1963 KPIX Documentary: Mrs. Winchester’s House

KPIX, the CBS station in San Francisco, made this half-hour documentary in 1963 and posted it to its YouTube channel in 2018. The actress Lillian Gish narrates. It opens with Longfellow’s poem “Haunted Houses,” then tells Sarah Winchester’s story from her New Haven marriage into the rifle-making family, through the deaths of her infant daughter Annie and her husband William, to her move to California and the decades of building at her San Jose house.

For most of its running time the film plays the legend straight: a Boston medium’s warning about the spirits of people killed by Winchester rifles, nightly séances in a hidden room, stairs of thirteen steps, a ball with no guests, and the 1906 earthquake that wrecked the tower and front rooms. In its final minutes the tone changes. The narration admits that after Sarah moved to San Jose the truth became tangled with gossip, suggests that dismissed servants and jealous neighbours spread many of the stories, and offers practical explanations for the house’s oddities, including short steps for her arthritis.

This documentary is a valuable snapshot of the legend as it stood forty years after Sarah Winchester’s death – and of how it was told. Almost every supernatural element it dramatises, from the Boston medium to the nightly séances and the obsession with thirteen, has no contemporary evidence behind it: no surviving account by her staff mentions séances, and historians trace these stories to the decades after the house opened as a paid attraction in 1923. Some details also differ from the record; Sarah and William married in 1862, not 1861.

Credit where it is due: the closing section is surprisingly skeptical for 1963 television, describing a generous, cultured woman whose reputation was shaped by rumour. Watch the two halves against each other – the vivid reenactment is what most people remember, but the film’s own conclusion points the other way.