#Winchester mystery house hauntings full#

The story of the Winchester Mystery House is a story of guns, and of one gun in particular: the Winchester rifle. Then, as my tour guide says, 'The hammers fell silent.'

#Winchester mystery house hauntings full#

When she died in 1922 at the age of 83, the Queen Anne Victorian mansion had 40 bedrooms, six kitchens, 47 fireplaces, a hydraulic elevator, and an aviary full of tropical birds.

There was no blueprint for the 160-room house she made notes and sketches on napkins. But Llanada Villa was much more than a farm: it was Sarah’s obsessive, 38-year construction project. She called it Llanada Villa, or the 'house on flat land,' and she sold its walnuts, prunes, and apricots under her own label. In 1884, Sarah Winchester purchased an unfinished farmhouse that sat on 160 acres of farmland and orchards in the Santa Clara Valley.

It is a study in almost unbearable sadness that refuses to be transformed into stories and snow globes. Some of these mysteries have been commodified for the many visitors that pass through its rooms and corridors each year, and some remain stubbornly beyond the reach of tourism. The Winchester Mystery House bills itself as 'an extravagant maze of Victorian craftsmanship-marvelous, baffling, and eerily eccentric.' As one of the most famous haunted houses in the United States, it certainly has its mysteries.