|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In 1886, an eccentric woman named Sarah Winchester traveled from New Haven, Connecticut, to San Jose, California, to start a new life. She bought a small eight-room farmhouse and began a renovation project that would take 36 years and $5.5 million (in the money of the time), stopping only when she died in 1922.
By the time she was done, the Winchester Mansion was a modern marvel with indoor plumbing, multiple elevators, a hot shower, and central heating. It had over 160 rooms and 40 bedrooms, 10,000 windows, and even 2 basements. Of course, that’s not all that’s unique about the house. Not all the 2,000 doors can be walked through—one leads to an 8-foot drop to a kitchen sink, another to a 15-foot drop into bushes in the garden below. Staircases lead straight to ceilings, expensive Tiffany stained-glass windows were installed in places where they would get no light, and there are more secret passages than Narnia. A particularly odd delight is a cabinet that, when opened, extends through 30 rooms.
A massive earthquake struck the Bay Area in 1906 and toppled the top three stories of the house, damaging the other four. Some say Sarah Winchester took this as a sign from the spirits that she was too close to completion and ordered the unfinished front half of the house to be boarded up. Though it’s open now, earthquake damage is still clearly visible.
In response to ongoing claims of ghostly encounters and other paranormal phenomena on the property, Winchester management hired parapsychologist and paranormal investigator Christopher Chacon to conduct a full-scale scientific assessment of the property in the early 1990s. The month-long, round-the-clock investigation included interviewing over 300 people regarding their experiences on the property and analyzing every aspect of the environment for any unusual phenomena. In 2018, a horror film was made about the infamous house and the spirits that live within.
Everything else is just history…
