Criminal - The Widow and the Winchester

Episode Date: February 1, 2019

When Sarah Winchester's husband died, she inherited millions from the family business: the manufacture of the famous Winchester Rifle. A medium reportedly told Sarah that she would be haunted by the victims of that rifle unless she used her fortune to build a house, and never stop building. That's exactly what she did. Pamela Haag’s book is The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture. For a transcript of this episode, send an email to [e-mail] with the episode name and number. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Criminal is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Please review us on Apple Podcasts! It’s an important way to help new listeners discover the show: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com.

That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. It's said that Sarah purposely designed this house with its stairs to the ceiling and doors to nowhere so as to confuse the spirits that meant to do her harm. For 38 years, the sounds of hammering never stopped as Sarah and her workers built room after room after room after room. Now it's your turn to experience the unique features of this house. On Winchester Boulevard in San Jose, California, there's a giant Victorian mansion. The National Park Service describes it as a bizarre multi-gabled house. It has 160 rooms quilted together over time. It's been called the most haunted house in the world

and it's said to be the inspiration for the haunted mansion at Disneyland. It was built by a woman named Sarah Winchester. In 1881, her husband, William Winchester, died of tuberculosis, leaving her a reported $20 million fortune, though it would be nearly $500 million today. And with the money, she built a house. Some say it was designed to be haunted. The story of the Winchester house is a story about gossip, grief, and a very famous gun. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. In 1862, Sarah Pardee married William Winchester in New Haven, Connecticut. She had repeated miscarriages for years and finally gave birth to a baby daughter, Annie. Something was wrong with the baby.

She couldn't digest food and starved to death. Then Sarah's mother died. Then William died. And Sarah Winchester reportedly went to a medium to try to communicate with them. Millions of Americans believed in spiritualism, which is basically a conviction that the living can communicate with the dead and that the worlds of the living and the dead are overlaid. So it wasn't at all unusual that Sarah might have been interested in that idea.

And it might have run its course as an idea, except for the Civil War. This is Pamela Haig. She's the author of The Gunning of America, Business, and the Making of American Gun Culture. After the Civil War, it gained momentum again because of the heartache and tragedy in American families caused by the war. That desire to be able to communicate with the dead was even more keen. Even the Lincolns tried to summon the spirit of their dead son in the White House. When Sarah visited the medium, she was told that people around her were dying as retribution for all the deaths caused by her family's gun business, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

Now, the biggest part of the legend holds. She became increasingly convinced that she was being haunted by to California and start building a house and keep building and never stop. And this house was either to accommodate all of the ghosts killed by Winchester rifles or perhaps to appease them. The Winchester rifle was innovative for its time since it could consecutively shoot 15 bullets before reloading. It was so popular that it was nicknamed the gun that won the West, making the Winchester family, including Sarah and her husband, very rich indeed. The Winchester Repeating Arms Company was started by William Winchester's father, Oliver Winchester. Oliver Winchester owned a shirt factory before he switched to making and selling guns in 1857.

It's said that Oliver Winchester had never even fired a gun until he started selling them. And in 1860, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company patented a rifle that changed the world. Not only because of what it could do, but because of how people felt about it. Okay, so the repeater rifle was a revolutionary new kind of gun design. Before the repeater rifle, guns were laborious to load. It's really difficult to load them. And it was hard to get off more than maybe one or two shots a minute. The repeater rifle, in a lot of ways, was kind of the first semi-automatic rifle.

It kind of began the whole era of the modern gun. The repeater rifle was a huge advance toward semi-automatic guns. They were much more lethal and quite shocking to people who had never seen this sort of gun technology before. It really changed warfare. It changed how shooters thought about themselves and what they could do with their guns. Before this repeater rifle, even a very skilled shooter could only fire two shots in a minute. Then they'd have to stop, stand up, and reload, making themselves a target. For example, the Blackfeet Indians had learned that a white man might come into their territory, get off a shot, but then he'd have to stand up to reload his rifle, and when he did that, they could ambush him. The repeater rifle completely changed

that kind of conflict. It was quite stunning when the Winchester Model 66 was first used in a skirmish, and the Blackfeet Indian came to call the gun the Spirit Guns because they couldn't imagine how quickly the gun was firing. They couldn't understand or account for how it was shooting so quickly. American Indians would soon adopt the Winchester repeater rifle, including using it to defeat General Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Gun manufacturers made most of their money selling to the government. Oliver Winchester had hoped that his revolutionary new gun

would be a major seller during the Civil War. That didn't happen. He was unable to secure big army contracts. Few Civil War soldiers were issued the Winchester repeater rifle. But it was so good that many soldiers went out and bought it with their own money. It made it possible for one man to be almost like the equivalent of 16 soldiers. So it was magnifying the killing power of each individual soldier or each individual.

They could now get off more shots more quickly as if there were 16 or 20 soldiers. There were reports in the Civil War of shooters who would spit on their rifles and they would sizzle because there were so many shots gotten off so quickly. So you weren't part of a troop anymore, a regiment. You were your own army.

You were a host unto yourself in the language of the day. Oliver Winchester leaned into this. He rebranded to market the rifle as a symbol of individualism, something every American needed. Pamela Haig writes, one answer to the question of why Americans love guns is simply that the gun industry invited us to. There was much more of a sense of the gun as something that every real boy would want to have. That was a phrase from a Winchester advertisement in the 1920s. And they were associated much more with masculinity,

with the idea of a virile outdoor culture, a sporting culture. So emotions around guns grew increasingly strong from the 1800s into the 1900s. In 1885 alone, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company made $1.8 million. The more successful the Winchester Company became, the more money Sarah Winchester inherited. So a lot of the shares kind of trickled down to her over the decades. I'm not sure how much precisely she inherited, but her shares toward the end of her life, her shares in the company alone in modern terms and modern value would have been close to half a billion. And she spent an

estimated five million building her house. Sarah Winchester hired dozens of construction workers to work in shifts, nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to keep working on her house, making it bigger and more confusing, until it was bigger than any house in the world. Neighbors and newspapers speculated about why, happy to repeat the rumor that she was in there alone,

tormented by the ghosts of those who had been killed by the guns that made her fortune. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. podcasts. reporter for The Verge to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. It doesn't really make sense if you're an onlooker, right? Jan and Bomi, Winchester

house historian. She moves out here, she's wealthy, she starts building this house. That's all fine and good. And then she never stops. And pretty soon people are like, man, is she ever going to stop? And then somebody new comes to the valley and they go, look at that house. She never stops building. She just keeps building and building. And pretty soon it turns into this 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

She never stops building. What's going on? Yeah, that's how the stories grew, because it didn't really make sense to people. Welcome to the Winchester Mystery House, my friends. This should be a very fun time. I'm about to kidnap you right now. So what are your guys' names? My name is Phoebe.

Phoebe. Lauren. Lauren, Zach. Well, nice to meet you ladies. Nice to meet you. All right. There are a couple of different types of tours at what is now called the Winchester Mystery House. We did not go on the ghost tour, which requires a hard hat. Lauren Spohr and I opted for the private tour with Zach Guller, an actor who's been working as a tour guide here for a few months.

He started the tour with one of the house's stranger features. So right here, we actually have a staircase that goes up to the ceiling. Oh, look at that. It doesn't go anywhere. Yeah, it goes absolutely nowhere but the ceiling. I always like to tell people on my tours that I would not recommend going up those stairs in a hurry, simply because you probably would not remember much after that. But again, I don't know exactly why Sarah would put this here. Maybe to confuse the alleged spirits that inhabit the inside,

which I can get into a little bit more as we go. The whole place is confusing. A staircase to nowhere. Hallways leading to more hallways. Doors opening to walls. In 1895, an article in the San Jose Daily News read, it is said that the owner of the house believes that when it's entirely completed, she will die.

This superstition has resulted in the construction of a maze of domes, turrets, and towers, covering territory enough for a castle. Mrs. Winchester was a very short woman, four feet ten inches tall. She went up to about below my shoulder. I, myself, am six feet tall. Now, much to my chagrin, the house is custom-built for a person that is of Sarah's size, and we're actually going to walk up these stairs right here. It's a perfect example of that. It's 44 steps in length, and it makes seven complete twists and turns,

but it only takes you nine feet above to your next stop. So, and you'll see with the way these stairs are oriented, they're very, very shallow. So, uh, Wow. Here we go. Oh, look at... This is the point of the tour where my guests typically start losing their minds. So, oh. Basically, yeah, they just, they're just astounded at these stairs, and then I remind them we're just getting started. Basically, yeah, they're just astounded at these stairs. And then I remind them, we're just getting started. So there are 40 bedrooms in the house. One of the main theories why there are so many scattered throughout the house is,

according to legend, Mrs. Winchester would sleep in a different bedroom every night as a way to confuse the spirits that inhabited the inside. So, yeah, and there's 40 bedrooms total throughout the mansion. Forty bedrooms, 13 bathrooms. There are more than 10,000 windows. That's more than the Empire State Building. In 1895, San Francisco Examiner Peace described it as dreamlike and a bewildering spectacle.

This is Sarah's seance room, and standing inside of it is typically a very special privilege simply because this room is said to be strictly off-limits to everyone except for Sarah herself. Now, according to legend, Sarah would come inside this room every single night. She would communicate with the spirits of those who were killed by the Winchester rifles, and they would then give her instructions on how to build the house. The gun was becoming more and more popular. And when someone was murdered with a Winchester rifle,

newspapers would often say so, sometimes speculating on whether it was the power of the Winchester that made a shot deadly. Some people wanted the Winchester taxed. It was too easy to use, and people were getting killed. Here's Pamela Haig. It definitely made killing faster, to some extent easier. Some of the advertisements said that you can get off several shots without even really having to aim. So there was a sense that these encounters are more destructive, haphazard, faster, more lethal. We don't know if Sarah Winchester followed these stories, but it was said that her seance room was full of outfits that she would put on to try to communicate with the victims.

So we can never know what Sarah was seeing or feeling in her own head, and we can never know for certain what she actually believed to be true, but it does seem that there are some tantalizing clues that she might have continually been revisiting this legacy, this blood fortune, and that she was haunted by it, and that she built constantly in an effort to paste over, repress, cover up, redo. The house certainly looks like the product of a very restless conscience to me. Honestly, I can't help thinking that she had a sense of humor, because sometimes I'll look at things in this house and they just make me laugh. I think she was having a good time, I really do. Jan and Bomi, Winchester House Historian.

I think she was having fun and I think that she and her workers probably kind of brainstormed and bounced ideas off of each other. So some of the ideas were probably hers. Some might have been her architect's or her carpenter's. I think there were some things that I look at and I just think, okay, this makes no sense at all. This looks like busy work. So maybe on rainy days or during the bad weather, she wanted to keep them working, and she'd say, why don't you go over here and build a few rooms and do whatever you want?

I'm not really sure, but I think that she enjoyed the process. She did say once that it was her hobby house. She was different. I mean, I think about it, a woman in her time who controlled her own fortune, controlled her own life, she was suspect automatically because women didn't do that back then. Sarah Winchester was often reported on and sometimes ridiculed in the papers. She was described as obsessive, reclusive, guilt-stricken, childless, always wearing a black veil and gloves. One article from 1911 called her home the Spook Palace.

The Spook Palace would soon be, you know, something about how death would soon visit the Spook Palace. The Spook Palace, you know, would soon be, you know, something about how death would soon visit the Spook Palace or something like that. The article was full of nonsense. I mean, it just, it hardly got anything right except her name and the name of her estate. But people just, you know, they would make stuff up. They would talk about things that they had heard elsewhere. They would exaggerate it a little bit to make it sound more interesting. And basically some articles called her hysterical. They called her crazy. They called her, you know, many different things, but they all made her sound as if she were mentally disturbed. Either because she was haunted by the ghosts of the victims of Winchester guns or her husband and daughter.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so they couldn't understand her and they just made of her what they wanted. And she would not engage with the media. Some of her people, I've read letters that some of the people close to her had written saying, I'm not going to talk to these people. They won't listen to me anyway. You know, I know people have tried to clear the record and they don't listen. They don't want to hear the truth,

so I'm not going to talk to them. As for the theory that Sarah was haunted by Winchester victims, it may have been started by jealous neighbors, angry about Sarah's money, angry about her never-ending construction or her refusal to socialize. It could have come from anti-gun activists or reporters looking for a story.

We sat down with Jan and Bomi in Sarah Winchester's dining room. She's been in love with the house since she was a little girl. Her great-uncle used to work on the grounds. And for her, the house has a warm feeling. She wonders if Sarah's continuous construction was actually a form of therapy, perhaps a way to feel connected to her late husband. They'd spent years building and designing a home in New Haven together. She enjoyed architecture.

She did her own drafting. She collected architecture journals and studied manuals. In the grand ballroom downstairs, Sarah had two custom stained glass windows made. They're on either side of the fireplace. Both are inscribed with obscure Shakespeare quotes, cryptic ones. One is from Troilus and Cressida. It reads, "...wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts." The other comes from Richard II. It reads, "...these same thoughts, people, this little world. Sarah Winchester continued working on her house for 38 years. Construction finally stopped on September 5th, 1922,

when she died of heart failure in her sleep. She was 82 years old. One of the last things that Zach showed us on the tour was a giant door right next to those stained glass windows. When Mrs. Winchester passed away, this door was opened and behind it was revealed a giant safe almost the size of this door. Now upon that first layer, you guys might be thinking, that's where Mrs. Winchester just kept all of her leftover money, gold, jewelries, those types of valuables. But actually, that giant first safe was opened. Inside of it was actually revealed a very valuable, smaller second safe. And inside that second safe was an even more valuable, smaller third safe. Now, at this point, it's got to be something that is more valuable to Mrs. Winchester than

anything else in this world. And that's indeed what it was. There were only four items inside that third and final safe. It was a lock of her daughter's hair, a lock of her husband's hair, and both of their obituary notices. So yeah, it's honestly, it's a really tragic story, honestly, when I tell it. A 1922 profile in the Oakland Tribune reads, the rasping of the saw has been replaced by the song of the hummingbird, and the methodical tap-tap of hammers has given way to quiet. Five months after Sarah Winchester died, the house was open to the public.

More than 12 million people have visited to hear the story of this widow haunted by guns, to walk through the rooms she built, hoping to see a ghost. Before they leave, they have a chance to visit the gift shop, where you can buy a shot glass shaped like a shotgun shell. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Audio mix by Rob Byers.

Special thanks to Susanna Roberson. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where we've also got pictures of Sarah Winchester and the Winchester house. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines,

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