Eerily beautiful, extremely eccentric and full of hidden passageways, the Winchester House built by Sarah Winchester, the heiress to the Winchester fortune, is a mystery in every sense of the word. In order to understand the strange construction and beauty of the mansion, one has to go back into the deep history that led Sarah to build this piece of puzzling and macabre abode.

The story goes something like this; in 1862, Sarah Lockwood Pardee married the famous William Winchester, who owned the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Sarah and William had a daughter who died at the age of six months in 1862. A few years later William Winchester fell victim to tuberculosis and died too. Sarah almost bordered on the fringes of insanity due to the extreme tragedy that befell her and went into a coma. She recovered from her illness but not from the death of her husband and daughter.

To come to terms with her life, she consulted a Boston psychic who told her that her husband has conveyed to her that due to the thousands of innocent lives taken by the weapon they produced, their family was cursed by the spirits of the people who died. In order to escape the wrath of the spirits, Sarah was to move west and build a house for the spirits to rest in and she must keep building it. As long as she kept building the house, she would be spared.

To Sarah this seemed the only way to spend her life. Since money was no object, she took the $20 million that she got as inheritance, including the thousand dollars a day income from the company, in 1884 and moved to California. She bought an unfinished farmhouse with eight rooms and started building one of the most baffling and mysterious houses that the world has ever seen. There was no plan, no preconceived idea as to how big the house would be. Just that the building and construction had to go on night and day non-stop.

Rooms upon rooms, stairways upon stairways, passages and passages seemingly going nowhere in particular. Doors and closets opening into walls. Hallways that twisted into hidden passages. The house went on and on with workers, craftsmen, plumbers, working non-stop hammering, sawing, cutting, carving and laying floors. The nearby barn was taken in, including the water tower. The work went on. For 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 38 years till Sarah died in her sleep at the age of 82 in 1922.

But what is stranger about the whole story is that even though the house is most erratic in its construction, Sarah spared no expense in the quality of the workmanship in every aspect. Each and every detail of the house has been painstakingly and beautifully done. She had excellent taste and used gold and silver plated chandeliers, German silver and bronze inlaid doors, tiffany art glass windows and mahogany and rosewood for the floors. The bathrooms too were the best money could buy with moulded Swiss bathtubs, etc. Right up to the door knobs to the crafted furniture and ceilings, the house is Victorian craftsmanship at its best.

But then we have the extremely odd sense of building like a staircase that goes down seven steps and then raises 11 steps. Not to mention staircases that end at ceilings! Then there are hallways that twist and turn for miles, some leading to secret passageways. Then there was a Séance Room that Mrs Winchester visited at midnight, allegedly to consult the spirits who told her what to build the next morning!

The Séance Room could only be entered by secret passages and doors through rooms and hallways known only to Mrs Winchester. The description given in The American Weekly, six years after her death, gave the account as follows, “When Mrs Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of the Indian or even of a bloodhound to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment into another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her.”

The reason for all this oddity was to confuse any evil spirits that might be chasing her. On the other hand, the beautiful and lavish interiors were for the good spirits to reside there and be pleased with Sarah. Some say that Sarah had lost her mind, some say that she had too much money and was too lonely, but some do understand and believe her. Why else would a perfectly finished room be dismantled or boarded up the next morning? Then she had a kind of obsession with the number 13 and spider webs which were somehow incorporated into the design of the house.

It is said that once President Roosevelt came to call upon Sarah at the magnificent front door. Little did he know that the part of the house was boarded up? He was asked to use the side entrance and is said to have left quite irritated.

The gardens too bear witness to the beliefs of the mistress. Beautiful and enchanting, the plants and trees were imported from all over the world. A statue of an Indian chief stands amongst the greenery to this day to appease one of the Native American chiefs who fell victim to the weapons sold by her company. So, the ‘Gun that won the West’, has a most tragic ending. The heiress to the Winchester fortune died in her sleep peacefully after having slept in a different bedroom every night.

What is the actual story behind Winchester House? Why did this intelligent woman fall prey to such a notion as to have been the owner of a house with 160 rooms but with no plan whatsoever? Well, visitors are told not to wander by themselves as they might get lost in this labyrinth, which is said to be full of the unseen.