Stuff You Should Know - What's with the Winchester Mystery House?

Episode Date: October 31, 2013

After her daughter and husband died, heiress Sarah Winchester became obsessed with the idea that spirits haunted her and to appease them she had to have a house continuously built for them. So she did - 24 hours a day for 38 years. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, everybody, do you ever scream at your printer or hurl empty ink cartridges across the room? We all do, which means that you likely suffer from cartridge conniptions caused by irritating ink cartridges constantly running out of ink. It's the worst, everybody. We can all agree on that. But thankfully, the Epson EcoTank Printer is the perfect cure.

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Hey, and Happy Halloween, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Go do what you're about to do, Chuckers. Boo. And Jerry. Jerry's saying. You put the three of us together. Me, Josh Clark, there's Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry.

And you've got Stuff You Should Know, the Halloween edition. Yep, we got a big old tub of candy corn here. We got a. Have you tried Starburst Candy Corn? My goodness. I don't like candy corn, and I like Starburst Candy Corn. Now, is it Starburst or is it Candy Corn? It's Candy Corn with Starburst flavors.

But not Starburst texture. No, Candy Corn texture. Oh, OK. Some mad scientist threw it all together. Interesting. Yeah. I'll try it. You got one?

I have a warm one in my pocket that's been in there for a few days. Perfect. Here you go. Soften it up. There. Ooh, that's delicious. Make a chewing sound.

Yeah, it's strawberry and lint. Yeah. That's exactly right, Chuck. Yeah, so we've got Candy Corn. It's a Halloween edition. And we hope you enjoyed our Halloween episode, our story. That's my favorite thing of the year, that and Christmas episode.

We're going to get cracking on the Christmas extravaganza. Yeah. We're running out of stories. I've probably, you know. I got one up my sleeve. I got an idea. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

Otherwise, we can just make stuff up. Yeah, and then everything worked out OK because it was Christmas. The end. Chuck. Yes. Have you ever heard of the Winchester Mystery House? I have indeed.

I have too. Thank God, because that'd be a surprise if I was completely unprepared. It would be. I would be surprised. I can tell you that. Yeah. Yeah, I've heard of it.

I've never been there. But I would like to go for sure and check it out. And I might do that next time I'm in the Bay Area. I might venture towards San Jose to check this thing out. Yes. Well, I've already cleared it with Yumi that we're going next time we're in the San Francisco area. Great.

How far away is San Jose from San Francisco? I don't know. I'm close, right? Do you know the way to San Jose? I do not know the way to San Jose, apparently. But if I could find my way there, we would find the Winchester Mystery House. Because apparently, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

I bet. It was originally in some pretty rural area. And over time, the acreage, I think 162 acres, that's what the Winchester House grounds eventually covered, has been whittled away. And now it's just like the suburbs with this enormous Victorian mansion situated in the middle of it.

Yeah. And when we say enormous, we mean enormous. Supposedly, about 160 rooms, even though, and I think this is part of building up the lore, some say they cannot be counted because you will get lost in the house and never get an accurate count. And never escape. I say that's hokum.

Hokum because, hey, if you can put a man on the moon, you can count the rooms in a house. Yeah, and what do you suggest using a post-it note? Just put a post-it note up in a room you've already been in. Yeah. You don't even need to write that. No. Just the very presence of a post-it note

indicates you've been there before. Then count up all the post-it notes at the end. Right. You could write the numbers on them even better. You wouldn't even have to count them. You just write one. And then keep in mind the last number you wrote down and write the next number that comes after that

on the next post-it note. Right. And you know what we should do? It would be funny if we did a little video series where you and I, big smart guys, tried to do this and we kept getting confused. I would watch that. Yeah.

I would watch that over and over. And then we find the lost wine cellar and everything's kind of Peters out from there. All right, so what we're talking about, let's clue those of you who don't know what we're talking about. In, we're talking about the Winchester Mystery House, which was, as Chuck said, an enormous mansion of an indeterminate number of rooms.

I think they estimate 160. But even the state of California on their tourism website says it is an odd dwelling with an unknown number of rooms. A tourism website said that? Yes, because it's a tourist attraction. Exactly. They're trying to draw people in with the mystery of the mystery house.

Yeah. And the whole thing was the brainchild and the result of a four foot 10 inch little firecracker. Yeah. Nicknamed the bell of New Haven in her day. Named Sarah Pardee, who became Sarah Pardee Winchester. Yeah, New Haven, Connecticut. She was born in 1839.

Did not New Haven, New Jersey. No. And she was very smart. Spoke four languages, could play the piano like a champ. Yeah, with her elbows. Yeah, she's beloved. She married in 1862, William Winchester of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fame.

Yeah, remember that? Because it's a big part of the story. It is. They developed what was known as the repeater, the repeating rifle, which is the coolest rifle ever. The Lone Ranger had one. Did he? According to the Lone Ranger play set that I have, he did.

I believe that. He mainly used the old revolver, though. Yeah, and the cudgel. Yeah, the rifleman. It's famous for. The rifleman used the repeater, for sure. The Lone Ranger did, too. OK.

But basically, it was a revolutionary gun that you could fire really quickly. And yeah, you could fire once every three seconds, which is pretty fast. Amazingly fast, for a rifle, especially. It was the gun that won the West. And it was the gun that helped the northern troops defeat the southern troops in the Civil War.

And when the West depends on your vantage point. But yes, it was the westward expansion took place at the barrel of the Winchester repeating rifle. So she marries William Winchester heir to that fortune. They started family in 1866 and very, very tragically lost their lone daughter, Annie, in infancy. And it was something that Sarah never recovered from, basically. No, it was a pretty sad thing to see.

Apparently, the child was alive for either 28 days or 42 days, I guess, depending on who you ask. So she made it to term. She was born. And then she died of a wasting disease called morassmus, which is a disease of malnutrition. So no matter what they fed her, she just wasn't taking in the nutrients.

And she died of malnutrition. And at the time, morassmus was still mysterious. So it seemed like, what the heck just happened to my kid? I'm feeding the kid. Also, here I go right along the edge of completely losing my sanity forever. And I'll never be quite the same again, but I'm going to come back a little bit.

And then when I do, a few years later, my husband's going to die an early death at age 43. Yeah, 15 years later, to be exact. Which, by the way, Chuck, can I take a second here? Sure. Somebody wrote in, and I can't find the email, but they wrote in for our dying podcast. We mentioned life expectancy.

And we said that we made the assumption that people used to only live to age 30 or something like that because the average life expectancy was so low. And this person pointed out that that's not the case, that people typically live to old age like they live now. But the infant mortality rate was so high that if you took all of the infant deaths and all the people who survived it and put it together,

you had an average life expectancy of 30. Right, so it's not like everyone's dying in their 40s. Right. They were dying in their 1s and 2s. Exactly. So if you made it out of your 1s and 2s, you would probably live a pretty long life. So that was the discrepancy that I never understood

until the person wrote in. So whoever wrote in, thanks for writing that in. You didn't catch a name or anything? I don't know. So where are we? She's lost her daughter. She's lost her husband. She's very distraught.

Goes and sees a medium, which was a big deal at the time. Yeah, in Boston, a man named Adam Coons. Which was strange that it was a male medium. It is, because, you know. Typically ladies. Yeah. Which is why they're all called ladies, so-and-so. Right?

Yeah. Yeah, like, you know. Oh, madam. Yeah, or madam or like Lady Charlotte or whatever. Yeah. Lady Charlotte, too, I go to. That's why Buzz marketed her. No, you don't.

Do you really? No. I go to see Lady Adam. So anyway, she goes and sees Lady Adam, and he says, you're going to be haunted by ghosts for the rest of your life because you married into a fortune of killing and murdering with that Winchester rifle. Yeah, so remember-

They're haunting you. Remember I said it was important that she married Mr. Winchester. Right here. William. The Winchester family supposedly had a curse according to Lady Adam that all of the people who had died at the other end of the Winchester rifle now haunted the family.

Sure. And they had listed demands that Sarah was going to have to put up with or else she would be gotten by the spirits, too. And that's where the house was born, basically. Yeah, the guy said, these spirits need a house, so you're going to have to build a house for them. More and more people are dying from the rifle that your husband's family created every day,

so you're going to have to make it a big house, and you can never cease construction. If you cease construction, you'll die. And there's two different interpretations here, and they're not quite sure how Sarah Winchester interpreted it. But whether if she stopped construction, she would die, or if she kept construction going, she would live forever. It's her own life because the people who were into spiritualism

were into that whole thing a lot, too. But either way, she had her walking papers, her instructions, and she decided to take them out west and follow her husband, who she believed was leading her, who supposedly told her all this through the medium, and headed toward California. Yeah, she visited, had a niece in Menlo Park and eventually found a property three miles west of San Jose

in the Santa Clara Valley there. And she said, you know what? I'm going to buy this land. I'm going to take this house, and I'm going to build on it till forever. And Lady Adam had a, his cousin was a contractor. It's not true. That would have been great, though.

Yeah, it's like, so you have to build forever non-stop. Here's my cousin, John Hansen. Right, I think that was me a big one. John Hansen was, in fact, her foreman, even though Mrs. Winchester was her own architect. So hold on, so Mrs. Winchester, who's just really slightly off her rocker now at the loss of her child and her husband, has instructions that she is to move west,

start building forever, a huge house, to house the ghosts of all the people who have died at the hands of her husband's company's rifles. That's where we're at right now. Before we go any further, let's do a message break. Stuff you shouldn't know. 2023 is already well underway, everybody. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business.

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or to book your tour. That's GateTheNumberOneTravel.com. Once again, use promo code HEART20 through January 30 to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. OK, before we left, I sort of hinted that she was her own architect. And she was. Not only did you hint it, you said it.

Not only was she her own architect, but she supposedly got instructions on building through seances. Right, and she had an architect at first, but she fired him later on, apparently. Oh, really? I think because he wouldn't listen to her. And she's like, look, I'm getting instructions

from the other side, pal. Are you getting instructions from the other side? No, well, then we go my way. So she had a seance room. And here's how she would conduct her seance. You try and trick the ghosts into not following her and disrupting the seance. So she would set out for the seance room.

She would traverse, basically, a labyrinth of rooms and hallways, like she would push a button and a panel would fly up. She would step quickly into there, shut the door. She would open a window to that place, climb out onto a flight of outdoor steps that took her down a story, come back inside like through a window. And she was basically trying to lose these spirits

that she felt like were tailing her until she could finally get into her comforting seance room, where she would receive instruction on what to build next. And then when she got into her seance room, which was the blue room, it was at the center of the house, and I think the second floor, she would get instructions, I think, from her husband, supposedly. And then also a spirit caretaker named Clyde.

And she would get the instructions at 12. There would be a bell rung. That's when the spirits arrived. At 2, another bell would ring, signaling their exit. And she would do this every night. And then in the morning, she would go meet the foreman, Hanson. Yeah, John Hanson. And say, here's what you guys do today.

And he would go, all right. But we should say that all through the night, including at midnight, at 2, and the time when she was sleeping after the seance and before she met Hanson, there was construction going on. Yeah, and it was 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, including Sundays, including holidays. There was always somebody doing construction on that house.

Yeah, she apparently, as long as she could hear those hammers nailing nails, then she felt at ease. She would design rooms that would be built on top of other rooms. She would build rooms. Apparently, to get to those 160 rooms, they estimate they may have built 500 or 600 over the span of those years. Right, because if there was something that got in the way,

she would either build around it, have it torn down. Sometimes there was even less explicable why a room would get torn down, but she would just order it torn down, even though, say, they'd been working on it a month up to that point. Yeah, and the whole trick to all this is to pay well. If you weren't paying well, then you probably would have had dudes walking off the job

and being like, you're crazy, lady. I'm out of here. Right, she paid double the day rate. Yeah, which is $3. The day rate was $150. She paid $3. Yeah, and so the construction dudes were happy to keep working on this what they thought

was this crazy old lady's plans. And they were probably frustrating, but they were getting rich or not rich, but they were doubling their money. Right, and I think over time, too, Chuck, I get the impression that the people who worked for her, both the construction workers, who, I mean, there would be, once they came, they didn't leave

unless they were fired because the money was so good. So when you work for some crazy old lady for 12, 15, 20 years or whatever, you're going to start to develop a sense of loyalty. And she was very much protected from the outside world by these people. Because her neighbors thought she was a total wacko, maybe a little evil, who knows what's going on.

She lived in seclusion. She always wore black. She always wore a veil. Well, yeah, one of the first things she did was had built a privet, had a privet planted around the entire house. But she was also very kind of children, especially orphans, would have them over for ice cream.

So it's not like she was some awful mean old person. No. She was just mysterious and liked her privacy, mainly. Yeah, and apparently once she moved into town, a lot of the local charities started getting anonymous donations that they never got before. And she didn't need all the glory, but she was still a very charitable woman.

Yeah, she had a bunch of money. The reason she was able to pay double was a big inheritance, obviously, about 20 million bucks and a lot of stock in the Winchester Company. And it afforded her, they guessed, about $1,000 a day to spend on construction, which is like 20 grand now or so. 27 and change a day. A day.

And this is mostly prior to the era of the income tax. So that was all hers. She ended up spending, I think, 5.5 million on the house in 1922 dollars. That's a lot of dough. It really is, but she didn't have anything else to do with it except give it away to orphans. That's true.

So all of this construction led to some very strange design decisions. And we should say this is probably a pretty good point to say, Mrs. Winchester didn't leave any diaries, any journals, she was never interviewed. All we can say for sure is that she went to a medium in Boston and received these instructions that she had to build the house to appease the spirits.

And that's what she did. Everything else is kind of conjecture. Like her motivations beyond that, the details of her motivations and what she thought and believed is conjecture. We should probably say that. And there's a lot of room for misunderstanding. Like the staircases that she built had lots of steps

and they were like two inches high. Well, the reason that she did that was because she had very bad arthritis and those are the only types of stairs that she could climb. But they would also double back all of a sudden or go around in crazy circles. A lot of people say that she thought that you could kind of screw with the spirits

and throw them off your trail, I guess on your way to the Sam's room by having stairs constructed like that. At any rate, there's a lot of weird design elements in this huge mansion. Yeah, the switchback stairs were seven flights that rose only nine feet. It's 44 steps total.

She had stairs that would go down, leading to stairs that went up, stairs that would go into a ceiling, chimneys that would stop short of the ceiling, hidden doorways covered up stairwells. It was just sort of a big, beautiful mess of design. There were doors that led from the inside out to the outside but it would just be a sheer drop if you stepped out the door.

Like that last step is a doozy. Right. There was an inside door in the Sam's room, a closet door that opened up onto the kitchen sink, another story below. There was a corridor behind a cabinet that went along the backside of 30 rooms. It's just all sorts of neat stuff.

There's the very famous stairs that lead to nowhere. Yeah, there were cabinets are only like two inches deep. There was a grand ballroom and it wasn't all just wacky stuff. It was like really gorgeous design in places. The grand ballroom was built without nails, which was a feat of engineering in itself and was gorgeous but never used because of an earthquake.

That was pretty significant in her life. In 1906, there was an earthquake that she was known for sleeping in different rooms every night so she wouldn't be found out by the ghosts. Right. And she was actually trapped in the daisy room and not found for a little while by her employees because they didn't know where she was

after this earthquake happened. Right, not only did the ghost not know where she was sleeping, her servants didn't either. So she was in there for a few hours and it freaked her out. Oh, I'm sure. Because despite the fact that it had totally killed a lot of people in ravaged San Francisco and burned it down,

she took it as a sign that the ghosts were mad at her. Right. That they were afraid that construction was nearing an end and so to appease them, she boarded up a lot of the damaged interior so that it could never be repaired and then therefore the house could never be finished. We should also say that by this time,

the house had reached seven stories and the earthquake was so bad it knocked off the top three, I believe. Yeah, she ended up sealing the front 30 rooms of the home, including the front entrance to the home, these like grand front doors that they had just put in, apparently only three people, the two guys that put in the door and her

were the only people to walk through them before she sealed them off forever. Yeah. Well, she had a beautiful Tiffany stained glass window installed and then built a wall behind it so no light could shine through it. Yeah, you can only see it from the outside and I'm sure it looks kind of dull.

And then after the earthquake, 1906 earthquake, which I said freaked her out, supposedly she went and lived on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay for six years. I bet that was nice. And then when she came back, it was different. Like before, there wasn't necessarily much of a plan and so like if she ran into trouble architecturally,

she'd just tear the thing down or build around the problem. This was like a different kind of frenetic pace and it was just like build whatever, wherever. Right. After the earthquake, it really got to her. Just like crazy person building. Yeah.

All right, Chuckers, before we go any further, how about another message break? Stuff we shouldn't know. 2023 is already well underway, everybody. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business and the way you can do that is by joining up with stamps.com. That's right, because with stamps.com,

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That's promo code HEART20 through January 30th. Visit gateonetravel.com for more information or to book your tour. That's gatethenumberonetravel.com. Once again, use promo code HEART20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. Okay, so back to it. Here's some numbers for you.

Okay. 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, two basements, six kitchens, 10,000 window panes and 467 doorways and only two mirrors in the whole house because of course ghosts are afraid of their own reflection and apparently the staff would sneak hand mirrors so they can occasionally see what they look like after getting out of the shower

but she didn't want to have anything to do with the mirrors though. Yeah, she also supposedly would fire staff who saw her without her veil on. Apparently her butler and her niece were the only people who could see her without a veil. And if you saw her without a veil, no hard feelings but you're cut, you're cut.

So we've talked a lot about the fact that she worked as her own designer and made all these weird terrible choices. It made no sense. But we also mentioned early on, she's a very smart lady. So she actually learned over the years more about design and architecture and got better at it and developed a skill

and she actually had some innovations in her home that were brand new at the time. For instance, they say she was the first person to use wool for insulation. Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah. They had carbide gas lights in the house that had their own gas manufacturing plant

for the estate. Right. Which is brand new. And she had electric push buttons installed to turn the lights on and off. She had an inside crank to open and close outside window shutters. First person to do that, that eventually became the norm. Oh yeah, that's huge.

What else? She had, I guess it was sort of green at the time. She had drip pans under the windows and a zinc subfloor in the North Conservatory. So when you watered plants, the runoff from those plants would be captured by drain pipes for the garden below it. It's pretty cool. And she had something called the enunciator,

which is a servant call system allowed her to summon servants from anywhere in the house and it would drop a little card to show the servant which room she was in at the time. That's pretty awesome. So it wasn't just crazy weird steps that lead to nowhere. There were actually some innovations at the time. And it's a gorgeous Victorian.

Like when you look at it, really, really beautiful house. Yeah, and apparently the construction, by the time she died, took up six acres. Six acres of the house, not just the grounds, because the grounds are like 160 acres. And when she dies finally, it's 1922. And apparently the legend has it that she died at a time when construction stopped.

The workman took a break or something to play cards. Oh really? And never started back up again because they discovered that she died in her bed sleeping in 1922. And right afterward, she left up everything to basically her nieces and nephews. And one of her nieces, I think the only one

who was allowed to see her without a veil, came in and was like, let's just auction this stuff off. And it took six weeks supposedly to get everything out of the house. Because there was that much stuff and it was that difficult to find your way out when you really got into the interior. Yeah, and some really valuable things too

that were locked away in storage that were never even used, like furniture and furnishings, just sitting in wait basically. Didn't you say that there's a wine cellar that's lost? Yeah, I think they can't find the wine cellar to this day, which also sounds a little like lore to me. It does.

Why can't you find the wine cellar? I don't know, it's lost. It is a popular tourist attraction today and still being renovated and maintained. Apparently it's continually being painted the exterior is all year long. They finish painting it and they start once again because it takes 365 days to complete the job.

I would imagine so. And it's been a tourist attraction almost since she died. Like the house was sold to a group of investors who wanted to start it as a tourist attraction for $135,000. That is crazy. Even though she dropped 5.5 million into it. And again, like if you're interested in this,

you can go check out the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. They have a website. I just imagine you type in Winchester Mystery House. But also look up something called Mrs. Winchester's house. It's a documentary from 1963. KPIX, I think it's a San Francisco television station. It's narrated by Lillian Gish.

It's just a half hour long, but it's really spooky and black and white and just interesting. It's a neat one. Very cool. Yeah, check that out. All right, so we're going. Okay, let's go.

Before that though, Chuck, if everybody wants to read this article, you can type in Winchester Mystery House in the search bar at housestuffworks.com. And it'll bring this up. And I said search bar. So that means it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, I'm gonna call this asexuality callback.

I just listened to your asexual podcast, guys. I found it very interesting. One thing really caught my attention. You said asexuals were classified as a separate group outside the range of homosexual to heterosexual. I think it could be different. So Paul is proposing an idea here. Instead of the range being a number line

with a subgroup that doesn't fit, it should be more like a coordinate plane. Not all people are equally sexual. I'm sure you know people who don't really think about sex often. And then people who it dominates a large portion of their lives. That made me think that it could be a coordinate plane

with homo and hetero on the left and right and asexual to extremely sexual, I wanna say nymphomaniacal even, but I feel like nymphomania is more complicated than a born sexuality. Or at least we don't know enough about it to say whether it is. Yeah, so what he's describing is like a plus sign.

Yeah, so sexual orientation on left and right and then the intensity of your sexuality going up and down. Exactly. You could have like high homosexuality, low heterosexuality and so on. Exactly. That's a good idea. I've actually seen that elsewhere too.

Coordinate plane, it just makes sense. He says that way all the people could be accurately plotted to some degree at least. Not saying it would count for everything perfectly, but I think it would clarify it a bit more. Anyways, I'd love to know your thoughts on that idea. You just got them. Yeah.

Has it been done before or have you read about that? I have not. I do not know. I saw in a paper somewhere somebody proposing that similar thing that, who was it, the sex study year? Kinsey? Kinsey, yeah. Or Masterson Johnson.

No, it was Kinsey. They really kind of missed a really obvious aspect of intensity rather than just orientation. It's a stuffed orientation. Dummy. It's a good idea. I agree. So Paul of Jungentown, PA.

We think it's a swell idea. Get to work on it. Yeah. Go, Paul. Maybe you can call it the Paul's sexual plane. Paul's A1 sexual plane. And a girl. Yeah.

Paul, thank you for that. And if you, like Paul, have some great thoughts or ideas on things that we've talked about, more expansive ideas, we wanna hear them because we like that kind of stuff. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastediscovery.com

and, hey guys, come hang out with us at our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the all-new 2014 Toyota Corolla. You're ready to travel in 2023. And since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less.

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Once again, use promo code HEART20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. The South Dakota Stories, volume three. It was my first time traveling alone. Packed my car with hiking boots, a camera, and my dog, Randy. I don't know what I was searching for. Maybe it was something new with adventure.

Maybe it was the idea of vacation I would never expect. Filled with wildlife, national parks, rivers, whatever it was I set out to find, it was all there and more. Because there's so much South Dakota, so little time.