A mansion Built for Ghosts

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A Mansion Built for Ghosts
In the mid-1800s in New Haven, Connecticut, there lived a beautiful young woman. At four feet ten inches tall, Sarah was not only beautiful, but charming, musically talented, and proficient in several languages. She was very popular in New Haven society.

Sarah soon focused her attention on a young New Haven man. And in 1862 the couple married. The Civil War was raging at the time, tearing families apart and ruining lives. However, this couple was one of the few who actually benefited from the war.

The groom was William Wirt Winchester. From his father, he inherited a company that manufactured guns. In fact, William produced the first rifle that could fire rapid shots one after another – the first true repeating rifle. By the start of the Civil War, that rifle was in great demand by the Northern army. Between government contracts and individual sales, money poured into the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

In 1866, Sarah gave birth to a daughter, but the child died before a month had passed. Nearly insane with grief, Sarah withdrew from society, even from her family. It was nearly ten years before she seemed ready to regain a normal life.

But then tragedy struck again. In 1881, William died from tuberculosis. Sarah again retreated into her sorrow. She inherited incredible wealth, but that did nothing to ease her pain. Her friends tried to get her to rejoin society to no avail.

Only one of Sarah's former interests remained. She was still fascinated by spiritualism-the idea that certain people could contract the spirits of the dead. At that time, many people believed that a psychic called a medium could enter into a trance and communicate with those who were no longer living.

Spiritualism had been very popular in America for about 40 years. The craze was started in 1848 by a young woman named Margaret Fox and her two sisters. They began inviting people to meetings in their old New York farmhouse, which was rumored to be haunted. The visitors asked questions, and spirits answered with rapping noises. Many people were convinced that they were communicating with dead relatives and friends through the Fox sisters.
The Fox family moved to Rochester, New York, and continued gathering people together to hear their rapping spirits. The sisters soon became famous both in the States and in Europe. They toured the country with P.T. Barnum, holding popular séances. By the mid-1850s many other psychics also said they were contacting the spirits of the dead. They went into trances and spoke in mysterious voices, levitated tables, and manifested visible ghosts.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many people believed in these mediums and séances. Among the believers were American journalist Horace Greeley and British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, Doyle's own fictional creation, Sherlock Holmes, would have been much more skeptical about the whole thing.
At the time that Sarah Winchester lost her husband, many popular mediums were holding séances. When a friend of Sarah's suggested they attend a séance to be held by a medium from Boston, Sarah agreed to go. Perhaps the man would be able to tell her something about the loved ones she had lost.

Sarah and her friend entered the dark room where the séance was to take place. Black curtains covered the windows, preventing any outside light from penetrating the darkness. In the middle of the room stood a stark table. Several candlesticks supporting white pillars of wax were placed upon the tabletop. Sarah noted that, despite the fact that they produced heat; the candles themselves had a cold look to them.

The medium invited Sarah and her friend to sit down. Several other men and women were already seated around the large, dark table. They glanced at Sarah and her friend and then returned to their thoughts. Sarah thought that they all looked ready, yet unprepared. Excited, yet frightened. Exactly as she felt.

When the séance began, the medium contacted a few family members and long lost loves of others at the table. Sarah began to get restless. She had come to the séance with high hopes in her heart. She was hoping she would hear something-anything-that related to her loved ones.

Suddenly the medium addressed Sarah.

"The spirit of your husband is standing beside you," he said.

Sarah felt the hairs bristle on the back of her neck. She, at first hesitantly, then eagerly, looked beside her. She saw nothing.

The medium sensed her doubt. He convinced Sarah by describing what her husband looked like. Then he said, "William has a message for you."

"What is it?" Sarah whispered.

"The message is that your husband and child died because of a curse on your family. The ghosts of all those who have been killed by Winchester rifles have taken revenge on you," said the medium.

So the powerful weapon had brought death upon its maker and his child. Now even his widow was threatened.

"You must build a house," the medium instructed. "It must be a mansion large enough to hold all the spirits of the dead killed by the Winchester rifle. But it should not be here in Connecticut. You will be shown the place, and you will be told how to build it. As long as you are building this house, you will live. When you stop building it, you will die."

Sarah sat in a state of shock. She didn't want to believe what she had heard. But yet-what if it were true? It did seem that her family had experienced its share of bad luck. Did a curse seem that far-fetched?

But how can I be expected to build a house for all the spirits of the dead killed by the Winchester rifle? She thought. Hundreds were killed-no, surely there must have been thousands. How could I hope to house them all, to please them all, and to escape their fury?

The medium once again sensed Sarah's anxiety.

"Your husband will guide you," he said. "He will tell you exactly where to build."

So Sarah went home and waited for further instructions. But she wondered how those instructions would get to her. Would William leave a note? Would he send a messenger? Or would he appear himself, right in front of her face?

One day Sarah had a sudden urge to move to California. Taking this as a sign from her husband, she sold her house in New Haven and traveled alone across the country. In the Santa Clara Valley of California, just south of San Francisco, she found what she was looking for.

In the town of San Jose, Sarah saw a large house under construction. Her dead husband's voice told her that this was the place she must build. The original plan called for 17 rooms, but the house would eventually have many more rooms than that. Sarah bought the house and land from its owner, then started giving new instructions to the builder.

Her fortune allowed her to do whatever she wanted. According to the medium's instructions, someone had to be kept working 24 hours a day, every day of the year. She hired as many carpenters and other workers as she needed to keep the work going in shifts. The nonstop building went on for 36 years. The house changed constantly as Sarah had rooms built, then torn down to make way for new rooms. She had a tall hedge put around the property to hide the strange activity from those who passed by.

She built a small, windowless room in which she held her own séances. Meeting there with her ghosts, she became convinced that good spirits were present as well as the evil ones that still wanted revenge. She had a bell tower put up, and every night a bell summoned the spirits at midnight. At 2 a.m. the bell rang again, signaling that the séance was over. And each night, Sarah emerged from her hidden room with new plans for the next day's construction.
The house that Sarah built grew year by year. By 1906, the house was seven stories tall. That year, the San Francisco earthquake damaged some of the rooms. Sarah was rescued from the house, but she was convinced that the evil ghosts had finally caught up with her. She had 30 rooms boarded up for good, including the one she had been sleeping in when the quake struck.

Then she continued building, and she never stopped as long as she lived. Perhaps the house is so odd because she had to keep building for so long. But perhaps it was meant to be a puzzle or even a trap for ghosts.

The house does seem to have been designed to confuse someone or something. It has a multitude of staircases and hallways, secret passageways, and hidden rooms. Some windows don't lead outside, some doors lead to a blank wall, and other doors open to a sheer drop outside an upper floor. Some rooms were constructed around other rooms, while other rooms grew crazily into entire wings. The roof is a jumble of towers, turrets, and cupolas.

Some stairways go up or down to dead ends. In other cases, rooms can be reached by taking one flight of stairs down and another back up. One stairway has 44 steps but only goes up ten feet to the next floor. Other stairs and some chimneys end halfway up a wall. There are three elevators, but one only goes up one floor.

It is said that Sarah knew the house well. She used the secret ways to slip from room to room. She slept in a different bedroom every night so the ghosts couldn't find her. And she only entered her hidden séance room when she felt sure that the angry ghosts had lost her trail.

At some point, Sarah must have become convinced that the number 13 would protect her. She built rooms with 13 windows, stairways with 13 steps, and 13 bathrooms in the house. She even ordered chandeliers made with 13 lights.

She often held lavish banquets for 12 guests, making a total of 13 at the table. Although the food was real and quite excellent, Sarah was the only visible guest.
In one sense, Sarah lived in the house alone. But of course there were servants, as well as the constant parade of workers. Perhaps she also had occasional visitors. According to some stories, President Theodore Roosevelt visited Sarah – according to others, she turned him away. Others say that the magician Harry Houdini visited her.

After a midnight séance in 1922, Sarah Winchester died in her sleep at the age of 83. When it was found that her bank account had dwindled away, rumors started that a fortune was hidden somewhere in the house. The treasure was said to include jewelry and a solid gold dinner service that Sarah had used to entertain ghosts. No such things were ever found.

Sarah stated in her will that her ghostly guests must always be welcome in the house. And it seems that they probably are. Visitors, employees, and especially visiting psychics often experience strange noises and sights – footsteps, banging doors or windows, voices, strange breathing, cold spots, moving lights, and doorknobs that turn by themselves. Lights go on and off by themselves; organ music plays without an organ. Even the smells of cooking come from an unused kitchen.

Some visitors have had visions of a couple dressed as servants, visions of workers, and even visions of Sarah herself. Some claim to have taken photographs of Sarah. During one séance, a psychic seemed to age and take on Sarah's physical appearance.

So perhaps Sarah herself still haunts her remarkable house. If so, let's hope she no longer has to flee the terrible spirits that haunted her life. Most likely she doesn't, since now she seems to delight in entertaining her human visitors. It is said that she is a gentle spirit and that no one need fear her.

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