Outside the Winchester Mystery House, Amber napped on a slatted green bench, trying to recover the hours we lost on the drive. The leaves overhead turned her face into a sun-dappled mask. I stood guard, pulling her salmon tank top back over her bra every time she wiggled, blessed to be tolerated and loved.
The management forbade photography in the house because, they curtly informed us, the architecture was protected by copyright. I was unaware that buildings were copyrightable. We were free to take as many photos of the exterior as we wished-they could hardly find a way to stop us. The inside required releases and payments to record. Is the fear that someone could reconstruct the house in their backyard, draw their own tourists, and confuse their own ghosts?
Beyond the tangle of rooms, the mystery house looked comical, its pale-yellow shingles like jaundiced dragon scales below adobe roof tiles. It would not look out of place in a Disney Channel original movie. Were it not a tourist attraction, it could be a summer home for Pippi Longstocking and not a prison for ghosts.
Why else would someone do something of this caliber if not for fear of ghostly victims? Sarah Winchester wouldn't have wanted it to be a tourist trap. There would have been far better ways to earn this designation.
We were not granted full access to all the rooms, at least those that were once meant to be accessible. In 1906, an earthquake rattled the house such that it lost three of the seven floors. It might have lost them all, but Winchester ordered it built with a floating foundation. The house would have been imposing enough to deserve the steep entrance fee had the earthquake not occurred.
Tourists stared at the side of the house and, when in Rome, I joined them. Above a sign reading "door to nowhere" was, as suggested, a door opened to the house, more than a story in the air. I knew a portal to the Underworld or Fairyland when I saw one. I doubted I could smuggle a ladder to test my hypothesis.
The landscaping was ordered around palm trees. A guide mentioned that, since the drought, these trees had died and been replaced at an excessive cost. The town did not appreciate this oasis, but it was a tourist draw, and they were willing to look the other way. Another tourist complained that they also looked the other way when it came to the frequent daylight break-ins at the adjoining parking lot.
The official story, which a man on this tour declared "horsepucky," was that a Boston channeler had told Sarah Winchester that her late husband insisted that she leave Connecticut and go west. Once there, to trick the gunshot dead out of their vengeance, she was to build without ceasing. It might have been more that Sarah was depressed after her husband's death. On this coast, she could be another person. She chose to be a touch mad, but she had the capital to back it up. Or, as was closer to the mythos of the Mystery House, she believed her fortune was cursed and wanted to spend as much of it as she could. She seemed not to consider donating most of it to a charity for the orphans of murdered parents. This might have done more to put her in the good graces of those dead by guns that likewise took the Winchester name. After William Winchester died of tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah inherited $20.5 million-a sum beyond conceiving in the 1880s-and a fifty percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. She could have done much good in the world without noticing a dent in her finances. She received an income of roughly $1000 a day, which would be nothing to slouch at in the early twenty-first century. It would have allowed her to do almost anything she wanted. She made more in a day or two than most people did in a year.
Instead, she built this house. Her place in history could have been the woman who funded the cure for tuberculosis or infantile diseases. Though the builders were happy for a continual income, she could have changed the world rather than chasing away ghosts. Construction only stopped upon her death on September 5, 1922, when she was no longer embodied to give further directions. ("Maybe," the guide noted, "Sarah is still here, lost in a trap of her own making.") Not everyone agrees. A biographer said that Sarah would fire all the workers on occasion so that she could rest to the extent she was capable. The more lurid stories might be credited to the estate developers who bought her home, the better to make a return on their investment.
The Winchester mansion was impressive, but it was far from the most splendid place for people accustomed to the tours of celebrities' cribs. It was almost quaint, a historical curiosity but not something people today would attribute to anything more than a modest wealth. This says far more about the gluttony of the modern rich rather than about poor, obscenely wealthy Sarah's era.
Some architectural eccentricities were anything but. Sarah was increasingly infirmed, so having small steps (in sets of thirteen) and elevators made sense. This was not to say this house passes muster with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I doubt anyone in a wheelchair could get through the front door, to say nothing of navigating the narrow and twisting hallways. There was only one working toilet in the house. The rest were to confuse ghosts, constipated by their rage at having been taken before their time.
To keep the house authentic, the owners were not about to install the accommodations, though nothing within the house was original. Reportedly, upon Sarah's death, it took six trucks packing and transporting all her possessions six weeks, working eight hours a day. Sarah's biographers did not grant this much credence, but it underscored how much there was to be removed at the behest of her niece and personal secretary, to whom the lot was bequeathed. (Sarah Winchester had one child, Annie, who lived only five weeks.) It was hard enough navigating the house with a pack of twenty-five other people through the oddly shaped rooms. There would be a tenth of the navigable area if it were still full of the original furniture and assorted building materials.
Years after our visit, the management discovered another room. Surely they had tried every door - real or otherwise - and had established the floor plan (such as it could be), but no. A pump organ, a Victorian couch, a sewing machine, a dress dummy, and paintings were within an attic space. I understood duping the rubes into revisiting the house to see a "discovered" room that was not before accessible to the public. Many rooms aren't, sometimes for the simple reason that few people could fit. I could not accept that anyone leaned on a bust and saw a wall open.
However disappointed we were that we could not brush against a chair that had once felt the impression of Sarah Winchester's buttocks, the Tiffany stained glass windows "might be" original, including her favorite: a spider pattern with the repetition of the number thirteen. (If one visits, the number thirteen is mentioned every thirteenth word.) The shame was that this window was never installed, left to gather dust instead of sunbeams in the "$25,000 Storage Room"-that dollar value being what the contents were worth in the early 1920s. The contents today were beyond appraisal.
There were around 161 rooms, though it was left to one's interpretation what constituted a room. Were a few inches behind a door a room? After the earthquake, the exact proportions of the house became more nebulous, justifying why one could not put a precise figure to this. There were two ballrooms: one opulent and finished, the other unfinished with the potential of rivaling the first. Most agreed from careful counting that the 47 fireplaces fed into only 17 chimneys (with evidence that two more chimneys might have once existed). It was built of redwood, which Winchester preferred, but not enough that she didn't tell the builders to apply fake wood grain and stains to hide it. There was no evidence she cared for the noble burl. In Sarah's day, the property was over 160 acres. It now encompassed a paltry 4.5, enough to surround the house and its outbuildings.
For all the people Winchester employed, she did not bother with an architect - they would have welcomed the challenge and despaired the realization - but built where she wished without practical concerns. Did she make a map to note which bedroom she had last visited or how to return to the only functioning toilet? It would have been more helpful than our yellow one. The guide said that the haphazard attachment of rooms might have amplified her fears of a haunting.
One of our crowded tour group grumbled, "There's nothing here except a house built by a woman with more money than sense."
Amber didn't correct him that Sarah Winchester also filled her home with innovative inventions. He would not have appreciated it.
How strange it must be to be so scared of ghosts - or so sick - that aimless construction was the only remedy.
The house felt like the trip itself: paths that went nowhere, startling beauty, sometimes hidden away. It made an improbable whole far more than the sum of its strange parts when I stepped back.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
