I was unaware of this tale, and found it fascinating. Sarah Winchester inherited a vast fortune from her in-laws, the famous gun-makers. With a guilty conscience, she used much of it to construct one the most bizarre buildings ever -- her "Mystery House," which she believed would contain and appease the ghosts of Winchester rifle victims. Excerpts from the article linked below:
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| Winchester Mystery House, circa 1905 |
Her estate was huge and fantastically bizarre -- 200 rooms, 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces, and 2,000 doors, trap doors, and spy holes.
She built her house with shifts of 16 carpenters who were paid three times the going rate and worked 24 hours a day, every day, from 1886 until Sarah’s death in 1922.
A staircase, one of 40, goes nowhere and ends at a ceiling. Cabinets and doors open onto walls, rooms are boxes within boxes, small rooms are built within big rooms, balconies and windows are inside rather than out, chimneys stop floors short of the ceiling, floors have skylights. A linen closet as big as an apartment sits next to a cupboard less than an inch deep.
She chose to convert a vast portion of her rifle fortune into a monstrous, distorted home; so we can now wander through her rooms imagining how one life affects others.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/heiress-gun-empire-built-mansion-forever-haunted-blood-money-built-it-180959712/?utm_source=onesignal
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