www.atlasobscura.com/articles/real-winchester-mystery-house
Demystifying the Winchester Mystery HouseUnder new management, the labyrinthine mansion is giving up more of its closely guarded secrets.by Elizabeth Svoboda
www.atlasobscura.com/users/elizabethsvoboda?view=articles February 01, 2018
A pre-1906 view of the house from the south. All Photos: Courtesy Winchester Mystery HouseWhen Walter Magnuson arrived at San Jose’s Winchester Mystery House as its new general manager in 2015, he asked the tour guides at the famed, peculiar mansion to show him everything. “I would see doors that were locked, I would see hallways that were kind of dark, and I would start asking about them,” he says. “They said, ‘You know, a lot of these spaces can only open with skeleton keys, and only one tour guide has the keys.’”
He did eventually gain access to these hidden spaces, and what he found was both astounding and in keeping with the home’s reputation for eccentricity. Some rooms were missing floorboards, others had been closed off after sustaining severe damage in the 1906 earthquake, and still more were just full of broken tiles. There were entrancing finds, too. He saw jewel-like wallpaper that scattered sunlight into tiny orbs, rows of stained-glass windows mounted inexplicably at waist height, and secret balconies that offered a bird’s-eye view of the many-gabled roof. “It was just in a constant state of becoming,” says Magnuson, who came to Winchester from a senior position at Disneyland. “Some of these spaces, you have a lot of questions: What was this room’s purpose? Who stayed here? What was Sarah thinking?”
Magnuson wanted to open some of these rooms to the public, but not all of the house’s long-term employees agreed. “Some of them were very protective,” he says. “Some of them really enjoy the spaces being something only employees know about.” Magnuson’s vision won out, as he made the decision to restore the front wing of the house to its Victorian-style, albeit sometimes unfinished, glory, and then share it with visitors.
One of the first things you notice upon approaching the Winchester Mystery House is that the front door is not aligned with the roof peak above it—it is staggered slightly to the right. This might be a minor detail, but it hints at the disorder that unfolds within. The mastermind behind this architectural oddity—a sprawling Queen Anne Revival with 160 rooms—was Sarah Winchester, the widow of rifle magnate William Winchester. Famously private and eccentric, she built onto her California home on and off for more than 30 years. Legend has it that she did it to appease or confuse the ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles. Getting to know the house is, in a strange way, like getting to know the woman who built it—and no ghost stories are necessary to marvel at its creativity and ambition.
Winchester inherited $20 million after her husband died in 1881, and not long afterward moved from New Haven, Connecticut, to an eight-room farmhouse in orchard-studded Santa Clara Valley. She got to work almost immediately. A dedicated crew of carpenters built new rooms so quickly that no one bothered to draw up blueprints. 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, 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.
Other than household staff, few saw the home’s interior during Winchester’s lifetime. 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. More striking, though, is the extraordinary artistic freedom she exercised in creating it, as well as the lengths to which today’s staff must go to keep the house intact and open.
An aerial view of the house.For decades, guests have followed more or less the same path, a guided tour that takes them through a hundred-plus rooms. It starts in the courtyard, passes through a carriage entrance hall and into spaces such as the wood-paneled Venetian Dining Room and the Grand Ballroom, where Winchester installed stained-glass windows featuring cryptic quotes from Shakespeare: “Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts” and “These same thoughts people this little world” (from Troilus and Cressida and Richard II, respectively).
Magnuson’s thought was to mix this up with new spaces to attract new and returning visitors. His restoration plan began in August 2016. After ten intense months, 40 hidden spaces—including some even the staff had only rarely seen—opened to the public in May 2017.
Some heroic construction work went into making sure the new spaces were safe, according to Michael Taffe, head of the house’s operations and maintenance team. “There’s a lot of modifications to actually make that a route,” he says. “You had raw redwood that wasn’t finished; it had to be framed and covered with plaster.” Wonky nails were pounded flat, old earthquake debris was cleared out, and floorboards installed.
One particular attic space took the most effort, says longtime house historian Janan Boehme, who helped with the restoration plans. “That essentially was just a platform with holes in it. There were staircases and things, but there was no railing, there was no safety at all,” she says. “If you walked across, you’d just fall through a hole.” The maintenance team had to build a new wooden walkway through the space.
All of this work was necessary, in part, because after the earthquake, Winchester had almost entirely abandoned the front wing of the house. “She just kind of stopped building in these areas, didn’t finish them up,” Taffe says. “But you can tell little remnants of what the rooms looked like before the quake.” Those clues—a glazed tile here, a stretch of wallpaper there—have helped the restoration effort. One newly spiffed-up space, the dining room, is kitted out with period furnishings and textured, fondant-like wallpaper that was popular among well-off Victorians. There was some residual damage to the wallpaper from the earthquake, so craftspeople had to take molds of the surviving paper so they could recreate it. (The dining room is not part of the new tour, but is available for special events.
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. An empty hearth also gapes not far from the entryway. After the quake, Winchester had mantles and fronts torn off fireplaces and their brick chimneys encased in metal, probably so they wouldn’t crumble in the event of another disaster.
The front hall staircase leads to a Tiffany-style stained-glass window that surely once provided bright beams of color. But it was later completely enclosed by a new exterior wall, presumably put up at Winchester’s request. Today, some strings of tiny lights illuminate it from behind.
The darkened window, however, is an anomaly. Though the house has a reputation as a dim warren, its estimated 10,000 panes of glass reflect Winchester’s desire for natural light. At one point, an outdoor patio was enclosed, so she had a skylight installed in its floor to pull light from above into the newly shrouded room below. It’s as though she carved tunnels through the house to let light penetrate.
The staircase landing opens onto an array of finished and unfinished rooms, including the Crystal Bedroom, where pale yellow, mica-flecked wallpaper gives the walls a luminous quality. One reason this room had been off-limits for so many years is concern about what sunlight might do to the wallpaper, so at some point it may need to be sealed off again.
Near there is an old photograph of the house that purports to show a milky-white ghost in the front window. On the topic of ghosts, the staff is somewhat vague, but eager to relay the experiences of others. “You definitely have folks who are very into the paranormal. They have heard a lot of stories about this place and want to experience it,” Magnuson says. “They may feel something tap their shoulder, things like that. One of Sarah’s workers named Clyde apparently still works here, and some guests see him from time to time with a wheelbarrow.”
Taffe agrees that there’s an undercurrent of something undefinable. “You don’t feel alone in the house.”
“But it’s friendly, at least,” Boehme interjects.
“Yeah, I’ve never been terrified,” Taffe says.
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