Winchester House
The Winchester House ( Winchester Mystery House ) is the former home of Sarah L. Winchester , the widow of the rifle manufacturer William Wirt Winchester . It is located in San Jose (California, USA) and is a symbol of California. It is open for viewing.
Building
Sarah Winchester bought the house in 1884 when it was an 8 bedroom farm with 161 acres of land from Dr. Robert Caldwell.
Construction began in 1884 and was not completed until Sarah Winchester died on September 5, 1922. The building has 161 rooms of various sizes, including 40 bedrooms on 4 floors (7 floors and up to 600 rooms are said to have been before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake ), 47 chimneys, 17 chimneys, several secret passages and 1000 windows.
The museum was opened on June 30, 1923.
On August 7, 1974, Winchester House was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a monument .
Curiosities
There are several curiosities in the house, such as doors with a wall behind, a staircase that goes down seven steps and then up eleven again, a staircase that simply ends in the ceiling and a door that leads into the abyss leads. The building was built piece by piece, until Sarah Winchester's death, new rooms were constantly added, there is no uniform construction plan.
According to popular belief , Sarah Winchester was obsessed with the fear of being haunted and killed in their sleep by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles. Therefore, she had her villa built like a huge labyrinth and slept in different rooms every day so that the ghosts wouldn't find her. As early as 1895, newspapers began to speculate about the behavior of Winchester and their motives for building the house. Many of these articles can be attributed to the tabloids . Reports of occult connections such as evil spirits and the alleged madness of the widow did not come up until after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake .
Influences on cultural works
The stories about the house inspired Stephen King to write Stephen King's House of Doom . Also influenced by the history of the Winchester House is an episode of the youth crime series Three Question Marks with the title House of Terror , but the house there has a different name. This house is also mentioned in the series Supernatural . The film Haunting of Winchester House is set in a building called Winchester House and also makes reference to Sarah Winchester. In 2018 the film Winchester - The House of the Damned by Peter and Michael Spierig with Helen Mirren in the role of Sarah Winchester was released.
Winchester House front side
Winchester Mystery House with fountain
Front view of the Winchester Mystery House and gardens
Winchester Mystery House with the door to nowhere
Winchester Mystery House side entrance
Winchester Mystery House plaque
Overhead view of the winding south wing of the Winchester Mystery House
View of the west wing of the Winchester Mystery House
Fireplace in one of the living rooms, original interior of the Winchester Mystery House
Example of misleading staircase in the Winchester Mystery House
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Web links
- winchestermysteryhouse.com - official website
- Documentation about the house
- Trailer and review for the movie "Winchester - The House of the Damned" (2018)
Individual evidence
- ^ Hours, Parking & Directions. In: Winchester Mystery House. Retrieved March 7, 2020 (American English).
- ↑ a b The Truth About Sarah Winchester |. Retrieved March 7, 2020 (American English).
- ^ History. In: Winchester Mystery House. Retrieved March 7, 2020 (American English).
- ↑ Entry in the National Register Information System . National Park Service , accessed March 8, 2020
- ^ Winchester House (US National Park Service). Accessed March 7, 2020 (English).
- ↑ Mary Jo Ignoffo: Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune . 2nd Edition. University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 2012, ISBN 978-0-8262-7231-7 , pp. 138 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
Coordinates: 37 ° 19 ′ 6 ″ N , 121 ° 57 ′ 3 ″ W.