most unique estates in California.”

Although it was ultimately never built, Winchester planned to have a castle with a moat and drawbridge — a novelty, not another escape from water-abhorring spirits.

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When Sarah Winchester died in 1922, the news made barely a ripple. Back in New Haven, her hometown paper wrote excitedly of the over $1 million gift she’d bequeathed to a local hospital. In the Bay Area, only her small circle of friends mourned her.

“A few days ago, a quiet woman went quietly out of life, leaving a fortune of some millions, all of it for philanthropy,” an unsigned editorial in the Mill Valley Record wrote. “She had no children, so she gave her stocks and bonds, her wealth of whatever form, to the public, in the most advantageous manner possible... This woman was Mrs. Winchester…

“How many thousands of lives will be blessed by Mrs. Winchester's bequest, yet the newspaper accounts of her going and its attendant circumstances were brief and unadorned.”

Mrs. Sarah Winchester in only one of two known images of her. This...

Winchester’s will gave most of her wealth to charity, and all that remained went to her niece. Her many real estate holdings — she lived in a different, more modest home in her final years — were auctioned off. The famed Winchester mansion fell into the hands of John H. Brown, a theme park worker who designed roller coasters.

One of his inventions, the Backety-Back coaster in Canada, killed a woman who was thrown from a car. After her death, the Browns moved to California. When the Winchester house went up for rent, Brown and his wife Mayme jumped at the chance and quickly began playing up the home’s strangeness.

Less than two years after Sarah Winchester’s death, newspapers were suddenly beginning to write about the mansion’s supernatural powers.

“The seance room, dedicated to the spirit world in which Mrs. Winchester had such faith, is magnificently done in heavy velvet of many colors,” the Healdsburg Tribune wrote in 1924. “... Here are hundreds of clothes hooks, upon which hang many costumes. Mrs. Winchester, it is said, believed that she could don any of these costumes and speak to the spirits of the characters of the area represented by the clothing.”

(It is worth noting here: There are no contemporary accounts of Winchester holding seances in the home, and “Ghostland” writes that the “seance room” was actually a gardener’s private quarters.)

The myth took hold, though, and the home, with its dead ends and tight turns, is easy to imagine as haunted. Although the spirits are fun, the ghosts shroud the real life of a fascinating, creative woman. Winchester was "as sane and clear headed a woman as I have ever known,” her lawyer Samuel Leib said after her death. “She had a better grasp of business and financial affairs than most men."

The legend of Sarah Winchester, Dickey writes in "Ghostland," combines our "uneasiness about women living alone, withdrawn from society" and "the gun that won the West and the violence white Americans carried out in the name of civilization."

"It's a compelling story, perhaps, because it's one in which Sarah Winchester is punished for her transgressions," Dickey writes. "... We've projected shame on her."