Table Of Content
- The next stop in the house is the south conservatory, which is the room with the most windows.
- The Abandoned 'Ghost Mansion' of Northern Italy
- Explore a Winchester Mystery House Floor Plan
- San Francisco Bay Loop
- Sarah Lockwood Pardee grew up in Connecticut in the 1800s and eventually married into the wealthy Winchester family.
- Explore This Park
Publicity-shy though she may have been, she was more anchored in the real world than the spirit one. The consensus among the house’s staff is that she was a creative do-gooder who endured through profound personal loss. “She would give to causes that were dear to her, and she’d usually do it anonymously,” Boehme says. She paid her workers far more than the standard wage, and kept them on for many years in part because she wanted to ensure their livelihoods. Ignoffo speculates that she threw herself into her all-consuming building project to feel closer to her late husband—architecture had long been one of William Winchester’s passions.
The next stop in the house is the south conservatory, which is the room with the most windows.
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. After she died in 1922, the businessman John Brown rented the house, christened it a tourist attraction, and later purchased it outright. It has been a beloved piece of quirky, creepy Americana since it opened. More than 12 million slack-jawed visitors have followed a planned route through Winchester’s singular vision. SAN JOSE, CA (September 9, 2020)—The Winchester Mystery House announced today that on Saturday, September 12th, visitors will once again be able to explore the 160-room mansion on a new Self-Guided Mansion Tour. The touchless, self-guided experience allows guests to independently navigate the world’s most bizarre home and expansive estate.
The Abandoned 'Ghost Mansion' of Northern Italy
“There’s very possibly things we haven’t discovered yet, just because we don’t have blueprints,” Magnuson says. There’s solace in the idea that, even in privacy-phobic Silicon Valley, there are still secrets at the house—and plenty of questions that don’t really even need answers. By design, the restoration left some intriguing rough edges. Near the home’s front door—now in use again—is a room with bare-board walls and a shallow butler’s pantry at the back, like a book squeezed into the end of a shelf. “She often would carve little spaces out of what existed,” Boehme explains.
Explore a Winchester Mystery House Floor Plan
De Anza Hotel is an Art Deco gem, while the SAP Center, which draws headline entertainers and is home to the San Jose Sharks NHL franchise, is a glassy modern palace. 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. Closing times vary, please check our Buy Tickets page for current tour times. Proceed two stoplights, and the Winchester Mystery House™ will be on your left. There are also lockers onsite for guests to put valuables during their tour.
San Francisco Bay Loop
At the time, newspapers were filled with advertisements, luring people to move across the country and settle in the newly incorporated California. Winchester first lived in San Francisco, but the weather bothered her arthritis. Instead, she decided to buy 40 acres of land and build a small farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley. Among the secrets Sarah took to her grave was why she insisted that so many things relate to the number 13.
I even remember that one of the windows had Sarah Winchester peering out from behind a curtain. I often wondered what it would be like to visit the real home. Almost fifty years later, I had the opportunity to do that with my daughter.
Born around 1840, Sarah Winchester grew up in a world of privilege. She spoke four languages, attended the best schools around, married well, and eventually gave birth to a daughter, Annie. However, tragedy struck in her late twenties when Annie died, followed by the death of Sarah’s husband William more than a decade later.
The mysterious California mansion that spawned a haunted house craze - National Geographic
The mysterious California mansion that spawned a haunted house craze.
Posted: Wed, 25 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The house opened for tours just five months after she passed away. Boehme said the windows share similar motifs and similar glass, but they have different types of designs. The Daisy Bedroom has daisies in its stained-glass windows, for example. Boehme describes the room as "elegant" with embossed wallpaper that surrounds the space and elaborate furniture that fills the room. Although it's beautiful, there is a darker reason why this room is so famous.
The conservatory leads into a space known as the Hall of Fires because there are seven heat sources for the small room.
I genuinely enjoy visiting and seeing places that have become a part of American folklore. I often find that they have an interesting back story and often reveal a great deal of cultural history. Time magazine once named the Winchester house one of the most haunted places in the world.
The ballroom is the biggest room in the house with the highest ceiling, reaching 12 feet. A fireplace mantle takes up most of one wall, while wood paneling covers most of the other walls. After this conservatory, visitors pass from the newer part of the house to the older part, using a small set of stairs that once acted as exterior porch steps. The Hall of Fires is actually three small spaces that seem to have once been separated by curtains.
The rooms appeared to be an eclectic collection of fully and partially constructed spaces. The quality of the construction did not seem mansion-like to me in that the rooms did not display wealth or exceptional architectural features. Winchester Mystery House in San Jose is named after a wealthy widow Sarah L. Winchester. She began a construction project of such magnitude in 1884 and it occupied the lives of carpenters and craftsmen until her death thirty-eight years later.
She kept to herself following the deaths of her husband and infant daughter, Annie, from illness. For the most part, no one was permitted even to photograph her. “There’s a story about Teddy Roosevelt making an appearance in San Jose and wanting an audience with the Winchester widow,” says Magnuson. “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.
