Day 2 - 31/08/2022 - Winchester Mystery House

Rita J. Dashwood

Sep 2, 20225 min read

Updated: Sep 3, 2022

This day is going to be a hard one to beat for the rest of the trip. I first visited Winchester Mystery House the last time I was here, three and a half years ago, and absolutely loved it. While I have heard it has the reputation for being a “tourist trap,” I’m personally an unapologetic fan of almost anything that comes under that description, and simultaneously would argue that the house is far too interesting and historically important to be so easily dismissed as that. As someone who has just published a book (shameless plug) on women’s relationships to real property — by which I mean the house and the estate — I find Sarah Winchester and her house fascinating.

The Winchester family made its wealth by creating the Winchester rifle, which for the first time allowed one to fire fifteen repetitive bullets, to the point that it became known as “the gun that won the West.” In what would appear to be a stroke of good luck, Sarah Pardee married into the Winchester family in 1862, when she married William Winchester, the heir to the Winchester fortune. Their only daughter died at six weeks of age in 1866, and William died only five years later, leaving Sarah a widow. Sarah was a very private person who left behind (as far as we know) no journal and only a very few letters (and those only to her lawyer), so what happened later is uncertain (I can’t wait for someone to find some letters under the floorboards!). The myth, however, is that she visited a medium after believing herself to be haunted by the ghosts of the people who had lost their lives at the hands of the Winchester rifle. According to this story, the medium would have told her that in order to appease the spirits she should move out west and build a house and never stop building it, in order to confuse the spirits who meant to do her harm. This would be the explanation as to why in the house you can find, for example, staircases and doors that lead nowhere (including the famous “Door to Nowhere,” which drops you from the first floor of the house into the garden outside).

Sarah’s favourite number was the number 13, and this is continuously repeated throughout the house, as is the spiderweb, her favourite pattern. A stained glass pattern featuring a spiderweb and thirteen coloured circles is believed to have been designed by her, for example. Unfortunately, none of the original furniture survives except for the built-in furniture, as it was left to her niece Marion “Daisy” Marriott (nicknamed as such because daisies were Sarah’s favourite flower) in Sarah’s will and she sold it, but the house’s decorator has done an excellent job in filling it with gorgeous period-appropriate furniture.

These and other pieces of information were communicated to us in the one-hour guided House Tour. In what is believed to have been the Séance Room, we also learnt, Sarah would have attempted to communicate to her long lost loved ones, ringing a bell at midnight to summon their spirits and again at 2am to release them. This is the same tour I had done the first time I visited, but apparently, having received feedback from visitors that this tour didn’t contain enough history around spiritualism, WMH created a new tour, the “Walk with Spirits Tour.” This, for me, was the absolute highlight of my day.

To begin with, I found out upon arriving that I was going to be the only person on the tour, which would have already made it an altogether VIP experience in itself, but to this was then added my guide, Victor, the best guide I have encountered literally anywhere. I had a close look at the newly restored twin dining rooms (hats off to the decorator once again!) and to many other areas of the house that I hadn’t seen before, including the witch’s cap in the attic, and the basement. In this tour, I found out that Sarah was by no means the only formidable woman in the neighbourhood. Mary Hayes Chynoweth (1825-1905) was a psychic leader and mystic who also lived in San José and built an enormous 64-room mansion that sadly hasn’t survived, as it burnt down in 1899. Victor told me about the connections between spiritualism and women’s rights, abolitionist, and animal rights movements in nineteenth-century America, and had so clearly gone above and beyond by reading widely on everything to do with Sarah Winchester and her period that I now have an Amazon basket filled with his reading recommendations. We went down into the basement, where the ghost of the wheelbarrow-carrying servant of Sarah Winchester has previously been seen (he evidently wanted nothing to do with me) and those of neighbouring children (who also didn’t appear, though I was less surprised by that, since my reputation as someone who strongly dislikes children proceeds me).

One of my favourite things about this tour was finding out more from Victor about Sarah Winchester as a mistress. While the stories about Sarah’s potential connections to the spiritualist movement are fascinating, those about her kindness and approachability (despite her having received the reputation of being the strange lady in the bizarre house) get lost. It appears that one day they had to call a servant from a neighbouring house because Sarah’s farmhand was struggling to milk the cows. When he came, she sat by this man in the cowshed for hours, talking to him as he milked the cows. The following day, this servant received a present of several exotic plants as a thank you for this one day of milking. Aside from this, all her servants received double the salary of the average one in San José, as well as the more comfortable rooms for servants I have ever seen. The large, airy and well lit rooms for the servants you see throughout the tour of the house cast nothing but shame upon the miserable, gloomy servants’ quarters you are taken to in tours around English estates.

As I mentioned, however, my favourite part of the tour was my guide. Victor is a fellow nineteenth-century aficionado, who had been spending the last few days thinking, for the first time, about the possibility of studying literature and history in the UK, after a friend of his has spent some time backpacking there, and serendipitously, as he put it, we happened to run into each other at the tour. Victor’s knowledge about and passion for the nineteenth century was so clear that I have no doubt that he will make an excellent scholar of the period, if he so wishes. To have been so warmly welcomed into California by a complete stranger just on my second day seems like something out of a book (or, to be more specific, a certain travel memoir by a little author called Elizabeth Gilbert).

The house opened to the public in 1923, only nine months after Sarah died at age 83, but this tour has barely been open for a month, so I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to see it, and in the way I did! At the end of the tour, I made sure to make a note of Victor’s name, as I said I would be blogging my visit and wanted to mention him, to which he replied: “You’ll get back to the entrance and talk about this guide named Victor and they will say ‘Victor? We don’t have a tour guide named Victor. And you never showed up for your tour!’”