Is this the world's most haunted house? Inside the real-life mansion from the new Helen Mirren film
Even viewed from a distance of 50 yards, from the opposite sidewalk of the six-lane South Winchester Boulevard, I can see that it is different. It is a structure out of time and place, a curiosity divorced from all context.
With its plain wooden “walls”, it has nothing in common with the modernity and burble of Santana Row, one of San José’s key restaurant and bar zones, immediately to the east, where bright young things are sipping tequila cocktails on the terrace of El Jardin.
And with its Gothic flourishes and attachment to the architectural affectations of the late 19th century, it could not be less of a kindred spirit with the new Apple headquarters, four miles to the west in Cupertino – or the tech dreams of tomorrow being cooked up at a constant simmer in Silicon Valley beyond.
But the Winchester Mystery House on the edge of California’s third-largest city probably always looked this way – an alien fallen to earth. It would have done so as soon as Sarah Winchester bought what was an unremarkable eight-room farmstead in 1884 and promptly set about turning it into a giant oddity. She was a woman of wealth and unusual tastes who moved across the country to what was still the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” – an area of agricultural bounty, pumping out plums and apples under the affable west-coast sun.
Sarah arrived with a back story. Three years earlier, she had lost her husband, William Winchester, the owner of Connecticut rifle firm the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. It was his bequeathed fortune ($20.5 million, or $530 million/ ￡376 million adjusted for 2018) which would fund her 38-year construction frenzy at the house.
If only Sarah’s tale had been just about cash. As the house grew over the decades – randomly, unendingly, without any discernible blueprint – local mutterings swirled about her state of mind. She was being tormented, it was said, by the ghosts of every man and woman who had died at the end of a Winchester weapon. These sorry souls, rumour had it, were the widow’s eternal companions and would leave her be only if she agreed to continue her building project. Forever. Adding chamber after chamber, door after door.
An intriguing legend – and one being told with horror-film flamboyance in cinemas at the moment in Winchester, which opened this week, with Helen Mirren as Sarah. But when I enter the Winchester compound, I begin to detect a sadness that goes far beyond easy screams and dramarama.
Perhaps it is the gift shop that makes me uneasy. It is done up like a fairground attraction, almost in denial of the property’s sober listing on America’s National Register of Historic Places. There is a creaking 25-cent “Palm Reader” in one corner where an automated “wizard” declares you a “Dreamer”, “Lucky” or “Cool”, and an antique movie box showing Charlie Chaplin goofing in 1916’s The Count.
Or maybe it is the discovery, from an information panel, that the house’s new owners were running tours within five months of Sarah’s death (in 1922) to capitalise on her notoriety. But when I cross the threshold into her old home, I find myself imagining not a black-veiled figure from a fantastical nightmare, but a damaged woman who, for all her money, suffered greatly from life’s foibles.
It is not that the Winchester House is not weird. Even in the first few minutes of the tour, it is clear that the structure was crafted as a flight of fancy whose wheels never touched the ground. There are steps that go nowhere, doors that open on to bare plaster, windows marooned in walls with no access to the day, passages which end abruptly. There are 17 chimneys, more than 10,000 window panes. There are “early riser” staircases, including one that takes 44 tiny steps to climb 9ft – to ease the burden of the arthritis that afflicted Sarah in her later years.
There are 161 rooms in total, including 40 bedrooms. The guide suggests that Sarah would sleep in a different one each night, on rotation, to stay a hop ahead of the phantoms who dogged her. The rest of my tour group chatters nervously. But for all this, there is a beauty to what Sarah Winchester created. There are gorgeous marble fireplaces – 47 in all. There are exquisite panels of Tiffany glass, including one, set defeatingly into an interior wall, which will never sparkle with the rainbow effect its inlaid crystals were designed to produce in sunlight yet is sumptuously pretty all the same.
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And there are rings of truth. Extra attention is paid to a chamber at the top of the house – an attic space that was apparently only uncovered in 2016. Sarah, the guide reports, slept here on the night of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake – then, having been trapped as the tremor tore apart sections of the house, had it boarded up. There is special mention too for a room which contained a concealed safe. When it was opened after the house sale, it was found to contain two obituaries and two locks of hair – one each for Mr Winchester and Sarah’s daughter Annie, who died aged six weeks in 1866. Sarah had no other children.
Suddenly a picture solidifies, of a woman trying, via distraction, to escape her demons. Not, though, shrieking ghouls in the dark, but the tendrils of her own undying grief. I am relieved to emerge into the afternoon. Away to the south-west, the ridge line of the Santa Cruz mountains is all that remains of the view that would have tempted Sarah to buy the property in 1884.
She is no longer here either. After her death, her body was returned to Connecticut, to Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, where she lies with her husband and baby – a wife and a mother, not a figment of gossip in the California dust.
Winchester is in cinemas from this week. For more about the film, see a review of it here.
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Essentials
Getting there
British Airways (0344 493 0787; ba.com) flies daily from Heathrow to San Jose. From ￡595 return.
Where to stay
The Hotel Valencia on Santana Row (001 408 551 0010; hotelvalencia-santanarow.com) offers doubles from $445 (￡316) per night, room only.
How to visit
Tickets to the Winchester Mystery House start at $39 (001 408 247 2000; winchestermysteryhouse.com).