Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California is a haunted mansion that is inhabited by ghosts and was built by a frightened woman, inspired by madness. It has been featured on Ghost Hunters and Most Haunted. Stephen King based his book Rose Red on the story of this house and its owner, Sarah Winchester.
The Winchester Mystery House is one of the most famous haunted houses in America. It was built by a woman named Sarah Winchester back in 1884 and the strangest thing about it is that the number of rooms it contains is a mystery.
Sarah Winchester’s husband invented the Winchester rifle and made his family very rich. But Sarah believed that a curse had been placed on her family. Her only daughter, Annie, died from marasmus and her husband died from pulmonary tuberculosis. Mrs Winchester was so stunned by the tragedy, that she fell into a coma.
Finally, she recovered and decided to visit a medium and contacted the spirit of her dead husband. According to Sarah Winchester, the medium held a seance and her husband’s ghost revealed that there was only one way to lift the curse that had been placed on her.
Sarah believed that the deaths of her husband and daughter were caused by ghosts. The ghosts of people who had been killed with the destructive rifles created by her husband. The only way to appease these evil spirits and stop the curse from killing her, was to keep building the house. If she stopped building, she was convinced that she would die.
Sarah Winchester’s husband had left her a huge fortune and she used this vast wealth to continuously build the house for 38 years.
Winchester Mystery House began to take on a strange and twisted shape. There were no blueprints and no master plan for how the house was supposed to look. Sarah didn’t care what it looked like, she just knew that she needed to keep building. The result was both bizarre and beautiful. Most people thought that Sarah had lost her mind.
As the years went by, Winchester House continued to grow. Rooms were added to rooms, doors were joined to windows, levels turned into towers and peaks and the place eventually grew to a height of seven stories. There were stairs that led nowhere, rooms built inside other rooms, open holes in the middle of floors, chimneys that served no purpose and closets that opened onto walls.
Sarah Winchester was also obsessed with the number 13. The windows contained 13 panes of glass, the walls had 13 panels, the floors contained 13 wooden planks, the rooms had 13 windows and every staircase had 13 steps.
The design of Winchester House was supposed to confuse the evil spirits and ghosts that were haunting Sarah. She designed a house that was really a giant maze where she felt she could hide from the spirits.
Sarah lived a lonely life in the solitude of Winchester House. Her only friends were the servants who worked for her and the builders who constructed her home. At night, she would wander the darkened hallways of the old mansion, trying to avoid running into the ghosts.
Sarah Winchester died in her sleep in 1922 at the age of 83. Many people believe that her ghost now haunts Winchester House, trapped there for all eternity with the evil spirits that terrified her in life.
In the years since the house was opened to the public, employees and visitors claim to have encountered paranormal activity. People hear mysterious footsteps, doors banging open and closed on their own, the whispering of strange disembodied voices, windows that suddenly shatter and doorknobs that turn by themselves.
I live about 5 miles from this house…
The House is so beautiful, I would love to visit…
Just saw that on google, its really beautiful and interesting….!!!!!!!!!
Check it out on google maps. Very interesting place
Yeah, right. The picture was OBVIOUSLY fake don’t tell me that anyone actually believes in this crap.
I would love to go on that tour because it sound really intresting….XD
Man i love the Winchester rifle…………. I love blowing zombies heads with it in dead trigger
Tee hee. I’ve taken the tour.
Wow she must be totaly rich ,-,) what a fancy looking house
Why did she lead such a miserable life
though upon asking this I already know that it depends on what we decide to do in our lives…
The Winchesters in Supernatural were also named after this story.
I think that Steven King got the idea for the book Rose Red from this house. almost the same concept… interesting.
i’ve heard of this somewhere on tv i think. it’s such a stunning house. i would love to visit it.
Oh…when I was five i heard that miss winchester started to hear voices of ghosts telling her to build the house that way…
the house is so pretty i wanna go there
The house is haunted. But why does it look so beautiful.
Such a pretty house. Nice garden, too. My mom would love to live there.
so sad i feel bad for her, i’d hate to live her life it must have been so lonely and fearful. :(.scary and strange.