Mystery House

Started: 2024-03-17 20:25:13

Submitted: 2024-03-18 21:46:45

Visibility: World-readable

Visiting the Winchester Mystery House in suburban San Jose

As a kid in the Bay Area, I knew about the Winchester Mystery House and the legends surrounding it, but I don't think I ever toured the site. It's been on my todo list ever since we moved back to California in 2020. It finally rose to the top of our list of family excursions not too far from home on Sunday of President's Day weekend, which turned out to be a bright sunny morning in between a series of winter rain storms.

The Winchester House started out as an eight-room farmhouse in the agricultural Santa Clara Valley near the end of the nineteenth century where Sarah Winchester bought the house and began expanding it. She was the heir to the fortune of the the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, leading to rumors of supernatural occurrences at the house and legends of its construction.

The house had once been at the center of a 160-acre estate that grew fruit, on land that has replaced by suburban San Jose. We drove past shopping malls and office parks on broad streets laid out in a rectangular grid (one bearing the name Winchester) and found the house, perched on a small plot that was all that remained of its original estate, a Victorian anachronism surrounded by modernity.

Our visit started in the gift shop that had a couple of exhibits around the edges, including a scale model to help orient us, and a series of magazine articles covering the house over the past century, reproduced on thick pages we could browse through.

We met our tour guide on a courtyard near the back of the house, between the house and the newer visitor's facility with the gift shop. Our guide took us into a corridor large enough to allow a carriage to pass to transfer passengers without exposing them to the weather (and told us not to run off on our own, because the last people that had done that had never been seen again). He took us around the corner into a maze of twisting passages to views of stables, past a stairway to nowhere that turned a corner and kept climbing into the ceiling. To let us view around the corner the tour operation had set up a mirror on the corner, which also let us see the fire sprinklers that had been awkwardly added in the 1950s.

Along the way we saw rooms holding extra building supplies in storage. In addition to the unpainted wood carved as decorative elements, we saw wall coverings that had been packaged into rolls like wallpaper but embossed with patterns designs in three dimensions. These were popular at the time, installed on top of the plaster on the interior walls instead of wallpaper (or the drywall texture that modern construction would use). We saw this installed on the walls of the house, and our guide said that there were many unused rolls still in storage that would never be used.

One of the interesting feature of the house was the proliferation of low-rise stairs, which our guide told us had been installed for Sarah Winchester because her arthritis didn't let her raise her feet high enough to use regular stairs. Each step rose only a couple of inches above the last step, and the space that might have been allocated for a regular staircase climbing a couple of steps was replaced by a dozen or more low-rise steps switching back and forth to climb the same height.

We started in the back of the house and gradually worked our way forwards, climbing to the second floor and then working our way forwards. We meandered through a series of rooms that were apparently used as staff quarters, but it was hard to get a good feeling for the rooms because they had been stripped of their furnishings, and because our tour route took a circuitous route meandering back and forth through the space.

Finally we reached Sarah Winchester's room at the center of the house.

Our tour guide led us to the room where Sarah Winchester was alleged to have performed seances, though our guide pointed out that no one actually admitted to attending a seance (implying but not quite saying that all of the supernatural lore surrounding the house and its construction was a fabrication). We exited the room via a one-way door (it opened from the inside, but once it was latched it couldn't be opened from the outside) and our guide volunteered Julian to go through the door first to see if he could find the way or get waylaid by anything supernatural.

There were multiple toilets in the house where the door panels had been replaced with glass to let us look inside, which gave the impression that they had been originally built that way as some sort of strange voyeuristic exercise.

We walked through a room with a metal floor and a drain used for watering indoor plants, then the first of two indoor atriums. (This one featured a skylight letting some light down to the ground floor.)

Next we visited the upstairs suite at the front of the house, overlooking the front garden, which had been damaged by the 1906 earthquake and abandoned in favor of the spaces in newer sections of the back of the sprawling house. The plaster had been knocked off the walls, revealing the thin strips of lath neatly nailed onto the studs. The masonry fireplace had apparently become detached from its mount and crashed onto the floor below, leaving a void space behind the mantle. Here much of the finishings were missing, letting us see the structure of the house underneath.

We climbed several flights of stairs into the , with an intercom to summon help to wherever they were needed in the house. We stepped out onto the roof and looked out beyond the house. The house used to be surrounded by orchards with a view of the mountains ringing the Santa Clara Valley; now it was surrounded by apartment buildings and office buildings.

We descended onto the ground floor and saw the kitchens, last updated around the turn of the twentieth century where the stoves still burned solid fuel but the exhaust vents in the walls would persist in residential construction for another fifty years. We saw a wood-paneled sitting room, featuring a pipe organ and a shelf full of trinkets. We saw a dining room with a long table set with china, with a hatch in the wall where food would be delivered.

And then the tour wrapped up an we emerged back in the gift shop, having spent more than an hour climbing up and down a very strange house winding our way from the back to the front, seeing rooms that were elaborately finished, rooms that were damaged and never repaired, and rooms that had never been finished. The whole thing was confusing and disorienting and we didn't get to dwell in any one place because there was so much to see.

We stepped into the gardens and walked around the front of the house. There were office buildings across Winchester Boulevard in front of the house, and apartments next door. The gardens were carefully maintained, though not especially colorful in what passes for winter in the Bay Area. Seeing the house from the outside gave a new perspective on how much it sprawled, with different wings being built at different times, but all painted to look like it belonged together.

Seeing the Winchester Mystery House was an interesting diversion on the other side of the mountain, offering a fascinating view into a truly strange house built by someone we will never fully understand.

I took a few more pictures of the Winchester Mystery House at Photos on 2024-02-18.