Is the Winchester Mystery House haunted? Sarah Winchester's story

What the legend says

Sarah Winchester, widow of the heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, lost her baby daughter and then her husband. In the legend, a medium then told her that the spirits of people killed by Winchester rifles were haunting her, and that she would die unless she built a house and never stopped. So she bought a farmhouse in San Jose, California, and kept carpenters working day and night for 38 years, adding stairs and doors that lead nowhere to confuse the ghosts, holding séances in a secret room and repeating the number 13 throughout. The historian Mary Jo Ignoffo summarised that version, as the house's own website then told it, in an interview with the Bay Area magazine 7x7, first published in 2013 and republished in 2016.

The house itself is real and remarkable. Its official figures list 160 rooms, about 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 47 staircases, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms and 6 kitchens across 24,000 square feet, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. The Winchester Mystery House mystery is not whether the building exists but why she built it this way.

Where it started: who built the Winchester Mystery House

Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven, Connecticut; the house's official timeline gives the year as 1839. In 1862 she married William Wirt Winchester, the only son of the rifle maker Oliver Winchester. Their only child, Annie, was born in July 1866 and died about five and a half weeks later. Oliver died in 1880 and William, of tuberculosis, in 1881, leaving Sarah a fortune the house puts at a reported $20 million plus nearly half the company's stock.

In 1886 she bought a farmhouse near San Jose, which grew into the estate she called Llanada Villa. She was no stranger to building. A review of Ignoffo's biography in American History magazine notes that her father was a master carpenter and that she had helped her husband oversee the design and construction of the family's house in New Haven. By the house's own timeline, the busiest years were 1890 to 1900, when the farmhouse rose into a seven-storey Victorian mansion.

The rumours began while she was alive. She turned down interviews and kept her distance from the neighbours, and in Ignoffo's account the gossip filled the gap. The University of Missouri Press, which published the biography, summarises it as showing that a hostile press cast her as the conscience of the rifle company, a widow carrying the guilt for its dead. The house's own history page agrees that talk of a “mystery house” was circulating before her death.

How it grew: from private home to tourist attraction

Sarah Winchester died at Llanada Villa on 5 September 1922. In April 1923 John and Mayme Brown leased the house, planning a park with a wooden roller coaster; public interest in the house was so strong that they opened it for tours instead. The official history dates the opening to 30 June 1923, and the timeline says the house was first officially marketed as the Winchester Mystery House in the 1930s.

Ignoffo says the Browns, whom she describes as long-time carnival workers, did not invent the rumours but embellished them heavily and added new ones to sell tickets. Her examples include the séance room, which she says no record mentions before a 1928 article published years after Sarah's death, and the repeated number 13, which she says was added after Sarah died, according to workers of the time. Her publisher's summary makes the same point: the new owners exaggerated the strangeness of the house and its owner for publicity.

The haunting itself belongs to this later period. The house's own FAQ says guests and employees began sharing stories of strange experiences, such as voices, footsteps and figures, after the mansion opened to the public in 1923.

Which details hold up

On nonstop building, Ignoffo told 7x7: “Winchester's own letters explain that she sent workers away for months at a time.” Her publisher's summary describes construction running for about twenty years after the purchase, not 38 years without a break.

How was the Winchester Mystery House built with so many dead ends? Largely by accident. The 1906 earthquake badly damaged the house, and the official timeline records that the seven-storey tower and most of the fourth floor were later demolished. Ignoffo says Sarah never fully repaired the damage, so many of the stairs and doors that go nowhere are places where broken sections were sealed off or landings fell away. American History adds that she considered tearing the house down and had it stabilised instead. Ignoffo says she moved to another house after the earthquake, and the timeline dates her purchase of a second house, in Atherton, to 1910.

The guilt is doubtful too. Ignoffo argues that in Sarah's day the Winchester company was widely seen as an American success story, and that Sarah invested and spent its money without apparent qualms. What the records do show is a philanthropist. Her publisher's summary says her real financial priority was a charitable legacy, and the American History review notes that she gave about $2 million in cash and stock to a New Haven hospital that treated tuberculosis, the disease that killed her husband. Ignoffo says there is no evidence that she took part in séances or held them at home.

Common questions

Verdict

The Winchester Mystery House explained: a real and very strange house, built by a wealthy, private woman who liked to build, damaged by an earthquake, and then sold to visitors as a haunted labyrinth. The defining legend, that a medium ordered her to build nonstop to placate the spirits of rifle victims, is contradicted by her letters, by the pauses in construction and by the earthquake record, and the séance room and the number 13 appear to date from after her death. Reports of voices and figures are experiences, not evidence, and the house's own site says it cannot say what causes them. Real or Legend files the haunting legend as debunked.