![]() Sarah made no effort to explain herself to the general public - why would she? This house was for her, not for them - so the general public was left to create their own stories about this wealthy, reclusive widow and her growing house. ![]() In a letter to her sister-in-law, Sarah wrote, “ 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 so, over a year ago, I took out a wall and put in a skylight.” Correspondence with family reveals a certain “aw shucks” casualness. Sarah had hired, and fired, two architects, preferring to do the planning herself. What Ignoffo does find evidence for is that Winchester was very wealthy, and very excited about architecture. These latter changes allegedly led even Sarah to say to a friend that the house looked “ as though it had been built by a crazy person.” ![]() In the corner of “no evidence,” Ignoffo included that the name of Sarah’s alleged instigating medium - Adam Coons - can’t be found in any business records that Sarah hardly kept her staff working ‘round the clock, but released her construction teams for months at a time, once writing that she did so to “ take such rest as I might” that she wasn’t even a full-time resident of the San Jose house in the later years of her life but mainly resided in an aggressively normal-looking home in Atherton, CA that the famous staircase to nowhere and its architectural twin, the door to nowhere are results of damage from the 1906 earthquake, after which Sarah carted away the rubble and closed off damaged sections of the house, refusing to rebuild areas she now saw as structurally unsafe. Ignoffo found evidence of Sarah’s alleged madness to be… lacking. Inspired to look into the story of this haunted woman, author Mary Jo Ignoffo published Captive of the Labyrinth in 2010, the first (and only) comprehensive biography of Sarah Winchester. Rumors swirled that Sarah was compelled to keep her builders working, night and day, in neverending supplication. Not the ghosts of the many family members who died prior to her leaving her Connecticut home and moving west - her infant daughter, her mother, her father-in-law, her husband - but haunted by the tortured souls of all those who were killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, the gun that was said to have “won the west,” used by the likes of Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley in their traveling shows, and to which Sarah could attribute her fortune, having married into the family.Īfter the death of her husband, Sarah allegedly went to a medium, who told her that she would be haunted by the spirits of those murdered by Winchester guns, unless she built a giant home to confuse them. It’s said that Sarah was haunted by ghosts. Today, visitors are shown a number of odd attractions, like the “staircase to nowhere,” where, rather than meeting a landing, the top of the stairs ends at the ceiling.Ī giant building, four stories tall with over 160 rooms, it’s marketed as the physical embodiment of its former owners’ compulsions. ![]() It’s easy to get confused about where you are, and where you’ve already been. Rooms connect via narrow and non-intuitive passages. It’s a non-symmetrical mishmash of odd-angles annexes, some too small, some too big. To call the Winchester House “odd-looking” would be an understatement. ![]()
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