Sarah Winchester, the heiress of the Winchester rifle, was widowed in 1881 and lived alone until her death in 1922.
Considering this, why did she insist on a continuous building that expanded her farmhouse’s original eight rooms into a vast 160-room palace that covered 24,000 square feet and had doors and stairwells that led nowhere?
One hypothesis is that Sarah desired to return to more joyful days. The Los Angeles Times said that she and her late husband had jointly handled the construction of their old home in New Haven, Connecticut.
Janan Boehme, a historian who has spent over 40 years at the Winchester Mystery House, believes Sarah was attempting to replicate that experience by engaging in a hobby they both enjoyed.
Sarah may have had philanthropic intentions, according to another interpretation. According to a Smithsonian article by Pamela Haag, PhD, author of The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of an American Gun Culture, the widow employed hundreds of carpenters who put in long shifts every day for 36 years while paying them twice the rate of comparably skilled carpenters.
Boehme stated Winchester had “loads of money and wants to keep her people gainfully employed” to the L.A. Times.
The third and strangest explanation contends that Sarah was following the advice of a medium who allegedly received instructions from her deceased husband to construct enough rooms for every person who had been killed with a Winchester rifle.
home’s maze of rooms within rooms, interior-facing windows, doors that opened to walls, and stairs to nowhere, according to legend, were all designed as part of a larger scheme to “confuse” the souls of the deceased.
Whatever her motivations, Sarah Winchester was enough of a mystery in herself to catch Hollywood’s eye: On February 2, 2018, the Spierig Brothers (of Jigsaw fame) released a movie featuring Oscar-winning actress Helen Mirren as Sarah.
Sarah Lockwood Pardee, a New Haven, Connecticut, native who was 22 years old when she wed William Wirt Winchester, the son of Oliver Winchester, the creator of one of the earliest repeating rifles, was born in 1840.
Four years later, they welcomed their daughter, who regrettably only lived for six weeks. Following William’s death from illness in 1881, Sarah became the legal owner of about 50% of the Winchester Repeating Arms Co., which was then valued at $20 million, according to the L.A. Times.
She used the funds to start an endowment that supported the Winchester Chest Clinic at New Haven Yale Hospital, which is still operating today, as well as to relocate to the west so she could be nearer to her family. She relocated to San Jose, California, where the area’s dry climate helped her with rheumatoid arthritis.
There are numerous ways to comprehend her, Mirren said to the L.A. Times in an interview conducted there in May of last year. “Was this woman a Rosicrucian? Was she a devout Christian? Was she possessed? Was she insane?”
The actress said, “If you have gained a fortune off of death, you have to pay the price, a psychological price and a spiritual price. And I can only speculate that those who still make a fortune from the sale of weapons at some point wonder, especially if they are Christians, “Am I going to pay?”
Some argue that Sarah Winchester’s seclusion serves as evidence of her guilt. She also had a habit of sleeping in various rooms (perhaps to avoid ghosts? It became an issue when three of her home’s floors collapsed due to an earthquake in 1906. Workers discovered her in a bedroom that had been hidden by debris.
The next movie emphasizes Sarah’s spiritualism with scenes like a séance that might or might not have occurred in the house’s front turret, popularly known as the “witch’s cap,” but not everyone is persuaded the heiress had ethereal motives.
The house’s long-standing historian, Janan Boehme, thinks there must be a rational reason for the continuous, confusing building work Sarah ordered throughout the latter half of her life.
She tried to give back and had a social conscience, according to Boehme. The construction of this house was by far her largest social service project.
What do you think is the reason behind building this giant mansion? Do you think it’s somehow related to ghosts? Please let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to spread the news so that we can hear from more people.
