99% Invisible - 162- Mystery House

Episode Date: April 28, 2015

According to legend, Sarah Winchester’s friends advised the grieving widow to seek the services of a Boston spiritual medium named Adam Koombs. The story goes, Koombs put Mrs. Winchester in touch with her deceased husband—but William had bad news. He told … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Let's say you lived sometime before 1860 and you wanted to fire a rifle. First, you'd need to pour gunpowder into the powder charge to measure the amount of gunpowder you need it. And then you'd pack down your gunpowder and then pull it into the rifle with a ramrod. Then you'd pull back the hammer and take something called a percussion cap and you'd fit it on the hollow metal nipple on the back of the barrel. Fold the trigger and... That was one shot. Then you had to reload which meant pouring out new gunpowder, stuffing the gunpowder and the new bullet down with the ramrod,

pulling back the hammer, putting a new percussion cap on the nipple, and then you could shoot again. The whole process took at least as long as it just took for me to describe it, and as you can imagine, this was all really inconvenient if someone was shooting at you. But then came the Winchester Repeater Rifle. That's reporter Nina Gensler-Debs. The Winchester 1866 Repeater Rif rifle was a thing of beauty. Nicknamed the yellow boy for its bright brass receiver, the gun was sleek, gleaming, and deadly. You could fire off 15 shots in just over 10 seconds. And the Winchester repeater arrived on the market just in time

for the rise of Western expansion. The huge sweep of manifest destiny and people migrating to the Western part of North America. That's Mary Joignoffo, a California historian at Deanza College in Cupertino. That weapon became a source of survival and protection for people. The next iteration of the Winchester Repeater, the 1873 model, was an even bigger hit. It was lighter, more accurate, and it became synonymous with westward expansion. It came to be known as the gun that won the West, but probably only by people who think they won the West. The Winchester Rifle Company was very successful.

The most successful arms company in America in the late 19th century. The Winchester family became fabulously wealthy. They lived together in this palatial mansion in New Haven, Connecticut. They were harmonious, rich, and happy. And to make matters happier, William Winchester, the heir to the family business, and fortune, married the girl next door, the beautiful and intelligent Sarah Pardy, and in 1866, Sarah gave birth to a daughter, Annie. And then came a string of terrible tragedies.

They found that baby Annie couldn't absorb protein. And even with all the money in the world, Sarah couldn't stop her daughter from starving to death before her eyes. Then five years later, Sarah's beloved husband, William, passed away from tuberculosis. He was only 43 years old. After losing her husband, Sarah Winchester then lost her father-in-law and her eldest sister. Sarah was now alone. Half a lifetime of loneliness lay ahead of her. That's the voice of the iconic black and white film actress Lillian Gish.

She's narrating an old documentary about Sarah Winchester with plenty of dramatic flame. And it was in that same year 18, that friends trying to consult Sarah advised her to seek the services of a well-known Boston medium. Mr. Adam Coons. And as the legend goes, through this medium, Sarah was able to contact her deceased husband William. But William had some bad news. Her husband's voice told her that she would always be haunted by the spirits of those who had been killed by the winter-st arrive. bad news.

Someone please give this poor widow a break. He now instructed her to placate them by building a structure that would never be completed. A house to which rooms would constantly be added to provide shelter for the ever increasing number of Winchester rifle victims. Finally, he told her that by doing what he had prescribed, she would gain immortality. Winchester rifles had killed a lot of people. If Sarah was to appease their ghosts, she would need to build a very, very big house.

And she had the money to do it. Having inherited her late husband's stock in the rifle company, she was now one of the wealthiest people in the country. And where better to build an ever expanding structure than in the wide open west, California. Sarah left New Haven to begin a new in California. She bought an eight room farmhouse in San Jose

and dove into the remodeling project head first. At any given time, there might have been a dozen people working on the house. Carpenters, tile-setters, painters, electricians. Some reports estimate that her house swelled from 8 to 26 rooms in the first six months. And others claim there was no end to the construction. That Sarah Winchester's crew worked on the house in rotating shifts 24 hours a day for 38 years. As the construction marched forward, the house became a tangled maze of halls and a mash-up of turrets and stained glass windows. You know it has a kind of haunted mansion quality. That's architectural historian Mitchell Schwartzer. Dores that lead nowhere, you know, staircases that stop halfway.

And because she built over so many years, the house was also a wild combination of architectural styles. You know, every five years or so, there was a kind of new movement, new types of ornament, curves are introduced in the 1890s. But for a long time, no one was able to see the hodgepodge of styles and ornaments in this house except Sarah Winchester. Well, Sarah and her staff of 18 house servants, 13 carpenters, 8 to 10 gardeners and two private chauffeurs. Because Sarah Winchester kept to herself.

Mrs. Winchester did not entertain, and she did not open her doors to herself. Mrs. Winchester did not entertain and she did not open her doors to visitors. Supposedly Sarah Winchester was also always shrouded in a veil. And she never spoke to strangers or members of the press who inquired about her odd building endeavor. And because she didn't respond, they started formulating their own suggestions. Maybe she's superstitious. Maybe she feels guilty that all that money came from guns. Maybe she feels like if she keeps building she'll never die. And so those little stories became the factual analysis of Mrs. Winchester. It's unclear how much of the Sarah Winchester legend is true. We don't know whether she commune with ghosts, or at least thought she was communing with

ghosts, or whether she built her huge house to placate them, or whether she felt guilty about her fortune coming from guns. But after her death, those legends and rumors about her have lived on. After Sarah's death, an entrepreneur named John H. Brown saw the possibility in the old decrepit estate. In 1923, he reopened Mrs. Winchester's property as the Winchester Mystery House, and ever since it's been the subject of all kinds of pseudo-documentaries on haunted houses. Said to be inhabited by ghosts, and inspired by madness, it has the deranged design of

a carnival funhouse. The Winchester Mystery House was built on here. When I walked in my, on my head, I got chills. The workers that built this place, they're still building it on the other side. For $33, you can buy a ticket and tour Sarah Winchester's house. My name is Maggie and I will be your guide today on this 65-minute tour Sarah Winchester's house. My name is Maggie and I will be your guide today on this 65 minute tour of Mrs. Winchester's beautiful 160-rubic touring mansion.

I brought my family there. We'd drove an hour, we waited in line, we sold out a whole lot of money for tickets because we'd never been there in some Bay Area landmark. And is California historical landmark? No, we're 868. If you have a look at that black and white photo right there, the tour points out all the bizarre things about the house, like the staircases that lead to nowhere. We have our door to a wall, a window to a wall, a staircase to nowhere, and even a door to nowhere. And they like to point out that Ms. Winchester

hid the number 13 all around the house. If you count the blue and amber stones, you will count 13 stones. out that Nizwin Chester hid the number 13 all around the house. But the highlight of the tour is definitely the Seyons room. This is the Seyons room. Which sits in the middle of the house. This is where Sarah supposedly received directions from the spirits. Legend has it, Mrs. Winchester would come up here every night to speak to the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle.

They seem to be selling the story of the haunted house and of the haunted Mrs. Winchester and a lot of people seem to be buying it, but not everyone. The mythology about her is not only insulting to her, it's insulting to me as a consumer of popular culture. It insults a person's intelligence. That's Mary Jo Agnato again, and she doesn't believe the haunted Mrs. Winchester legends. She wrote a book about Sarah Winchester that challenges some of the myths about her. Sarah herself didn't write a memoir or speak to the press, but Mary Jo did find documents

that helped her understand who the real Sarah Winchester may have been. There were incredible original sources that hadn't been used by anybody else before. Letters that she wrote correspondents with her attorney, property records. After pouring through documents, Mary Jo has come to believe that a lot of the really strange things that we see today and that are emphasized in the mythology about Sarah Winchester are completely explainable. The stairs to nowhere, for example, they probably did lead somewhere once. Rooms were constantly being tweaked and remodeled.

Plus the 1906 earthquake had a major effect. There are no original blueprints for the house, but we do know that the earthquake destroyed the front of the mansion and the third and fourth stories. She felt like the defects of the house really came to the fore in the 1906 earthquake. And so she kind of was chagrined at her own workmanship that this would happen. Instead of rebuilding, Sarah had workers clear away the rubble and make the place safe, and then just boarded up the front of the house. So it's very possible that the stairs led to a room that got destroyed in the quake.

As for all those thirteenths, Mary Jo doesn't put a lot of stock in them. And she believes that some of them might not be from Sarah Winchester. A couple of the men who worked on the house, they stated in the 1920s that those references to the number 13 were added after her death. As to whether Sarah Winchester conducted sances in her supposed sance room, it's possible. Spiritualism and sances were actually fairly common practice in Sarah Winchester's time, but still Mary Jo finds it unlikely partly because of the location of the room in the middle of the house.

Anybody who knows about spiritualism or Sanchez know that those are really public affairs, social affairs at the very least, if not public. And you would have that in your front parlor. Then again, Sarah was a very private person, so maybe she did her sayances alone. The ranch foreman also stated that he had actually stayed in that room, and it was not related to any kind of spiritual or superstitious events at all. And lastly, in the popular legend about Sarah Winchester,

her whole building endeavor was set in motion after seeing a medium by the name of Adam Coombs, who had supposedly put her in touch with her dead husband. But Mary Jo gained access to a list of mediums and spiritualists that would have been practicing in New England during Sarah Winchester's lifetime. The name that's usually associated with having seen Winchester is not there. Adam Coombs may never have existed at all.

There are some things we'll never know about Sarah Winchester, but what Mary Jo does feel like we can know for sure is that Sarah wasn't out of touch with reality. On the contrary, she was rational and savvy. This is a woman so far ahead of her time in financial matters, in her real estate investment, in her bond portfolio. It's remarkable. It's really remarkable.

So why does a financially savvy forward-thinking woman build such a crazy, never-ending house? Mary Jo has a different theory. No ghosts involved. She was an architect wannabe. Sarah Winchester wanted to be an architect. She loved doing, building, experimenting. And I love that theory. Sarah Winchester lived at a time when...

It was highly unusual to have women architects. And she wasn't licensed. So her own house was the perfect place, the only place really, for her to practice architecture and it became her playground. Sometimes in the middle of a project, she'd lose interest and move on to something else. From all this, emerged an odd and frenetic confluence of architecture, but her house isn't only a collection of oddities. There are some legitimately innovative elements too. There's a salarium with a zinc floor. It doesn't rest, and it's tilted for the water to run off and be used in the garden. There are also these

amazing zigzagging stairs that instead of going up at a steep pitch, rise and shallower increments. that instead of going up at a steep pitch, rise in shallower increments. Sarah Winchester had debilitating arthritis, and these stairs made it possible for her to move about her house. The legend says that Sarah and her crew worked on her house 24 hours a day for 38 years, and that upon hearing of her death, her work crew finally set down their hammers and walked off the job. This is most likely an exaggeration, but the house was certainly a project that consumed Mrs.

Winchester's attention for decades. Finally, he told her that by doing what he had prescribed, she would gain immortality. And of course, she didn't gain immortality from all of her building as the spirits had supposedly promised, but she did live into her 80s. In the end, whatever her motivations were, Sarah Winchester built a house with over 150 rooms, 2,000 doors, 47 fireplaces, 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, 3 elevators, 2 basements, and 1 shower. And spent nearly all of her life being an architect. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Ninet Gunsler Dabs, with a re-travelman Katie

Mingle, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 Local Public Radio, K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced at the offices of Arxine, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, we're all on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify and you can listen to every single episode of 99% Invisible at 99pi.org. From PRX.