Winchester mystery house review full#
Winchester mystery house review windows#

Winchester mystery house review windows#

It starts in the courtyard, passes through a carriage entrance hall and into spaces such as the wood-paneled Venetian Dining Room and the Grand Ballroom, where Winchester installed stained-glass windows featuring cryptic quotes from Shakespeare: “Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts” and “These same thoughts people this little world” (from Troilus and Cressida and Richard II, respectively). An aerial view of the house.įor decades, guests have followed more or less the same path, a guided tour that takes them through a hundred-plus rooms. More striking, though, is the extraordinary artistic freedom she exercised in creating it, as well as the lengths to which today’s staff must go to keep the house intact and open. “He knocked on the front door and was not even let in.” Her eccentricity and the ghost stories-not to mention the scandal of a woman living autonomous and alone-have always been amplified in the house’s history. “There’s a story about Teddy Roosevelt making an appearance in San Jose and wanting an audience with the Winchester widow,” says Magnuson. For the most part, no one was permitted even to photograph her. She kept to herself following the deaths of her husband and infant daughter, Annie, from illness. Other than household staff, few saw the home’s interior during Winchester’s lifetime. More than 12 million slack-jawed visitors have followed a planned route through Winchester’s singular vision. It has been a beloved piece of quirky, creepy Americana since it opened. After she died in 1922, the businessman John Brown rented the house, christened it a tourist attraction, and later purchased it outright. And she didn’t hesitate to make unorthodox building decisions-a stairway ascending to a wall, a closet about an inch deep, a “door to nowhere” that opens to empty space. A dedicated crew of carpenters built new rooms so quickly that no one bothered to draw up blueprints. Winchester inherited $20 million after her husband died in 1881, and not long afterward moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to an eight-room farmhouse in orchard-studded Santa Clara Valley. Getting to know the house is, in a strange way, like getting to know the woman who built it-and no ghost stories are necessary to marvel at its creativity and ambition. Legend has it that she did it to appease or confuse the ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles.

Famously private and eccentric, she built onto her California home on and off for more than 30 years. The mastermind behind this architectural oddity-a sprawling Queen Anne Revival with 160 rooms-was Sarah Winchester, the widow of the rifle magnate William Winchester. This might be a minor detail, but it hints at the disorder that unfolds within. One of the first things you notice upon approaching the Winchester Mystery House is that the front door is not aligned with the roof peak above it-it is staggered slightly to the right. “Some of them really enjoy the spaces being something only employees know about.” Magnuson’s vision won out, as he made the decision to restore the front wing of the house to its Victorian-style, albeit sometimes unfinished, glory, and then share it with visitors. “Some of them were very protective,” he says. Magnuson wanted to open some of these rooms to the public, but not all of the house’s long-term employees agreed. “Some of these spaces, you have a lot of questions: What was this room’s purpose? Who stayed here? What was Sarah thinking?” “It was just in a constant state of becoming,” says Magnuson, who came to Winchester from a senior position at Disneyland. He saw jewel-like wallpaper that scattered sunlight into tiny orbs, rows of stained-glass windows mounted inexplicably at waist height, and secret balconies that offered a bird’s-eye view of the many-gabled roof.

Winchester mystery house review full#

Some rooms were missing floorboards, others had been closed off after sustaining severe damage in the 1906 earthquake, and still more were just full of broken tiles. He did eventually gain access to these hidden spaces, and what he found was both astounding and in keeping with the home’s reputation for eccentricity. “They said, ‘You know, a lot of these spaces can only open with skeleton keys, and only one tour guide has the keys.’” “I would see doors that were locked, I would see hallways that were kind of dark, and I would start asking about them,” he says. When Walter Magnuson arrived at San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House as its new general manager in 2015, he asked the tour guides at the famed, peculiar mansion to show him everything.