Winchester Mystery House Spooky But History Behind It Is Suspect

SAN JOSE, CA – As the story goes, Sarah Winchester inherited a massive fortune after her husband, firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester’s death in 1881, and spent a big chunk of it on some of the best crazy money can buy.

Her $20 million inheritance was worth today’s equivalent of over a half a billion dollars.

So on the advice of a psychic medium who told her she’d spend the rest of her life hounded by ghosts of the thousands killed by the eponymous rifle, she left New Haven, Connecticut for the West Coast and bought a Santa Clara farmhouse that she converted into a never-ending 38-year construction project to help keep the spirits chasing her at bay.

The legacy of her investment lives to this day as the labyrinth of architectural madness that is the Winchester Mystery House.

It’s a great tale to be sure, and one that’s has helped make this South Bay mansion an international tourist destination. Since it’s 1923 opening, the Winchester Mystery House has drawn over 12 million visitors.

There are plenty of reasons to visit this mind-bending spectacle of a dwelling. A candlelit tour of the 160-room historical landmark with doors and stairs that lead to nowhere, among other oddities that was the basis of a recent Hollywood production, is by all accounts well worth its weight in spookiness.

But under close scrutiny, the story behind this ostensibly haunted house, marketing gold as it may be, is about as grounded in reality as QAnon.

Journalist and Winchester dynasty descendent Laura Trevelyan put it this way in an article for The Guardian: “There is scant truth to the myth.”

Mary Jo Ignoffo, a South Bay historian who authored the first full-length Sarah Winchester biography, found no evidence supporting the prevailing narrative about the gun heiress of which the Winchester Mystery House is based.

In Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune, Ignoffo disputes a caricature of Winchester as a superstitious guilt-ridden widow.

According to Ignoffo, the stairways to nowhere and half-built chimneys weren’t the result of Winchester’s fear of ghosts but rather the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Ignoffo doesn’t attribute the misinformation surrounding the Winchester Mystery House to its current owners, relatives who purchased the house in 1923, a year after her death.

“To the local people, she was an enigma,”Ignoffo wrote in her book. “They did not know what to make of her. Eventually, they just made fun.”

Former Winchester Mystery House General Manager Shozo Kagashima questioned the South Bay historian’s findings in a 2010 interview with The Mercury News in which he noted that he’d skimmed the Winchester biography.

“She refutes our stories, but that’s, I guess, an author’s prerogative,” Kagoshima, said. “But I’m not quite sure where she gets her information or how she was able to verify that our facts are incorrect.”

Kagoshima said the building as it stands today as Winchester designed it.

“She’s the one who actually built it,” he said. “Why she built it the way it is — that’s the mystery.”