WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE San Jose! After her husbands death in 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20.5 million plus she received 50% ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Co., giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to about $30,000 a day in 2012. At some point after her husbands death a Boston medium told her, while supposedly channeling her late husband, that she should leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles. Winchester left New Haven and headed for California. Though it is possible she was simply seeking a change of location and a hobby during her lengthy depression, other sources claim that Winchester came to believe her family and fortune were haunted by ghosts, and that only by moving West and continuously building them a house could she appease these spirits. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began building her mansion. Carpenters were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven story mansion. She did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so that the home contains numerous oddities like doors or stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms, and stairs with odd-sized risers. After her death, many accounts attributed these oddities to her belief in ghosts.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 17:20:01 +0000
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