The Real Story Behind America’s Most Famous “Haunted” House

On September 30, 1862, Sarah Lockwood Pardee married William Wirt Winchester in New Haven, Connecticut, becoming a part of one of the wealthiest industrial families in America. Her new father-in-law, Oliver Winchester, owned the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, maker of the famous Winchester rifle. Yes, that Winchester. Naturally, the marriage brought Sarah decades of financial comfort. However, the family fortune would eventually become tangled up with a series of personal tragedies.

In her lifetime, Sarah unfortunately suffered a number of life-altering tragedies, each making her life less like what it had been before. The first of these tragedies occurred in the summer of 1866, when her daughter and only child, Annie Pardee Winchester, died on July 24, just over a month after she was born, from marasmus, a wasting disease associated with malnutrition.

Oliver Winchester died in December 1880. Sarah received an estimated inheritance of $20.5 million, which included 777 shares of Winchester Repeating Arms stock that made her the largest single shareholder and earned her approximately $1,000 in dividends per day. Just three months after Oliver’s death, on March 7, 1881, Sarah’s husband, William, died of tuberculosis.

On her doctor’s advice to seek a milder climate and to be closer to family, Sarah left Connecticut for California’s Santa Clara Valley. In June 1886, she purchased 45 acres with an unfinished eight-room farmhouse for $12,750 in gold coin. Not exactly the sprawling “mystery house” tourists know today! Sarah called the property Llanada Villa.

I know I can be an indecisive person, but Sarah Winchester might have had me beat. The project had no master blueprint. Instead, Sarah would sketch her latest revisions on sheets of paper and hand them to her estate foreman, John N. Hansen, who would then instruct the construction crews. Over the years, rooms were built, torn down, and rebuilt as Sarah changed her plans.

Sarah’s strange “Easy Riser” staircases may look like another bizarre feature of the house, but they had a practical purpose. The switchback staircases have 44 shallow, two-inch steps going up a mere nine feet—quite the journey for one floor! Sarah suffered from severe arthritis, so the staircases made it easier for her to get around the house despite her joint pain.

Each year, more additions were made to Llanada Villa until the house eventually reached a whopping seven stories, which was quite unusual for a private home! Since Sarah had been building without a master plan, corridors twisted around, staircases changed direction, and new rooms were sometimes built over old ones. No wonder the finished house eventually earned a reputation for being a maze.

The legend that Sarah Winchester kept building because she believed she would die if construction ever stopped has outshone much of her actual life. The earliest known version appeared in a February 24, 1895 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, which claimed exactly that. Quite the story, except Sarah herself never said any such thing. It was classic “yellow journalism,” the sensationalized reporting of the era, rather than a belief documented in Sarah’s own words.

Another popular myth says that construction on Sarah Winchester’s house never stopped because she supposedly feared what would happen if the hammers went quiet. But the workers’ daybooks and payroll records preserved in the Carl Hansen Papers, named for foreman John Hansen’s son, tell quite the contrary. Bad weather, Sarah’s trips, and normal work breaks interrupted construction regularly, sometimes for weeks or even months at a time. So much for the idea that one quiet hammer could spell doom.

Given that the house didn’t have a proper master plan to begin with, you can only imagine how it fared against a major natural disaster. On April 18, 1906, the Great San Francisco Earthquake caused Llanada Villa’s seven-story tower to collapse. Sarah was inside her front bedroom, later known as the “Daisy Room,” and became trapped behind a rubble-filled doorway. Staff removed the debris and freed her, thankfully unhurt. The house never again rose above four stories.

It was Sarah’s decision to leave the already damaged front of the house boarded up and do repairs elsewhere, rather than pay to fix them. Most historians interpret this as a financial decision. There is no evidence that Sarah thought the damage constituted some sort of warning or omen.

Sarah also helped pay for the Winchester Chest Clinic in Connecticut, a hospital for tuberculosis patients, quietly and in memory of her husband. Sarah also purchased a houseboat, The Ark, in Burlingame in 1904 and an estate in Atherton in 1910, as getaways from construction and places to be with family.

On September 5, 1922, at age 83, Sarah Winchester quietly died of heart failure in her sleep. When the carpenters working on her house were informed, they simply put down their tools. Scaffolding still stood in place, and nails remained half-driven into walls—as unfinished as you could possibly leave a house. That afternoon, after 36 years of work, construction finally stopped.

When estate handlers went through the house after Sarah’s death, they found storerooms filled with purchases she had never used: imported mahogany, uncut Tiffany glass, and German silver sconces, together representing millions of dollars in unused materials. After decades of building, Sarah’s project seems to have involved plenty of accumulating, experimenting, and changing her mind rather than simply finishing the house. I suppose her “I’ll use this someday” pile was just considerably more expensive than mine.

Six workers spent six weeks clearing the house of all Sarah’s precious heirlooms. Once it was emptied, eight boxcars full of Sarah’s belongings headed east to her niece, Marian “Daisy” Merriman Marriott, in New Haven. But the house stayed put, empty and waiting to be appraised.

Local appraisers valued the house as worthless because of its erratic, non-standard layout. In December 1922, the estate and acreage were auctioned to help pay tax bills and other cash bequests. The 160-room, unfinished house represented a fortune that amounted to nothing on paper.

After Sarah Winchester’s death, entrepreneurs John and Mayme Brown took the tabloid stories already circulating about her private eccentricities and turned them into a money-maker. They leased Llanada Villa in February 1923, bought it shortly after, and opened the house to the public that May as the Winchester Mystery House. Sarah had been dead for less than a year, and her famously private home was already becoming a public attraction.

Some of the tour’s spookiest features weren’t even built by Sarah. To thrill visitors, the Browns and later operators adjusted the number of coat hooks to add up to thirteen and altered some drain covers. The so-called “Séance Room” was originally a small office. None of these touches date from before 1922, and none were ever Sarah’s.

On October 31, 1924, magician Harry Houdini walked through the house at midnight and was impressed with the carpentry and the intricate complexity of room after room, but remained unconvinced of the home’s paranormal claims and didn’t see any ghosts. The spirits have never even once outshone the fine woodwork.

The Winchester Mystery House eventually became one of the inspirations behind Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, but it wasn’t Walt Disney who visited it. In the spring of 1957, Disney Imagineer Ken Anderson, who was helping develop the attraction, made the trip himself to study the mansion’s notoriously bizarre layout. He recorded what he observed in Disney company notes, and details from the Winchester Mystery House influenced his designs for the Haunted Mansion.

This content was created with the help of AI.