Build or Die: The Story of Sarah Winchester

by Matt Blanchard

APRIL 30, 2009 TAGS: ARCHITECTURE, FEAR, DEATH, ILLNESS COMMENTS (3)

Just before we entered the charmingly psychotic and beautiful Winchester Mansion, my girlfriend decided to smoke one more coffin nail, a Camel. I triple-checked the car locks and entertained a flitting thought that my heart might be beating out of rhythm, a possible first sign of cardiac arrest.

Like millions of neurotics, we're both high-strung and occasionally fearful, but we weather the terrors of everyday life by two opposite methods: She likes to smoke small doses of self-destruction. I practice low-intensity hypochondria.

We'd come to the Winchester House to see a third option. Rising out of suburban San Jose like an Addams Family dream palace, the vast, illogical 160-room mansion is said to contain doors that lead nowhere, stairs that end abruptly at the ceiling, and windows that open in the floor. The exterior is a Mad Ludwig's castle of gables, towers, and pinnacles – all of it shingled to the gills like a High Victorian hallucination. The $25 house tour wends for more than a mile.

The reason for such excess? The builder, a wealthy heiress named Sarah L. Winchester, was afraid to die.

For 38 years Mrs. Winchester kept shifts of carpenters working around the clock, building and rebuilding room after room in the superstitious conviction that spirits would kill her if construction ever ceased. The resulting structure covers four acres. It is fear rendered in real estate, anxiety as architecture; a monumental and probably psychotic twist on the familiar buzzword, “housing crisis.”

The saga of Sarah’s struggle against the spirits, now retold every 20 minutes by tour guides, runs like a Greek myth: Frightened by an oracle’s warning, Mrs. Winchester became the American King Minos, a labyrinth builder not of Crete but of California, who hid her spectral Minotaurs inside a maze of Victorian woodwork. Against this parable of paranoia my imaginary heart condition began to feel small, and worse, un-ambitious.

The young Sarah Lockwood Pardee (dark eyes, round face, sharp little nose) was born into upper-class New Haven, Conn., in 1839, the daughter of a carriage manufacturer. In 1862 she married William Wirt Winchester, the worried-looking son of the man who invented the Winchester Repeating Rifle, that short-barreled, hand-pumped carbine seen in every cowboy’s saddle, the so-called “Gun that Won the West.”

Four years after their wedding, the couple’s infant daughter, Annie, died of a wasting disease, followed in 1881 by William himself, carried off by tuberculosis. Sarah was suddenly alone, sunk in depression, and extremely rich. Her inheritance, nearly half of all Winchester Company stock, provided an income of $1,000 a day on top of a $20 million lump sum. Yet she felt cursed.

On a visit to Boston, Sarah consulted a spiritualist known to history only as “the Boston medium,” whose Delphic message would determine the rest of Sarah’s life: Thousands of souls slaughtered by the Winchester rifle – Indians, cowboys, soldiers of the Civil War – were now haunting Sarah’s family. These spirits had killed Sarah’s daughter and husband, the medium explained, and they would take Sarah’s life next unless she moved West and built a great house for the spirits. The house must never be finished, the medium decreed. So long as the sound of hammers did not cease, Sarah Winchester could survive.

Sarah abandoned Connecticut in 1884, buying a farmhouse and fruit orchard about three miles outside San Jose, then a town of just 13,000. By 1900, her home was a mountain of wood seven stories tall. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 knocked it down to four stories, but the work never stopped. Today it sports 2,000 doors, 1,257 windows, 40 stairwells, 40 bedrooms, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, six kitchens, three elevators, and a many-turreted exterior requiring 20,000 gallons of paint for a single coat. As a father in my tour group told his young son: “We’re in the monster house now!”

Many odd features of the house can be explained in practical terms. One stairwell is 100 feet long with seven switchbacks and 44 steps, but rises only 9 feet to the second floor. It’s a late addition to accommodate Sarah’s arthritis, which left her unable to lift her legs for more than one 2-inch step at a time.

Other features suggest a real panic to keep building: A stairwell leads smack into the ceiling. A cupboard, when opened, is only an inch deep. A chimney rises through four floors only to stop 8 feet short of the roofline. There was, we are told, an entire wing of rooms that, when finished, were torn out and redone at Sarah’s insistence.

And superstitious touches abound: There are 13 windows in the “13th bathroom,” 13 steps to many stairwells, and 13 lamps in the Grand Ballroom’s gaslight chandelier. Every wooden post in the place is installed upside down, a trick said to confuse evil spirits.

But was it really meant as a home for ghosts? Or was it instead a trap for them? Was the odd, ever-changing architecture meant to scramble their haunting patterns and distract them from taking Sarah’s soul?

A famous recluse, Mrs. Winchester gave no press interviews and left no personal notes. Six years after her death, the American Weekly, a Hearst Magazine of wide circulation and questionable reputation, published an account of Sarah’s movement about the house:

When Mrs. Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of an Indian or even of a bloodhound to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment to another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her. Then she opened a window in that apartment and climbed out, not into the open air, but onto the top of a flight of steps that took her down one story only to meet another flight that brought her right back up to the same level again, all inside the house. This was supposed to be very discomforting to evil spirits, who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps.

Perhaps the house was Sarah’s rabbit warren, a hidey hole to elude predators. But the more convincing evidence suggests that Sarah and the spirits had a cooperative relationship:

At the midpoint of the tour, visitors are led into the Séance Room, a small, second-floor chamber with barred windows close to the heart of the great house. Each night, dressed in colored robes, Sarah contacted spirits of the Winchester’s victims using a kind of Ouija board. Legend has it that she would receive construction plans from these spirits, sharing them with her workers in the morning. The dead, once bent on killing her, had become her architects, and she the dutiful foreman.

The end came on Sept. 5, 1922. Sarah was found dead in one of her two-score bedrooms, the victim of a heart attack at age 82. That day the carpenters stopped their work, our tour guide reverently explained, leaving nails half-hammered and boards half-painted.

After the tour, we exited through the “gift shoppe,” a barn-sized bazaar of Winchester mugs, hats, key chains, snow globes, DVDs and books. Old-timey nickelodeon music roared in the background as I bought a postcard with the mansion’s new publicity name: “Winchester Mystery House.” It must be acknowledged that Sarah’s occult architectural masterpiece, her four-decade death struggle, is today a fairly cheesy tourist attraction.

But the Boston medium was not mistaken. Eighty years after Mrs. Winchester’s death, restoration work continues and so does Sarah. Thousands visit her home each year, adding their entrance fees to the upkeep budget, and the Winchester story is told in a dozen books and on probably a hundred websites.

Her many-gabled effort to outrun death did not save Sarah Winchester’s life, but it did make her immortal.

Matt Blanchard, a freelance writer, is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania.