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Sarah was smart, generous, and yes maybe aloof but not demented. Over the past two years, the Winchester Mystery House has completed restoration projects on two of the oldest rooms in Sarah Winchester’s San Jose mansion. The Twin Dining Rooms are believed to be the original dining area of the modest farm house that Sarah bought when she moved to San Jose in the mid-1880s.
DAILY MANSION & ESTATE TOURS
The conspicuous absence of the house in her will has puzzled many. It seems appraisers viewed it as virtually worthless because of earthquake damage, the erratic and impractical design and its unfinished nature. The significance of the number to her was clearly immense, although whether it was out of superstition or simply a troubled woman’s fixation remains unclear. Within the 160 rooms (the precise number is still debated) are 47 fireplaces, 6 kitchens, 3 lifts, 10,000 windows and 52 skylights. Sarah also adopted new innovations including an indoor shower, wool insulation and electricity.
VISITOR ITINERARIES
Even 95 years after her death, it seemed that Sarah Winchester’s house was still holding on to some secrets. This unique tour takes you beyond the ordinary, exploring areas of the house that you don’t see during the daily mansion tour. Sarah had arthritis and architectural features were added to accommodate her disability.
IMMERSIVE 360° TOUR
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Once the United States’ largest private residence and the most expensive to build, today you could almost miss it. The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, sits between the eight lanes of the I-280 freeway, a mobile home park, and the remains of a Space Age movie theater. The world has changed around it, but the mansion remains stubbornly and defiantly what it always was. Tragedy befell Sarah – her infant daughter died of a childhood illness and a few years later her husband was taken from her by tuberculosis. Though visitors can watch the video tour for free, the Winchester Mystery House is asking visitors to consider purchasing a voucher for use at a later date.
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She hoped, perhaps, to get advice from the beyond as to how to spend her fortune or what to do with her life. Her house is a testament to her skill, an example of the Victorian aesthetic at its most intricate and maze-like. For more than a century her legacy has been defined by ghosts stories, seances, and grief. But like her house she contains infinite amounts of complexity.
Sarah Winchester as Innovator
The Winchester Mystery House even boasts special tours on Halloween and Fridays the 13th. Prior to 1906, when the house was damaged by an earthquake, it had 7 stories. Odd features such as uneven floors and stairs, corridors to nowhere, doors that don’t open and windows that overlook other rooms in the house contribute to the eerie feeling inside.
Walk With Spirits Tour
Winchester made charitable donations, certainly, and if she had wanted to, she could have become a philanthropist of greater renown. But the fact remains that she chose to convert a vast portion of her rifle fortune into a monstrous, distorted home; so we can now wander through her rooms imagining how one life affects others. I must have been hoping that the house would yield up its secret to me. At first glance I was deflated, for the unusual reason that from the outside, the house wasn’t entirely weird. When I heard her ghost story from a friend in graduate school, I was enthralled. Eventually, Winchester became the muse for my book on the history of the American gun industry and culture.
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The home was designated a historic landmark in 1974, and it's listed in the National Registry of Historic Places. Few people aside from household staff and teams of carpenters and other workmen were invited into the mansion during Sarah's lifetime, and very few if any interior photographs were taken. The furniture inside the home today reflects the period, but her personal belongings, including the contents of the house, were left to her niece, Marian Marriott, who kept what she wanted and sold the remainder at auction. The previously offered video tour is also still available to rent for $5.99 or to purchase for $13.99 online at winchestermysteryhouse.com/video-tour/. Throughout the years-long construction of the Winchester Mystery House, Sarah Winchester would never confirm that she was building a haunted house. The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester.
THE MOVE OUT WEST
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The house became a tourist attraction nine months after Winchester's death in 1922. The Victorian and Gothic-style mansion is renowned for its size and its architectural curiosities and for the numerous myths and legends surrounding the structure and its former owner. Experience the Winchester Mystery House’s daily tour – Walk With Spirits – and explore the paranormal as explained through the Spiritualism movement.
Guests will guide themselves through the mansion that is famous for its dizzying floorplan and lack of formal blueprints. Tour Hosts will be stationed throughout the house to ensure guests don’t get lost. In 1886, Sarah purchased an eight-room farmhouse in San Jose, California, and began building. She employed a crew of carpenters, who split shifts so construction could go on day and night, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for 38 years.
During the Walk With Spirits Tour, guests will attend the wake for a departed soul in the parlor of the home, ascend to the third floor to experience a Victorian era seance and end in the dark and foreboding basement. Experience a historic first as the Winchester Mystery House opens its doors to the public for an exclusive Paranormal Investigation within the darkened halls of the mansion. This is your chance to become an active participant in the world of the unexplained, as seen on your favorite paranormal shows & channels.
Some say the labyrinth layout was meant to confuse the ghosts, allowing Sarah some peace and a means to escape them. She was the sole architect of this extraordinary home, and no master building plan has ever been uncovered. So Sarah may be the only person who ever truly knew all of its secrets. When movers were called in after her death, one lamented its labyrinthine design that includes many winding hallways.
Construction lasted for thirty-eight years on the Winchester Mystery House, one of North America’s most unusual and eccentric homes located in the heart of San Jose, California. Through the 160-room labyrinth-style mansion built by Sarah Pardee Winchester, there are many beautiful and extraordinary examples of the Queen-Anne Victorian Style architecture. Ever since doors opened for tours in 1923, guests have traveled from all over the world to marvel in the beautiful and the bizarre. While visiting the Winchester Mystery House, you’ll have the opportunity to explore the must-see rooms inside of the world-famous mansion. Sarah issued many bizarre demands to her builders, including the building of trap doors, secret passages, a skylight in the floor, spider web windows, and staircases that led to nowhere. There are also doors that open to blank walls, and a dangerous door on the second floor that opens out into nothing—save for an alarming drop to the yard far below.
"Mythbusters," "Ghost Adventures," and "Ghost Brothers" have all produced programs about the House. It made its spectacular big-screen debut with the supernatural horror film "Winchester" in 2018, which tells a fictionalized version of the story behind the mansion. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including NYmag.com, Flavorwire and Tina Brown Media's Women in the World. Far after the construction was completed, Winchester continued to make efforts to appease the victims of the Winchester rifles. Stranger so was the fact that many of the alterations seemed pointless.
Deposed from power and alone in his cell, the king has an idea to create a world within his prison cell, populated only by his imaginings and ideas. Nearly 100 years after the house opened for tours, millions of guests have visited Sarah Winchester’s beautiful home. We’ve been mentioned in many “Top Destination” lists around the world. Shortly after her husband’s death, Sarah left their home in New Haven, CT and moved out west to San Jose, CA. There, she bought an eight-room farmhouse and began what could only be described as the world’s longest home renovation, stopping only when Sarah passed on September 5, 1922.
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