THE ONE ABOUT SARAH WINCHESTER
Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester in Lionsgate’s 2018 film “Winchester”
CW: Genocide, colonialism, the Civil War, the American Indian Wars, guns, child loss, and a brief mention of slavery.
Rambling old houses have long been a subject of interest for me. I based the haunted house in PARTING THE VEIL on several historical mansions, including the Biltmore Estate, Mount Stuart on Scotland’s Isle of Bute, and most specifically, the Earl Wheeler Mansion in Sharon, PA—which is now a parking lot. But with its hidden rooms and secret doors, the Winchester Mystery House had an undeniable influence on the interior of my own Havenwood Manor.
Sarah Winchester and her labyrinthine mansion in San Jose, California have inspired many haunted house stories. But what’s the real story behind this never-ending house and the woman who owned it?
I recently read Ghostland by Colin Dickey, which is an exploration of American history through the lens of our regional ghost stories and folk legends. With a forensic eye toward uncovering the truth behind these haunted places, Dickey points to many of our shameful national wounds: slavery, genocide, and the damaging, long-reaching effects of systemic racism, colonialism, and gentrification.
Sarah Winchester’s story is one that encompasses the ambitions of a growing country in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, at the cost of thousands upon thousands of Native American lives. The legend says that the reason she never ceased working on her monstrous house was due to the restless spirits of the indigenous people her husband and father-in-law’s Winchester Repeating Rifles had killed as the west was “won.”
There’s a lot to unpack with this legend. Lots of implications. Not the least of which centers a wealthy white American woman and her supposedly haunted house in a scenario meant to titillate and amuse instead of educate listeners about the true plight of Native American people, reducing them to vengeful, angry spirits who drove a woman to madness. This particularly harmful, reductive trope is something that has been repeated in our nation’s literary horror canon, over and over.
But why would these spirits wait until Sarah Winchester’s ostensibly guiltier husband died to start haunting her? Doesn't make much sense, does it?
When Sarah Pardee met William Wirt Winchester, he’d already amassed a fortune manufacturing shirts with his father, Oliver. Yes, shirts. Once the Civil War started, old Oliver saw that some of the same expertise they used to mass-produce gentlemen’s dress shirts could be used to manufacture munitions to aid the Union’s efforts. He bought out Smith & Wesson’s then-failing enterprise, set his best mechanical engineer to work, and within a few years, the Winchester Repeating Rifle was born. But by the time the U.S. Army started using these rifles in battle, the Civil War was almost over. Reconstruction and westward expansion now became the major goals of the limping, bloody country. And with Winchester’s new gun, things just got bloodier.
(For a truthful, no-punches-pulled history of the American West and the American Indian Wars, I highly recommend Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Heart of Everything That Is by Bob Drury).
Early in their marriage, Sarah and William lived far from the west in New Haven, Connecticut. In the years to come, they would remain removed from acknowledging the violence Oliver Winchester’s invention had caused. They were a typical wealthy white American family of the time—entertaining guests and playing at social politics in their insular bubble. In this circle of privilege and plenty, Sarah gave birth to her first and only child, a little girl named Annie.
But Annie was weak and sickly, suffering from a congenital form of malnutrition that no doctor could cure called marasmus. Within forty days of her birth, she died. While infant and early childhood loss were quite common in the era, there’s no doubt little Annie’s death impacted Sarah. She never went on to have more children, although she and William seemed reasonably happy otherwise.
In 1870, due at least partially to William’s recent diagnosis of tuberculosis, Sarah’s father-in-law sent her husband to oversee a new branch of operations in San Francisco. Sarah went with him. William’s illness took a grim toll on the couple. Despite the climate out west, which was said to be restorative to consumptives, he died a decade later, a year after his father’s death.
This left Sarah Winchester a very wealthy widow.
Widows are often the subject of scrutiny, and few have been scrutinized as much as Sarah Winchester.
After William died, Sarah was eager to leave the society bustle of San Francisco behind. She bought a lovely 8-room farmhouse in the sleepy Santa Clara Valley, in the then-outskirts of San Jose. You can see a photo of the original house on the Winchester Mystery House site.
She had a completely logical reason for making the earliest additions to the house: she hoped to have her siblings and extended family eventually move into the home with her. Although her family never accepted her offer of communal living, Sarah didn’t stop building. The daughter of a renowned woodworker and millwork craftsman, Sarah had a pronounced interest in architecture and developed this skillset largely on her own. As the years went on, renovating the house became her obsession.
And that’s when the gossip started.
There were rumors of nightly seances in a round room, where desperate Sarah communed with the spirits of the dead as balm for her troubled soul. Then there was talk of a psychic medium named Adam Coons, who told Sarah that she would only live until the house was completed, which resulted in workmen hammering throughout the night without cessation. The number 13 was repeated often throughout the house—yet another example of Sarah’s eccentric nature—but many other numbers were repeated as well. And then there were the multiple staircases leading nowhere, meant to confuse the dead who walked the halls.
Reader, there’s only one staircase-to-nowhere, and it was likely the result of an engineering mistake due to Sarah’s amateur architectural skills.
Sarah’s letters to her sister-in-law recount several of her experiments with architecture. Far from a madwoman intentionally constructing a death trap, she mentions a skylight she placed in a dark upper hallway to keep people from losing their footing. She refused to rebuild a magnificent seven story tower and cupola that collapsed during the 1906 earthquake, out of concern for its structural integrity.
The truth is seldom as outrageous as fiction, but no less interesting for historians like me.
If guilt truly were the catalyst for any of her behavior—which is doubtful, as she demonstrated only marginal progressive ideologies—it much more likely manifested in Sarah’s charitable contributions. She gave widely and anonymously during her lifetime, and employed countless local workmen she paid well to build her unusual designs. This spurred the local economy of San Jose to lasting effect. When she died, she did not die in the 13th bedroom of the strange house she called Llanada Villa. She died peacefully in her sleep, probably of heart failure at one of her unremarkable homes in nearby Atherton, where she spent the last 17 years of her life.
In her will, she left the bulk of her fortune to charity. The rest, including Llanada Villa, went to her niece Marion, who promptly auctioned off everything she didn’t want. Marion attempted to sell the house, but no one wanted it. Instead, a down-on-his-luck (and very creative) showman named John H. Brown offered to lease it and be its caretaker until he could afford to purchase it. With Brown’s aptitude for hyperbolic storytelling, the myth of Sarah Winchester became a capitalist’s opportunity. Brown soon opened the house for tours and became a wealthy man in his own right.
But if Sarah Winchester didn't continue to work on her house out of a sense of guilt, grief, or fear of the unknown, why was she driven to such extremes?
This is where I go into conjecture.
Being a neurodivergent person, I am well-acquainted with the ways in which a special interest or subject can quickly become a singular focus. History is mine. Could it be that, left alone, with so much time and money and freedom on her hands, Sarah Winchester finally had the opportunity to indulge in something she loved with a hyper-focused passion? In the 19th century, young women were rarely given license to explore careers of their own, and apart from the famed Julia Morgan, there were few (documented) women architects during the era in which Sarah Winchester lived.
There’s certainly evidence of a sharp mind at play throughout the house. Puzzles and clues written in stained glass windows. Allusions to literary works she admired. There’s the repetition of her favorite numbers—a possible sign of synesthesia, or perhaps even a secret code written for her own amusement. And then there are the rare accounts from people who knew Sarah. Far from being superstitious or fanciful, the Sarah Winchester of their recollections was clever, sure of herself, and not given to histrionics. She was certainly an introvert and a recluse, but did not seem particularly unhappy living alone.
We will likely never know the true reason Sarah continued working on her strange chimera of a house. But I like to think that rather than being haunted by restless ghosts, Sarah was driven by her desire to do what she loved the most, at a time when women were often denied the opportunity to be anything other than a subservient “angel in the house.”
I prefer to think of the Winchester Mystery House as a passion project. Perhaps, inspired by the same sort of curiosity as a novice composer writing a symphony without form, Sarah Winchester chased her own muse, whether or not those who witnessed her symphony of wood and stone could appreciate its beauty.
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