“William, are you there?” asked Sarah Winchester, while sitting at the table in her recently-constructed séance room. She was hoping to contact the spirits of her deceased husband and infant daughter, but all she heard was a babble of voices, some of them laughing and saying things she didn’t understand.
She was certain they were the voices of the spirits murdered by the Winchester pistols that her husband, William Wirt Winchester, had produced through the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. And to placate them, she had to continually construct new rooms for them to visit.
“Here, in the carriage room, you can see a door that opens onto a wall, and another door that is too small to traverse,” said one of the voices that Sarah could hear, this one louder than the others.
There was always one voice that was particularly loud and clear. Sometimes it was the voice of a man, other times it was the voice of a woman, but it was always this voice that described the rooms that the spirits wanted Sarah to construct next.
«A carriage room», Sarah wrote down, «with one door that opens onto a wall, and another door that is too small to traverse.» She would give these instructions to the architect tomorrow.
She knew that the architect thought she was crazy. She knew that everyone thought she was crazy. But they didn’t see what she saw or hear what she heard.
Sarah had always been psychic and after her husband had died, in 1881, she’d had a dream in which he had asked her to go to this particular location, in San Jose, California, to build a house here to commemorate the Winchester name.
She had done what her husband had asked her to do, but after she’d started constructing and living in the house, she’d felt certain that it was a portal between this life and the afterlife. She’d started seeing and hearing spirits, and concluded that they were the spirits of people murdered by Winchester pistols, and that really, this house was in honor of them.
Sometimes the spirits were cruel to her. “This Sarah Winchester is... a real crazy lady,” said one of them now, laughing at one of the stairways that didn’t go anywhere, even though they, the spirits, had told her to construct it.
Sarah hoped that if she did everything the spirits told her to do, constructed every room she heard them describe and every strange characteristic – the stairway with seven turns, the séance room with one entrance and three exits, the thirteenth bathroom with thirteen windows – that they would leave her alone, but the more rooms she constructed, the more spirits came.
She saw them sometimes, traversing her private rooms, guided by the one with the clear, loud voice. They often held up something that made a clicking sound, presumably replicating the sound that a pistol made when someone pulled the trigger – the last sound they heard before they died.
Sarah continued the construction, of ten rooms, twenty, thirty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty ... And the spirits continued to come, including families with children, speaking languages she didn’t understand. She blamed their presence on the popularity of Winchester pistols and was horrified at the number of deaths they had caused.
The worst time of the year for Sarah was Halloween, when her house was invaded by demonic spirits, enacting terrifying scenes every night. Sarah felt certain they had come from Hell to punish her for her husband’s murderous legacy.
She continued construction on her house and although she saw and heard hundreds, if not thousands, of spirits, she never saw or heard the spirits of her husband or infant daughter, until she died there in her sleep on September 5th, 1922, and was reunited with them in the afterlife.
She had thought her failure to contact them had been part of her punishment for her husband’s legacy, but what she hadn’t realised was that her house was a portal not between her life and the afterlife, where people go when they die, but her life and life on earth after she died, when her home would be converted into the Winchester Mystery House.
People from all over the world would traverse Sarah’s private rooms, guided by a tour guide who would describe the rooms and their many strange characteristics. In time, the tourists would hold up cameras and, later, cell phones, and make clicking sounds as they took photographs, and some of them would talk and laugh about how crazy Sarah was.
On Halloween, actors would dress up as monsters and enact terrifying scenes to scare tourists in her house. Sarah had mistaken the spirits of the living for the spirits of the dead, and so had constructed a mystery house that would commemorate her husband’s name that branded her forever as a crazy woman.
