Robin Chapman Too: California's House of Mystery

The Winchester Mystery House today.

Have your heard of the Winchester Mystery House? It is one of the most famous haunted houses in America and can be found just minutes from the Mineta San Jose Airport, and just a few minutes further from San Francisco International.

The house was built by Sarah Winchester, a woman who inherited a half interest in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and felt her family was cursed because the fortune had come from guns. She owned a lot of acreage in the Santa Clara Valley. Los Altos, the town where I'm living now, was built on land purchased by the railroad from Mrs. Winchester.

She was born Sarah Pardee and married William Winchester in 1862. He was the son of Oliver Winchester, the founder of the Repeating Arms Company, a firm that did a lot of grim business during the U.S. Civil War. As America counted its war dead, Sarah and her husband had just one child who lived only a few weeks. In 1880, Oliver Winchester died and in 1881 Sara's husband died. The wills of the two men left Sarah a wealthy but lonely woman.

It was the era of spiritualism and Sarah, having a fortune estimated at $30 million dollars, found herself a psychic who told her to go west and build a house to please the spirits. As long as construction continued, said the psychic, the spirits would be satisfied and Sarah would live.

She moved to San Jose, California and bought a farmhouse and for the next 38 years, construction on the house never stopped. To those of us who've suffered through the home renovation process, its hard to believe old Sarah, who could have afforded the best, would have put up with all that aggravation for all those years. But she did. And that is what makes the house so strange. Stairways rise to nowhere. Doors open into walls. Towers rise where no towers are called for. Anything--to keep the builders at work.

Needless to say, when Sarah Winchester died, at the age of 83, in 1922, it wasn't the kind of home you could flip, as they say today.

And so it became an attraction.

A photo of the house as it looked during the lifetime of Mrs. Winchester. She can be seen in the small photo above in front of the house in her carriage.

The most interesting news of late about the house, according to the San Jose Mercury News, is that Andrew Trapani, who went to school in the Santa Clara Valley and later made the Lionsgate film The Haunting in Connecticut is planning a movie about the house. If he wants to make it a hit, I hope he'll follow the lead of classic film director Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Leopard Man, Out of the Past) and make it a scary movie in which the fear is caused by what he doesn't show.

In the meantime, I'm planning to visit the old house in the coming days--just to see if any spirits are still roaming there) and I just wanted to let you know, in case ... something happens and ... I don't come back.