She did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so the home contains numerous oddities such as doors and stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms and stairs with odd-sized risers. Carpenters were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven-story mansion. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began building her mansion. Though it is possible she was simply seeking a change of location and a hobby during her lengthy depression, other sources say that Winchester came to believe her family and fortune were haunted by ghosts and that only by moving West and continuously building them a house could she appease these spirits. Winchester left New Haven and headed for California. Tabloids from the time said that, at some point after her infant daughter died of an illness known as marasmus, a children's disease in which the body wastes away, and her husband died of pulmonary tuberculosis, a Boston medium told her (while supposedly channeling her late husband) that she should leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles. These inheritances gave her a tremendous amount of wealth which she used to fund the ongoing construction. She also received nearly fifty percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day. Sarah Winchester's biographer, however, says that Winchester "routinely dismissed workers for months at a time 'to take such rest as I might'" and notes that "this flies in the face of claims by today's Mystery House proprietors that work at the ranch was ceaseless for thirty-eight years." Inspiration Īfter her husband's death from tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20.5 million.
Under Winchester's day-to-day guidance, its "from-the-ground-up" construction proceeded around the clock, by some accounts, without interruption, until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased. Since its construction in 1884, the property and mansion were claimed by many to be haunted by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles. It is privately owned and serves as a tourist attraction. It is a designated California historical landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. in San Jose, the Queen Anne Style Victorian mansion is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan. The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearm magnate William Wirt Winchester.