Doomed to Fail - Ep 55: Ghosts in the stairwell: Sarah Winchester & her Mystery House

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

We're staying spooky with one of the most Haunted Houses in America, San Jose's Winchester Mystery House! Taylor tries her best to spin a scary story -- but, of course, she totally doesn't believe in ghosts and also would never do a seance, probably. It's complicated. We also talk about the history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and Sarah Winchester herself.Pics via the Creative Commons & AI SourcesCaptive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune, Revised and Updated EditionSarah Winchester: Beyond the Mystery Beyond the MysteryWinchesterhttps://winchestermysteryhouse.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A. 097. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. We are recording and we are alive. Hello, Taylor, with a mouthful of soup. So I'm going to go ahead and kick us off because Taylor just made some amazing soup that looks. I don't know, I can't see the soup, but just the facial expressions she's making is, it's obviously. I'm going to put it to the side. There we go. You don't have to for long, because I think I'm going first today, right? I don't, are you? What was last week?

Go ships. I think I can go first. I think I go first. Oh, you do go first. Yeah, you're right. You're right. All right. Well, then, but you're, well, we can, we can record either way because they're separated.

Okay. Well, I said that in case you want to have your suit. Whatever, it doesn't matter. Okay. So welcome to do to fail. I'm Farr's joined here by Taylor. We're twice released a week podcast about relationships for historical events that we're doomed to fail. We're going to kick things off today on the historical side, on the Taylor side, on this lovely Monday morning, I hope.

So, Taylor, how are you doing? Perfect. No notes. I'm good. I'm eating soup, but I feel like that's a weird thing to start with because I feel like I'm not really a soup person, but I just like have the soup. It's mostly noodles. Anyway, I said that to someone recently and they mentioned that many of their friends have soup at the month club memberships and I was like, that's weird. It's weird to like be so into soup. Unless you're like in a nursing home or hospice care, I feel like we're not of the age and demographic that would be passionate about soup. I know, I agree. And I also like I feel like I eat soup for like the bread and the noodles. Like I don't eat it because of like the soupiness. Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. Or. Or in my case, I like to have my soup in a bowl, a bread bowl, so I can eat the bread as I'm eating it. Oh, my God. I saw a Instagram thing that was like some mac and cheese and a bread bowl. And I was like, yes. So many carbs. So many carbs.

I am going to go grab my drink to prepare myself for this session. So one second while I do that. I'm opening mother cry. Fancy. Too classy to have Waterloo, like us normal people. I don't even know where I would get water allude. I don't have to have that at Walmart. I think it's a Costco thing.

Sorry, I'm class-thissing us. So my dream today, Taylor, is going to be Shipyard Pumpkin Ale. No, shit. Shipyard Pumpkin Head, which is a pumpkin-spiced ale, because it is October, and I just saw Saw 10 last night. And I'm in a Halloween mood. And I'm hoping you don't scare the shit out of me like you did last week, because That was really bad. That was so fun.

I loved it. I think I'll switch to pumpkin ale when you, what is your turn? Because I did finally get it because I did talk about it a couple of weeks ago and say that I put it on my grocery list and then my husband did not buy it. And he realized after he came home, everybody was listening to it and that he did not buy it. Are you okay? You just choked. I tried breathing the pumpkin ale and said drinking it.

And just a little warning to listeners. don't try to breathe your beer you're cool um well for me my theme drink is pediolite for two reasons one because i just got my both my arms are are shot i got my covid booster and my flu shot today so a little sore on both sides i'm just doing this this like wing thing with my arms and i drank some pediolite so i don't get sick and then also there's some infant nutrition problems in this story so i think that that also applies okay fair enough yeah i'm into it All right. Okay. You ready? I'm ready. And I, so I asked you to watch a movie.

Yes. But that you've watched, you've already seen for this week's scary story, because I'm going historical, creepy, because it's Halloween time. So I asked you to watch the movie with Helen Mirren. Oh, shit. Sorry, okay, you're right, fine, fine. Okay, there's going to be a break here and it's not going to make any sense, but I cut something out that I wasn't allowed to say. So moving on. Okay. I did watch Winchester. So for this week, I asked you to. Yeah, there we go.

I watched Winchester. Have you seen it before? I've seen it many times, actually. I've seen it many, many times. It's pretty good. I love the fact that it was just a known thing in the 1800s to just take opiates and laud them, like just casually, which I was constantly on. Helen Mirren was amazing in it. And there was a lot of jump scares, which I'm usually not a fan of.

But the setting of the house itself was really cool. so it made up for it. Yeah, it's such, oh my gosh, the, the house itself is so beautiful. Obviously, we're talking to the Winchester Mystery House and Sarah Winchester today. But the, oh, the house was so beautiful in the movie, and I'm like, where's those sets go? Like, can I have in those cabinets? With all the cabinets, like, they're so beautiful and I want more cabinets. And then also Sarah Snook is in it from Succession, so that.

And then also, who is this guy who's, like, the, has, like, the scariest face. What is his name? Emin Farrant, E-A-M-O-N-Faron. He's a guy who was like the brother, mean, guy. He's also in, he's in, he was in Twin Peaks. He's in The Witcher. He just has a scary-ass face.

So, I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. No, I'm trying to remember. I'm looking them up. E-A-M-O-N-F-A-R-R-E-F. Yeah, yeah, I know you're talking about. Yep. Yeah. He's a scary, it's got a scary face.

he's in it. I think he knows he has a scary face and he's pretty cool is it. He is a mood as the kids are saying these days. He is. So yeah, so if you haven't watched Winchester, super

recommended, it's really good. And today I'm going to talk about the Winchester Mystery House and the story of Sarah Winchester. Sweet. So, P.S. The Winchester Mystery House has been a tourist attraction for a hundred years. It opened in 1923

to the public. That's pretty cool. It's not for that long. So picture this. It's 1881 and a widow in New Haven, Connecticut loses her husband, her father-in-law, and her mother

all in the same year. She's left with a $20 million fortune in an uncertain future. For comfort, she seeks the help of a spiritualist like at a sands. kind of thing, which was very popular in this time, the spiritualist tells her to move west and to never stop building or she will die because the bad luck that she's had is due to the

spirits of the people who have been killed by the weapon that made her fortune, the Winchester repeating rifle. Can I pause? Can I pause real quick? Just so everybody's aware, the Winchester house is not a documentary. It is like a horror movie. correct yeah no no this is true this is a ghost story because we're talking about a real thing and there's a real thing there and it's whatever anyways point made it's on purpose it's a ghost story yeah so in 1886 she moves to san jose california where she buys a home in a valley for the next 36 years she adds and subtracts to her home construction never stops entire wings are created and broken down. Staircases lead to nowhere. Doors open to several story drops out into the yard.

The widow wears morning clothes and a dark veil over her face the whole time. When she dies in 1922, the house has 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and six kitchens. So it's huge. So who haunts this house? Visitors have heard laughing, and singing in the ballroom, they've reported having their skirts and their dresses tugged on when they're walking through the corridors. The most popular ghost is a wheelbarrow ghost. It's a man who is seen in the basement with a wheelbarrow full of ash that would have been his job to, like, move the ash from, like, the furnaces to wherever.

And they see him in the basement and also, like, leaving the house with the ash. So visitors have said, like, that actor is in. amazing and they've been like there is no actor who is the ash mover guy like what are you talking about um it's like in the haunting infill house when they have that clock fixer you know old-timey clock fixer and the dad's like i would never have hired an old-timey clock fixer what are talking about the truth is a bunch of things part of the truth is that houses are scary at night especially big houses you know i'm scared i got i kind of scared myself other day because i like watched a scary movie and then was reading about this and like in my house at night i was like it's dark in

here. Basements are scary at night. Big Victorian houses are really fucking scary at night. And that's because that's the kind of house that we decided as a culture is the most haunted. A haunted house is a big Victorian house. And it's never like your builder grade house, Ohio. You know what I mean? It's like a big Victorian haunted house. I think we mentioned this before when we were talking about the Warrens is that Ed Warren was like, yeah, of course the ghosts that you're going to see are going to be Victorian women. Because these are the houses that still stand that women died in because women die constantly from like childbirth and such you know what I mean it's uh it's it's not it's not correlation

we know it's not causation's correlation basically yes mm-hmm exactly science so a scary Victorian ghost and a scary Victorian house is something that like we love as a culture I fucking love it. So, um, another part of this truth of the story is that women who are rich and have a lot of money are able to pursue their hobbies, um, now and then. Um, and in the past, women couldn't go to school so they could just, you know, they would like, you know, paint and bright poetry and shit in Sarah Winchester, loved architecture. So I read a couple books about, yes. Okay. It wasn't just like, I'm trying to stave off the dead corpses of the people of my husband's gun company killed no that's not true at all okay

i tried to start with like a little bit of the ghost stuff but like i feel like ghosts aren't real in like a ghosts aren't real but also in like i would never sleep there yeah have you have you been the website recently because this thing the unhinged warm it's scary yeah well it's Halloween and it's been 100 years, but I'm going to talk about that later too, like the marketing around it is top-notch. I also, you know, I bought the, like, you can buy a 3D tour of it online for like $8 for the lifetime thing. And I was in that recently. It's real fun. You get like, you kind of go along dots on the floor and you can like kind of walk for the whole thing. It's great. It's a really fun story. So I read some books, one called captive of the labyrinth and one called Beyond the Mystery. And Beyond the Mystery. And Beyond the Mystery. I was reading that one first. It's like a very short book. I think it's for kids. It's like a, you know, a kids research book. But it was pretty, I don't know. It was pretty much a killjoy about all of the fun parts about it. So I was like, I don't know. I kind of want something more fun than this. Because like the story itself, it was like, again, there are no ghosts, but also maybe there are ghosts. I don't know that makes sense. But you know what I mean. So starting at the beginning, Sarah Lockwood Pardt was born in 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut. She didn't have a higher education. because she was a woman, but she probably would have if she would have been able to. She had three sisters and her brother. Her family had been in the United States for many generations by the 1800s, and they were woodworkers.

She lived near the Winchester family. The Winchesters were tailors and had created a way to make shirts fit because shirts didn't always fit people to, like, very recently. So you would just, like, buy a shirt and, like, tuck it. it in and make it fit you in a weird way because you know how like old-timey bartenders have those like ribbons around their arms you know what I mean like the cuffs that's because shirts didn't fit you couldn't pull your shirt up because like shirts were just like kind of like a sack that you like tie around you in a weird way to make it fit you but um Oliver Winchester um that one of the patriarchs of the Winchester family found a way to make shirts fit people better by like curving the arm

and like things that make sense now like we take for granted that shirts fit but shirts didn't fit for a very long time it was just like this is the shirt make it fit you. So at one point, the Winchester's employed about 5,000 women who all got to work from home sewing Winchester shirts, which is kind of fun. And another fun bit is he was one of the first factories to use sewing machines, but tailors around the country, they protested because they thought sewing machines were job stealers, which like kind of were. Yeah. Yeah. That's like always happens. It's going to happen forever. One consistent thing throughout time in Memorial. something's going to come to take my job.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So she's upper class, but they worked hard to get there. They're near Yale. So it's a time when they're starting to create these really big institutions of higher learning. She lives near Yale in Connecticut. Her family is also abolitionist, civil wartime.

They're on the union side. Her brother is in the battle of bull run. So they're really involved in that as it happens. On September 30th, 1962, in the middle of the war, Sarah marries William Wirt Winchester, who's one of the Winchester's sons. I think he's the only Winchester son. He's 20, she's 23 and he's 25.

Also another cute thing about them is that she's 4-9 and he's 5-9. Aw. That's cute. They were so small. We're so small. So they're cute. They would have probably eventually made their own home in New Haven, but things were crazy with the war.

and his parents really wanted everyone to be together. So in a lot of this story, people want to live by their families, but it's not like staying at your in-law's house. It's like, you live in this wing of my mansion, you know? Right. So they live together, but like, kind of. And so she lived with the Winchesters.

And on June 15th, 1866, they had their first and only child, Annie Pardee, Winchester. Annie died six weeks later of Maras, which means her body didn't absorb nutrients and she starved to death, which is terrible. That's crazy. So the baby didn't live and they did not have any more children. It's also worth noting that Sarah was a devout Baptist until about this time. And it's probably because Baptists were starting to do that thing where they're very much like, babies will go to hell if they're not baptized.

And women were like, wait a minute, what? Fuck you. You know, because like, that's dumb. and babies die and like that's super unfair and like real shitty so wait so she was a devalbaptist until this happened yeah i think around this time i think it was like not just her it was other women of like victorian time were like we still want to be religious but maybe not as conservatively religious got it okay you know because of the because of the baby healthing so 1866 the year that annie was born and died is also the year that the first winchester

repeating rifle hit the market. It was called the Yellow Boy, and that was the very first one. There's other gun manufacturers that you know of. There's the Colts, Smith & Wesson, those are real people at this time who are making guns, like for the first time, like mass producing them for people. The Winchester is the first successful repeating rifle and also due to new ways to work in the factory that can make the parts faster as well. What does repeating mean? I'm going to tell you. Okay. So we're going to pause and talk about guns.

I googled the Second Amendment, and it is not advised. I got some, like, weird ads. Don't love it. It immediately leads from that to, like, 9-11's an inside job. It was basically how all this goes. Not great. But the Second Amendment is a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep in bare.

arms she'll not be infringed because yes for a long time guns were super necessary in america especially as we talk about westward expansion in a little bit um i mean when you got here there were already people here and you need the guns to protect yourself and continue to move west um to kill native americans is what you're saying 100 percent got it yes so we're clear also if you if you were part of this militia you'd be called to fight all the time that's what well-regulated means Like you were some people in like the 1600s every household was required to have weapons just in case like I don't know the British came or the French came or Indians came or whatever like there's plenty of times that they're having like these people come in like attack your town and everybody has to stand up and like be prepared to fight do you remember the Bonnie and Clyde episode of last podcast where they talked about how every like town in America in like the late 1800s 1900s had an armory armory for their citizens to access in case they had to like literally just everybody had to run out and start fighting it's crazy yeah kind of fun yeah it's crazy kind of crazy kind of crazy um and in early

america guns are important you don't know what you're going into um you guns kept you fed and they kept you safe so they would like you know use a gun to kill a deer and eat it use a gun to kill native americans as you are stealing their land like that was a huge part that's a huge part of American history as we know. You also brought your own gun to war for like most of history. You brought your own stuff to war. So if they were like, you have to come and fight with us, you'd be like, cool, I have this helmet and this sword and this gun that is like my family's and this is what I'm bringing. So you weren't like closed by the army. So two things are happening kind of at the same time that involves the Winchesters and and their guns. There is the Civil War

and there's westward expansion. So in the Civil War, war, the guns were like a single loading rifles. So you load it once, you put the gunpowder in, you pat it down, blah, blah, blah, you shoot, then you run to the back of the line and you do it again, you know? Wow. Does that make sense? Yeah. So if you're in like a line, you know, you just keep running to the back, you shoot once, and they're doing the same thing to you. It's like one shot back. It happens really fast, but it's happening. You have to continue to reload. There's this great Colbert video that I watched again today. It's so fucking

funny because in like, I don't know, whenever 10 years ago, Sarah Palin was talking about like how Paul Revere was like riding his horse and ringing his bell and shooting his gun to tell people that the British were coming to take their guns away. It's like so funny and like unbelievably not what happened. And Stephen Colbert is the thing where he rides this like like a kid's horse like put a quarter in and he's holding a bell and he's trying to put her into a gun and it's so funny. And I'll share it's hilarious. He's like laughing so hard. Everybody's laughing so hard. So it's hilarious. So but that was the thing. So a gun, you had to reload it every single time that you wanted to shoot it. So Oliver Winchester, William Winchester's dad, the guy who invented the shirts, he buys a part of a gun factory because now he's starting to get rich so he's making these investments. So he invested in a gun factory, but it went under. So he bought everything inside the gun factory for $40,000 and started to make his own gun. His business partner, Benjamin Tyler Henry, invents the repeater.

The repeater can shoot 15 times. 10 seconds that's the thing that's what it means okay so the guy taylor friend invented the gun sort of Oliver winchester is william winchester's dad he's the one who had the clothing manufacturer where he had like 5 000 women working for him he invented shirts so he's the his partner yeah he's the money guy and then this other guy invented a thing and was like hey i'm just an inventor i don't know how to do anything else and he's like i'll buy the equipment out of this gun factory and we'll build your gun we'll call it my name so it's actually the first well not yet it's actually called the henry first it's called the henry repeater um because his

name was benjamin tyler henry and they call it up they named after him so oliver he's the money guy he tries to sell it to the government and they say no they don't want to use it for the civil war um some of it is like some people are like well it's about valor in battle, it would be super unfair if we had this gun, which is stupid. And then some people are like, they just don't really get it. It's actually, it's not perfect. Like, it does explode sometimes, you know, it's not like, they work on it. It gets better.

But the first version, I wouldn't like try one, you know, it's going to explode on you. So one, only about one percent of the guns in the Civil War were Winchester's, like, from, from them. Oliver goes to Europe in 1865 to try to sell there. So he ends up getting contracts with like England, Russia, like countries over there. There are other guns, like the Colt and Smith and Weston are the ones that were used in the Civil War. Winchester buys a factory from Eli Whitney's son, who used to be the cotton gin factory, and now it's a gun factory. And while he's in Europe, Henry tries to take over the company. So he tries to like take over the, like everything because he was like, because with,

Winchester had signed over control of the company to Henry while he wasn't in Europe. Henry tried to like do some sneaky stuff to get him out. Winchester gets back and ends up kicking Henry out and taking the designs, altering them a little bit, but he has all the machines. So it becomes a Winchester and Henry leaves the picture. Okay. So he didn't like to screw him over. He was like, like he was protecting his interest in the business, basically.

Well, yeah, because Henry tried to screw him over first. Exactly. Exactly. And he was like, fuck you. So now it's the Winchester. And so he's selling the Winchester to foreign governments for, for like their own wars. And the U.S. government kind of slowly starts to use it as well. And then the second thing is we go west with the gun. And the West is bananas.

It's completely lawless. Like saying like the Wild West is like, it's like lawless. People die constantly. And I'm sure you've seen Deadwood, right? no um so there's like deadwood and hell on wheels are like two shows of this time it's like post-civil war westward expansion and it's just like how fucking dangerous it is how lawless it is how like really you go to like an old west town and it really is like whatever the sheriff who has no authority over anything says goes you know i think everyone has a gun very scary and it's all yeah i mean it does until you're like well it's super dangerous everybody had terrible diseases, obviously. Like in Hell on Wheels, which is about like train expansion westward post-Civil War, they all get like trench foot because like they're in like these tents and like muds everywhere

and it's gross. It's also a very, very, very, very, very bad time to be an Indian. They're starving. Yeah. They're being built and it's almost like, it's terrible. Indians actually, they, some of the tribes and some of the people, really liked the repeater, the Winchester. So they had Winchester's.

In the Battle of Bighorn, the Indians had the repeater and Custer did not, which is part of the reason that Custer failed. The government would just give guns to settlers. They're like, hey, take this land out west, here's some guns, good luck. So a huge part of it. There are tons of people died.

Buffalo Bell used to Winchester and so did Annie Oakley. So that really was like the myth of like the Wild West. They were really using Winchester guns. Teddy Roosevelt, of course, loved it and wrote about how much he loved it as well. Nice. The book that I did not read that I would like to read some day is called Winchester, The Gun That Won the West by Harold F. Williamson, but that's like the main idea. The Winchester had a big part in Westward expansion and like killing people as we went west.

You know? So there's lots of money. It's from the guns and there's a lot of blood on the money, technically, you know, if you're thinking about it. which is part of Sarah's kind of her mystery as well. And part of her story is like the guilt that like she may or may not have felt because of this. So in 1886, William Winchester dies from tuberculosis. He was always sickly. He was always sick.

He wasn't going to like live to be old. He was like 43 or so when he died. Sarah's left with a lot of money, a lot of shares in Winchester and nothing to do. So she may or may not have seen that spiritual. She told her to go west. Probably not in real life. It's probably just she wanted like more space than to do something different. But spiritualism is obviously like super popular in this time like I've already talked about. And it's not really seen as like not religious. It's kind of seen as like the next step in religion. You know. Right. Because like if technology is doing all these things like connecting the world via those cables that we talk about and, you know, making vaccines and helping people do, you know, helping people live longer. Then why wouldn't technology? also be able to move us to the next level of religion, which would be talking to the dead, right? I get it. I mean, look, it feels like one of those things where when you are rich enough and bored enough, it's like every yoga instructor in L.A. that has also worked at the House of Intuition

and has like 17 different crystal business. It's like you just had too much free time. Yeah, exactly. And it sounds really fun, you know. And of course, you want to talk to dead people that you love you know all the things like it totally makes sense that you would want to think about it would you do that so i honestly think i would be so fucking scared during a seance i don't know yeah we talked about this about like i don't know i don't know if i could do a sound i feel like so yeah it's like they're dead like do you really want to let's leave let's leave them in the past i'm such i feel like no that's not even why i'd would just be scared. I'm like, I know ghosts aren't real. And like, this story is just a ghost story and it's fun. But also I'm like, I'm like, I'm talking about different types of ghosts. I know the ghost I see in my house and I wouldn't go to science because I'd be so scared. So I'm like, I know I'm saying two different things in the same sentence, but I don't know. But that's the way I feel.

There was one thing I was listening to a podcast recently and one of the things they said about like hauntings was that it might not have anything to do with religion or spirituality. It could literally have someone to do with like the universe and how the structure of the universe is where like timelines could overlap in a way. You know? Well, I mean, religion isn't real. So like, yes. But that's what I said, no, because you just said it. No, you said it so flippantly like, of course ghosts aren't real. I'm like, it's not of course goes.

You're saying that because you're doing a religious interpretation of what a ghost is. But I'm saying like there's another, there could be other alternatives to it. I'm on scene ghost. I love alternate timelines. I think that's super fun. You know, like we talked about like that time skip of a Marie Antoinette where like they think they might have like see Moran-Torrent and the thing. Like I love that. Like what if like time overlapped for a second? I knew it accidentally stuff with males they weren't supposed to see. That's cool. Totally.

Totally. Yeah, I hope that's true. a way more believe that yeah if i die before you taylor i'll come back and like try to talk to you oh my god you better but i won't do anything scary i'll be like i'll be like i just heat up your soup for you like you know like you just something nice i'll do something nice well but i think i think that's a problem because they no matter what you do it will be scary you know like if you wrote me a letter if i like got to my desk and there's letter and it was like hey taylor miss you love far's i'd be like oh my god oh my god i would i'd be so scared i'd be like i need

i need to leave taylor a nice note but like i'm a ghost so i don't really have ink so i just go kill some animal outside and use this blood to like right hi taylor miss you on on like a mirror or something you kind of way to like leave me money yeah i feel like that'd be great i'll tell you who the lottery what the lottery numbers are for next next week okay that's exactly what i need to go to do for me i lose so i i haven't i have this i'm showing this of taylor i have this notebook next to me that I found, I haven't unpacked this house yet, like a year later. Anyways, I pulled this out and then in the middle of it was this lottery ticket from like, like 2021. And I don't even know how to check it. I don't know how to check it.

You can check it online. You can check it online. I'm not going to throw it away then, because I might have, I might have won millions. That'd be awesome. Anyways, so I'm really really, you're running your story. Go ahead. But yeah, that's what I want. I mean, that's also yeah that's the thing like if if it was a if you could contact me through like a parallel universe and you could just like walk past the door or like i could see you in my in my like security camera or any of those things like that would fucking scare me so much you don't even know what you do and i know that you're nice and i know that you wouldn't hurt me but i still i don't know that so i don't know my answer is i don't know if i would never go to sales

especially if like i show up in the form that i took when i died so like i'm walking around with like my head underneath my armpits like just like walking around endless decapitated your face is in like a scream like a ball with a scream i don't know i don't know why my death had oh it's because i saw saw last night that's why i think about deaths like this yeah yeah i'm sure i'm sure um but yeah so during this time a lot of people are thinking about this um sarah does end up knowing the stanfords who made Stanford University, and I didn't, I think if I knew this, I forgot, but Stanford University was actually made as in memory of their son who died when he was a teenager. He died in Europe on a trip, and they said that they saw a spiritualist, and the spiritualist was like, you should build something

in his memory. I don't, then, I don't know if that really happened, but either way, Stanford University is made for the Stanford's dead son as a memorial to him. So Sarah wants a place for her entire family. She wants to be able to play around with architecture because that's what she likes to do. Her family was woodworkers. She really is interested in it, like, sincerely. So she was 100% right

because she picked a place in San Jose. A lot of her property was in like Palo Alto and Silicon Valley area. So like she owned a big chunk of that land for a while. She asked for sisters to go with her and they do. So they go from Connecticut to California. They take the train at different times. Everyone moves.

One sister's husband is. There's a principal at a school, but he gets fired and they move around. Her sister Bell ends up being one of the founders of the Humane Society in California. And she does really fun stuff. Like she's citizens, arrest people that she sees hurting animals, which I love. Her daughter, Daisy, lives with her in the big house for a while. Her daughter, Sarah's niece, Daisy is also named Marion, but called Daisy. She's Sarah Snook in the Winchester movie.

So like the niece that's there. She's there a lot. Sarah pays for her home. She buys homes for her family all over this area. She owns like dozens of houses around San Jose, San Francisco. She owns a big houseboat that's called an arc, like a huge boat that she lives on for a while that her family lives on. She hires a lawyer named Frank Lieb. He's her lawyer for the rest of their lives.

Land use in this area is super, super complicated because there aren't any records, really. Because it's like, yeah, we sent this family of people out here with a gun 50 years ago and they said to owe this land. like we don't know when they did like starting from scratch on land that they stole and then called it something else and all the things so it's kind of complicated so she has a lawyer um incidentally frank her lawyer his first partner was a man named delphin m delmas and he ended up moving to new york and defending henry k thaw for the murder of sanford white that we talked about before i love how everything just overlaps taylor you said that she inherited 20 million dollars did you look up what that is in today's money it's like 600 million dollars six over 600 million yeah it's six and six million dollars fucking crazy amount of money she was rich so they said that like like the dividends were giving her like a thousand dollars a day you know like she she just had she had tons of money um so she bought the house in the winchester mystery house but it turns into in san hose california it was pretty isolated it isn't as much now but it was at the time and

And she wasn't the only one doing this. Like Elizabeth Colt, the wife of Samuel Colt of the guns in Connecticut, also built a big rambling house. You know, it's like also a gun lady built a big house. But people really zeroed in on Sarah as like being crazy. This was a very, very Victorian time. So they had a lot of money. And she would read architecture magazines.

There's like cancel checks that she sent to like get an architecture magazine subscription so they know that she did. Her family was woodworkers. so she would build things, but she would use her own, like, plans to tell the contractors what to do. But because she didn't have, like, an architecture degree or any formal training, sometimes she would be wrong. So she would build, build, and then tear it down if it wasn't exactly what she wanted. She built the hallway one time, and it was too dark. So she built a skylight, and the skylight leaked.

So it was a constant repair and building in just like a normal rich person way. And it wasn't like constant, constant. You know, like in the movie, they're like 24 hours a day. people are always building it wasn't like that but it was like a fair amount of building and um in 1906 the house has a seven-story tower five stories in most other places it just continues to grow which i think is awesome and i wish i could do that like i would love to like add to my house it would be super fun like i love that people are like oh let me grab something from this house and add it to my house and like do all these things like it sounds like you know a fun rich person

copy to have. Taylor, I feel like you're kind of setting this up as though the story of why she did this isn't true. Yeah. How many people were living with her this house? Oh, what's a good question? I feel like her niece and her niece's adopted daughter lived there for a while with her. And there also were a ton of people who just worked there. There was like obviously like a carriage guy who turned into the car guy and his family lived there. There were a lot of gardeners. She employed a lot of Japanese people in a time when that was like not something that a lot of people did because it was obviously always,

but a super racist time against Japanese people specifically. So a lot of people live there and worked there as like contractors, but like in her house with her, it was mostly just like her and her niece. And I just looked it up and the house is 24,000 square feet. So I don't I guess that's what rich people I'm not rich and I don't know I need to be more money

What are you going to do? She has like a dumb amount of money You know It's like what do you do with the dumb amount of money You know she she you do what you want to do You do your passion like what do you like doing She's like I like architecture I like these buildings

I like woodworking I like you know doing these designs so that's what she did And in 1906 the house had a seven-story tower that she had built. Most of the house was five stories. And on April 18th, 1906, was the great San Francisco earthquake.

And her tower fell and all the top stories fell. So, unfortunately, that explains the stairways and the doors because she didn't rebuild. She just sealed things off. So if the fifth floor collapsed, she would just seal off the top of the staircase. And that's why their staircase is that go to nowhere. That sucks, Taylor. I know. I wanted to talk about the ghosts of at the beginning because that sucks. And the ongoing construction of her room or like interaction.

But why, why, okay, so where did you, where did, where was the conclusive evidence that this was not because of ghosts that she did this? Like everywhere else. The house is marketing campaign. I'll tell you about I'll get there. I know. Um, so a bit about Sarah herself during this time. She worked on her investments and her trusts. She gave money to her family in a trust so that, you know, all of the money that they would get like a certain allowance. And then when they died, the rest of the money would go to this hospital that she built.

She built a hospital in Connecticut named after her husband. It was a William Wirt Winchester Hospital for tuberculosis. She built, it was she, I mean, it was like, she spent like three million dollars on it. So like just an incredible amount of money on it. It became a hospital of World War I soldiers, then interpretation. tuberculosis. It's now a hospital for lung disease at Yale University. So it continues to be something that, you know, it helps people with lung diseases. Now that like tuberculosis isn't like as big as it was. Now there's like other things. So she gave tons of money anonymously. She would like give money. If someone asked her for money, she would give money to someone else to give to them. So it couldn't even like trail back to her because she was really, really private. Part of the reason that she was private is she suffered from severe arthritis. So her hands were like all clawed up and her feet. So a lot of the staircases in the Winchester house are just like an inch off the floor. So it's like a whole bunch of stairs to go not very far and that kind of wind.

And that was for her because she couldn't lift her legs very high. She had her greatest. Yeah. She also, also all of her teeth, her teeth were really bad. Her teeth are missing. So like I just want to say that we're very lucky to be in a time where even like you don't have to be rich to have nice teeth. And then also rich people even then like she couldn't get her teeth fixed. she tried to get nice dentures and like she couldn't find nice ones you know and now like all rich people have the same teeth because they like buy like the weird veneers so I'm very lucky that we're very lucky to have teeth because it's new in human life that our teeth are nice um and just remember she was very very private she donated secretly she rarely had visitors so she was always in morning so she did always wear black and she did always wear that veil but she wore that veil because she was kind of embarrassed by her teeth you know she didn't want to like see a lot of people because her arthritis was so bad

And a lot of people, like, worked for her, her whole life. And they really loved her. And they're like, she was like a really nice woman to them. But because of her secrecy and because of the media and everybody wants to tell a story because she is super rich. And it is because of guns. Even in her own time, stories started to happen to come out about her. In the San Jose Daily News in March 29, 1895, there is a story that headline is, strange story, a woman who thinks she'll die when our house is built. Ten years ago, the handsome residence was apparently ready for occupancy.

But improvements and additions are constantly being made for the reason it is said that the owner of the house believes that when it is entirely completed, she will die. The superstition has resulted in the construction of a maze of domes, turrets, cupolas, and towers covering territory enough for a castle. So they were talking about her before she even died. Just like spreading rumors because she's like an old lady who wears all black and lives in this creepy weird house. Was she even that old? of course they were. When she died, she was like in her 70s, which was very old for the time as well. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. So it didn't get better. These rumors were kind of everywhere, kind of all over the country about her and her house. But she chose to ignore them a lot and just continue on. She did not constantly work on the house. She did in like 1916. She built an elevator in the house so that she could go up and down. But she lived in her different properties. She had a ton of houses. She would be just something like, hey, I want to come visit you for a while. Let me just buy a house next door. You know. there's a picture of the outside of the house that has a doorway to nowhere

have you seen that one right that's because yeah those are because like parts of the house fell off in the earthquake damn that you know it sucks carry on i know so sarah died in 1922 her assets were divided up her niece auctioned off a lot of the stuff so another unfortunate thing is like none of the stuff in the house is hers it was empty it was emptied out um so this stuff was stuff that was given like hardy's auctions it off it like disappeared into the abyss um the house was sold to an amusement park man named john brown and his wife maim john had invented the roller coaster called the backer upper i'm sure you've been on one of these it's one where you like go up like you're going to go up but you don't and then you go back oh yeah yeah you know what i mean

you go up and then you go back it was called the backer-upper this guy became a millionaire off of it huh yep and so um i also think that he might have known my great grandpa because my great grandpa bish he owned a company called the bish rocko amusement company i believe it was called and he had invented a a ride um called the flying scooter and i have a bunch of like um ads for the flying scooter i have like tickets of his for when he went to like the world's fair in Chicago in 1893. So like I come from a roller coast coaster folk. So maybe they knew each other.

Fish Rocco amusement company, Chicago, Illinois. Yep. Look at that. Yep, that's us. You're like, you're like amusement park royalty almost. I am amusement park royalty. Not almost. Yeah.

Did a guess. So they bought the house and immediately made it into a tourist attraction. So that's night she died in 1922 by 1923, 100 years ago, exactly this year. it was a tourist attraction. In 1924, Harry Houdini was on a tour of America trying to debunk spiritualism, because, like, he seems, I don't know why, but that's hilarious. And he did, like, a cursory investigation of the house, and he told them that they should call it the Winchester Mystery House.

So that name comes from Houdini. That's fun. Which is fun. In the 1970s, a dude named Keith Kittle, who used to work at the Frontier Village, at Disneyland became the manager and he was like exactly who you'd think like a guy who would you know he worked at the frontier frontier village at Disneyland so he was like pretending to be a cowboy for years and so he was like a big personality he got it on the national register of historic places in 1981 and he put up these billboards that you see if you drive into San Jose they have

like the house and like a skull behind them to make it like make it into like a really scary attraction he really hyped up the 13 thing which isn't really true so they're like you know, like 13 nails in all the closets. There's 13 hangers in the things. And you can see that in like the virtual tour. But it's just stuff that they added later or like put significance on saying that Sarah was obsessed with the number of 13, but like she really wasn't. They have if you go now, they have nightly seances, which again, sounds super fun.

They said there's a seance room in the middle of the house where she had seances. That wouldn't even really make sense. Because if you had a seance in that time, you would have had it in your dining room because it's like a social thing. wouldn't have hit it. You would have had people come over and just do it. So that's probably not true. I read a thing that in 2016, they found a room, like an extra room. They had a bunch of stuff in it. And I looked at the picture and it's like Victorian couch with a scary doll on it. So like I believe that zero because of course, that's what you'd find if you wanted it to be scary. And now you can go on tours. You can get married there. There's some really beautiful pictures of a wedding there because it's a beautiful house. You can have team building events there. You can go on. nightly flashlight tours, which sounds super fun. I don't think it's what Sarah would have wanted her legacy to be. I think she would have either not really wanted a legacy or she would have wanted it to be the

tuberculosis hospital and the hospital to help people with lung diseases. But instead, it's this mystery house, which I think has brought a lot of joy to a lot of people. Kind of a really fun story. So I don't mind it for her. Oh, man. I think it was fun. I think a boatload of money. A tour is $100 a $100 a person.

person yeah i'm making a shit ton of money over there good for them i mean it must it must be working because people are going so i still want to go i don't not want to go i still want to go so scary you know and i'd still be scared the whole time and i'd still be scared if i went to a seance there and all of those fun things so that'd be very fun though i think it's still be really really fun so it's mostly rumor and stuff that you know was made by the amusement park company to be an amusement but it's interesting and cool i am disappointed i wish it was actually a crazy woman who had a lot of money and a lot of ghosts in her thoughts and that's why she did what she did that's better i did you interesting it's okay not everything can be true that's great statement that is a

fucking award winning comment right there not everything can be true i love it um sweet well thanks taylor you know what's funny is um i realized this as you started talking i was like our stories again are going to overlap because i also have a scary house that is probably haunted that also had events happened in the 1800s no early 1900s whatever same difference um so thank you for the story is there anything you want to share before we go ahead and cut things off yeah one quick thing um i got a for my friend Elizabeth who wanted to just talk about how we use the word crazy. And I definitely like, you know, agree that it's like a tough word. And we know a lot about like mental illness and all of that and just want to make sure

that it's clear that like we, you know, definitely support, you know, getting help for yourself. We know mental illness is not anyone's fault. But like they say in last podcast, it's your responsibility. And we will be, you know, we'll think about it. nice yeah it does and then also thank you to everyone who is new listeners

our listenership has gone up a bunch so we're super excited if you like it please give us five stars on Apple Podcast and leave a review that's super helpful and we are everywhere

at Doom to Fell Pod on Instagram and YouTube and all those things and let us have you have any questions or ideas we're at Jim DeFellPod at gmail.com We would love to hear from you

awesome love it Thank you. Well, we'll go ahead and cut this off and we'll rejoin you on Wednesday. Thanks, Mark.