• The Winchester Mystery House is one of the most famous houses in California, located in San Jose. The rambling late-Victorian mansion is among the most popular tourist attractions in the Bay Area, both for its eccentric architecture and for the legends of superstition and hauntings that surround it. There is a great deal of mystery surrounding the inspiration behind the house, but that is perhaps the greatest part of its appeal.
  
  

History

• Sarah Winchester was the wife of firearms baron William Wirt Winchester. Following the death of her husband and daughter, Sarah Winchester moved from New Haven, Connecticut to San Jose where she purchased 162 acres of land and a small farmhouse. Construction began on her mansion in 1884 and continued steadily, 24 hours a day for 38 years, until her death in 1922. Carpenters worked on the sprawling mansion around the clock, eventually producing a seven-story structure with more than 200 rooms. The house was considered incredibly modern during its day, with forced-air heating, indoor plumbing and push-button gas lights. Following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 the house was reduced to four-stories and was much as it is, as of 2010.
  
  

Legends

• No one is entirely sure why Sarah Winchester endeavored to build such an extraordinary house, although many legends abound. The most common belief regarding the construction of the house is that Mrs. Winchester, overcome with grief at the death of her husband and daughter, visited a spiritualist medium for solace and was informed that she was suffering a curse at the hands of those who were killed by firearms built by her husband. The medium advised that Mrs. Winchester should begin--and never end--construction on a house in order to house the angry spirits of those killed by Winchester arms. Another spin on this popular legend is that the widow built the house in such an oddly unintuitive way in order to confuse the spirits that were after her, leading to the belief that she never entered any room the same way twice in a row, and that she created the hidden doors and passages in her home in order to fool her pursuers.
  
  

Architecture

• The most striking thing about the Winchester Mystery House is its eclectic Queen Anne-style architecture and numerous structural oddities. The architecture of the house is highly formal, owing to the great wealth that Sarah Winchester possessed, and despite its grandeur there are numerous eccentricities in its execution.The house has 160 rooms, with 40 bedrooms, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 10,000 window panes, three elevators and two basements, all of which are arranged around a network of narrow corridors, zigzagging staircases, doors that open to nowhere, secret passageways, hidden doors and more than one staircase that ascends directly into the ceiling. The nearly 10,000 windowpanes in the house are arranged in groupings of 13, which was a number that obsessed Sarah Winchester later in life. Interior windows were also an obsession of Mrs. Winchester, who had all the bathrooms in her house outfitted with interior windows.