The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif., is incredibly whimsical or intensely eerie, depending on how you view such things, with stairs leading to the ceiling and doors that open to nowhere. The grand estate was the home of Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune, who, according to legend, had workers ceaselessly laboring on the house for decades, from 1884 until her death in 1922. She undertook the project at the behest of a New England seer to delay her own demise, one version of the story goes, or to calm the spirits of the thousands of souls killed throughout the ages by Winchester rifles, as another version has it.

The tale has all the makings of a good horror flick: a mysterious medium; a weird, possibly haunted house; a reclusive heiress who may or may not have been insane; ghosts. Best of all, the story is true — or is it?

In “Winchester,” which opens Friday, Feb. 2, the directors Peter and Michael Spierig (“Predestination,” “Jigsaw”) have taken the Northern California tale at its spooky word, filling the mansion with levitating rifles, rocking chairs that move by themselves, and the specters of an army of long-dead war veterans and murder victims. Then there’s Helen Mirren, dressed head to toe in mourning black, as the mysterious Ms. Winchester. Cue the fin de siècle jump scare.

Studio marketers are playing up the “true story” angle on trailers and posters and news releases, hoping to make the already scary story even more so. But the studio also added the label because it couldn’t assume that people outside Northern California would have even heard of Sarah Winchester and her house.