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The Winchester Mystery House is in San Jose, California. It was built by Sarah L. Winchester after her baby daughter died, and then husband, the son of the Winchester Rifle Manufacturer, died and left his fortune in 1884. A medium conviced her that continuous building on the house would appease the evil spirits that killed her family, so with her $20,000,000 inheritance, she hired workers to continue builing on her house 24 hours a day, for 38 years until her death at the age of 82.

No one has ever been able to explain the odd features of the 160 room house. For example, 40 of those rooms are bedrooms, there were 47 fireplaces, and 13 bathrooms. In the house, there was a window built into the floor of one room. There's also a chimney that rises 4 stories only to stop 1 1/2 feet from the ceiling. There are stair cases that go no where, doors that open into walls, and a surprising amount of objects that come in thirteens.


windows

This is a picture I took when I went on The Winchester Mystery House tour in September '96, from inside the house. It was only one of the many beautiful stained glass windows.		 Web Windows

In this picture you can see part of the garden out of some web-windows. There were 13 of these windows in a row.




windows

This is another picture taken from inside of the house. Through the windows, because of Mrs. Winchester's extensive building, an entirely different part of the house is visible!



book

This is a picture of a book on Mrs. Winchester's desk. Once on a tour, the windows were open to let the wind blow through, and cool off the house. The wind was strong enough to flip the pages of the book, but the tour guide saw the pages flipping slowly, one by one, in the opposite direction!		 chair

This chair is in the last room of the tour. This is where an odd, unexplained occurance most often happens. It sits on the floor by a lamp and has been seen rocking, all by itself.



Another odd occurrance in the house happens when tour guides or tourists see one of the faucets running and spilling water on the floor. They'll go get something to clean it up with, only to come back and discover no water anywhere in the huge house which, by the way, doesn't have plumbing.



There was also one time when a tourist complimented the tour guide on the way they got someone to dress up like Mrs. Winchester and sit in the kitchen. Later the tour guide went to ask their manager if they had anyone who dressed up like her, because they hadn't seen or heard anything of it. The manager said there wasn't anyone who had been hired to do that.



organ

There was a couple who was writing a book on America's haunted houses. For reseach the skeptical couple decided to spend one night alone in the Winchester Mystery House, with the doors and windows all locked, monitored with and alarm system and video cameras in each room. They retired to the Daisy bedroom, Mrs. Winchester's favorite bedroom, and went to sleep.

In the middle of the night, the woman woke up because she heard foot steps heading towards the bedroom. She woke up her huband, who told her she must have drempt it, and to go back to sleep. She did, but an hour later, the husband woke up, because he heard foot steps coming towards the door. He woke up his wife and she said they had probably both been dreaming so they should just go back to sleep.

About an hour later, they both woke up to the sound of organ music, remembering that Mrs. Winchester played the organ and there were three in the house. The organ music stopped with a crash, and the two decided to go back to sleep and check the video tape in the morning. When they did the next day, they saw the organ in one frame, solid and still. Then in the very next frame the keys to the organ were completely shattered and all across the floor. Never a door or window had been cracked, nor the alarm system set off through the whole night.



All of the information and stories I got, either from the tour guide when I went, or the Winchester Mystery House web site.

Eighteen pictures of the Winchester Mystery House and Sarah Winchester that Verene's grandfather bought in the early 1940s can be seen here.

A visitor to this page and to the Winchester Mystery House recently (February, 2001) contributed some pictures.
She thinks a ghost or two may have been posing while she took her photos.



The Winchester Mystery House is definately worth seeing for yourself if you're in the San Jose area. Tours run every day, except Christmas day. Special midnight tours are given, in the dark with souvineer flashlights, on Friday the 13th and Halloween of every year.

map


Thanks for stopping by Verene's Winchester page!

skeleton

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