Winchester Mystery House

Sarah Lockwood Pardee – “Sallie” to those close to her – was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1839 and in 1862 married William Wirt Winchester, son of the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Their only child, Annie, died at about six weeks old in 1866. In 1881 William died of tuberculosis, months after his father, leaving Sarah a substantial fortune and shares in the company. In 1885, in poor health and seeking a milder climate, she moved to California, and the following year she bought an eight-room farmhouse on 45 acres outside San Jose that she named Llanada Villa.

For the next two decades she expanded it, acting as her own designer and employing a large crew of carpenters. Rooms were added, altered and abandoned as plans changed, producing the maze for which the house is famous: doors opening on to walls, a staircase of 44 shallow steps that rises only ten feet – built, it seems, to suit a small woman with arthritis – and windows set into floors. The 1906 earthquake brought down the seven-storey tower and much of the upper floors, and Sarah, who also owned homes in Atherton and Burlingame, did little more building there afterwards. She died at Llanada Villa on 5 September 1922.

Within a year the house had a new life. John and Mayme Brown leased it and opened it to paying visitors in 1923, with Mayme as the first guide, and the legend took shape quickly. In its best-known form, a Boston medium told the grieving widow that the spirits of everyone killed by Winchester rifles were pursuing her and that she would live only as long as building never stopped; she held séances each night and filled the house with the number thirteen to confuse the ghosts. Harry Houdini visited around 1924, and later managers marketed the house with billboards of a silhouetted mansion and hints of ghostly encounters.

Historians have taken most of that apart. Biographer Mary Jo Ignoffo found no evidence the Boston medium – usually named as Adam Coons – existed, and traced the story to a 1967 book. People who knew Sarah described her as clear-headed and sharp with money, and a 1951 thesis based on interviews with former employees concluded she built to keep workers employed and to indulge her own design ideas. Construction was not round-the-clock – she paused, sometimes for months – and much of the “thirteen” lore first appeared in a 1929 magazine article. Ignoffo has written that guides were long expected to follow a script built on such claims.

None of that has dented the house’s fame. Staff and visitors continue to report ghostly experiences, paranormal programmes including Ghost Adventures have investigated, and the 2018 film Winchester starring Helen Mirren retold the legend for a new generation. The mansion was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and remains privately owned and run as a tourist attraction.

Accounts repeated on tours and on paranormal television describe footsteps and closing doors in empty corridors, cold spots, unexplained voices and knocking, and fleeting figures in the halls – sometimes identified as Sarah herself or as one of her workmen. Many of the stories come from staff working in the house after closing.

Stories focus on the room promoted as Sarah’s “séance room”, the maze of servants’ corridors and switchback stairs, the basement and the upper floors left unfinished after 1906; after-dark flashlight tours around Halloween and on Friday the 13th draw the most reports.

The house is one of the most famous haunted attractions in the world, retold in Colin Dickey’s Ghostland, cited as an inspiration for Stephen King’s Rose Red, and dramatised in the 2018 film Winchester. Mary Jo Ignoffo’s biography Captive of the Labyrinth is the key corrective to the legend.