The Winchester Mystery House Beautiful but Weird!

Winchester Mystery House is an extravagant maze of Victorian craftsmanship – marvelous, baffling, and eerily eccentric, to say the least. Tour guides must warn people not to stray from the group or they could be lost for hours! Countless questions come to mind as you wander through the mansion – such as, what was Mrs. Winchester thinking when she had a staircase built that descends seven steps and then rises eleven? Some of the architectural oddities may have p ractical explanations.

For example, the Switchback Staircase, which has seven flights with forty four steps, rises only about nine feet, since each step is just two inches high. Mrs. Winchester arthritis was quite severe in her later years, and the stairway may have been designed to accommodate her disability. The miles of twisting hallways are made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. Mrs. Winchester traveled through her house in a roundabout fashion, supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might be following her.

  From the outside, the building appears to be nothing more than a sprawling Victorian mansion surrounded by meticulously groomed gardens, soothing fountains, and lots of tour buses. It’s pretty, though not particularly shocking. But the interior of the building and the story of its construction are bizarre and fascinating. Tickets are surprisingly expensive, and there’s sometimes a long wait for your guided tour to begin. But once inside, you forget all about that. You’re walking through a mystery. The Winchester House has 160 rooms, with a total of more than 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 52 skylights, 47 fireplaces, 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 6 kitchens, 3 elevators, 2 basements, 1 shower, and 349.7 other impressive-sounding numerical statistics. What makes it most interesting, though, is what it doesn’t have—any rhyme or reason. The entire house seems to have been randomly assembled, disassembled, and reassembled numerous times, with no master plan or design. And in fact, that’s pretty much what happened. Stairs lead to nowhere; floors have doors and windows in them; doors open into solid walls. All of this and more was due to an inexplicable obsession that drove its erstwhile owner, Sarah Winchester, to keep the building continuously under construction for 38 years

   Mrs. Winchester began renovating her farmhouse immediately upon moving in. She employed construction crews twenty-four hours a day, working in shifts. The construction would continue for thirty eight years after beginning. Paying for the project was no trouble. Mrs. Winchester received a large inheritance after her husband's passing, and the farm property allowed her to create her own brand of fruits, dates, and nuts to sell at local markets. The strange design of the house was meant to confuse spirits that might be following Mrs. Winchester. Not only did it confuse spirits, but the staff working at the house often had to use maps to find their way around. Cabinets that were really doors, stairs leading to dead ends, and doors that opened to solid walls were all methods used my Mrs. Winchester to hide from the angry spirits that might be lurking around her. 

Building a house to appease angry spirits is enough to indicate that Mrs. Winchester was quite superstitious. The number thirteen, a number with superstitious meaning for many, is used throughout the property. There are thirteen bathrooms, thirteen windows in the thirteenth bathroom, thirteen California palms lining the driveway, and thirteen hoods in the seance room to hold the thirteen cloaks Mrs. Winchester wore while communing with spirits, just to name a few examples. In addition to the number thirteen, Mrs. Winchester was not fond of mirrors or photographs. There were only a few mirrors in her house, and most were hand-held. There is only one known photograph of Mrs. Winchester, snapped quickly as she was sitting in her carriage in front of the house.