A trap for spirits, or the Little mistress of the Winchester Big House (30 photos). Winchester Mansion. House designed by ghosts Sarah Winchester's house in America
This is a huge mystical house number 525 on Winchester Boulevard in San Jose, California, which is visited by crowds of tourists from all over the world.
While the hostess was alive, guests were not invited here; even President Roosevelt, who tried to ask for tea, got a turn at the gate. Now the former possessions of Sarah Winchester, nee Sarah Lockwood Purdy, scurry about groups of curious. But, by and large, the house is just as inaccessible to strangers as it was during the life of the owner. Some places, like some stories, remain impenetrable to outsiders. The home of Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Winchester, looks like an arthritic old fist. The fist is almost not unclenched.
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Maid Purdy would have laughed if it had been predicted that she would have tea parties with ghosts every night for thirty-odd years. The life of Sarah Purdy developed reasonably and successfully. She was 25 when, in 1862, she married William, the son of "the same" Oliver Winchester, whose multiply-charged production is said to have decided the outcome. civil war in the States.
The family grew rich rapidly on military orders, the newlyweds lived in love and prosperity. Small, less than five feet tall, but lovely Mrs. Winchester was the life of the party in New Haven, Connecticut. But four years after the wedding, a misfortune happened in the family - shortly after birth, Annie's daughter died.
Sarah almost went insane, and only after ten years, as they say, did she come to her senses. The Winchesters had no other children. In 1881, William Winchester died of tuberculosis, leaving Sarah a widow with an inheritance of $20 million and a daily income of $1,000 (she got half of the firm's income). Mrs. Winchester was inconsolable. Trying to understand why fate was punishing her so cruelly, she went to Boston to see a medium.
The medium communicated with the spirit of William Winchester for a modest fee. The spirit told her to tell Sarah that the family is cursed by those who died from high-quality Winchester products. He also said that in order to save own life Sarah must move west towards sunset, and in the place that she will be indicated, stop and start building a house. Construction must not stop; if the hammering stops, Mrs. Winchester will die.
The widow packed her belongings and headed west. In 1884, she reached San José, where, according to her, the spirit of her husband told her to stop. She bought a house and set about remodeling and expanding it. Sarah Winchester did this for 38 years in a row, without resorting to the services of professional architects.
Now Winchester House has three floors. It has approximately 160 rooms, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, 40 stairs. The rooms have 2,000 doors, 450 doorways, 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces. An architect who tries to find logic in the arrangement of a house must be struck with neurosis.
The house was built in such a way as to confuse the spirits that would come to the soul of Mrs. Winchester. Therefore, the doors here open into the walls, and the stairs rest against the ceilings. The corridors are narrow and winding like snake loops. Some doors of the upper floors open outward, so that an inattentive guest will fall straight into the yard, into the bushes; others are arranged in such a way that, having passed the span, the guest must fall into the kitchen sink on the floor below or break through the window arranged in the floor of the lower floor. The doors of many bathrooms are transparent. Secret doors and windows open in the walls, through which you can quietly observe what is happening in neighboring rooms.
The skeptic will notice that these traps, as simple as bear pits, betray the metaphysical ignorance of an elderly widow. The mystical symbolism of the house smacks of simplicity. All stairs, except one, are made up of 13 steps. Many rooms have 13 windows. Luxurious stained glass windows from Tiffany consist of 13 segments. The abundance of fireplaces in the house is explained by the fact that, according to legend, spirits could enter the house through the chimneys.
Other guests were not expected here, and, apparently, Sarah was quite content with her own ideas about the other world. Everything in the house was tailored to the standards of the hostess. The steps are low so that a sick old woman can easily climb them. To lean on the railing, you should bend down - Sarah was short.
The corridors and bays are very narrow - Sarah was thin. It is not known whether Jorge Luis Borges knew about the existence of this house, and Mrs. Winchester certainly could not read his writings. But the house, the designs of which the hostess drew on a napkin at breakfast, seems to be the embodiment of the writer's fantasies. The Minotaur could live here. Sarah Winchester was sure that spirits lived here. Every midnight a gong sounded, and the hostess retired to a special room for séance. During these hours, the servants heard the sounds of an organ on which the mistress, ill with arthritis, could not play.
By 1906 the house had grown to six stories. But there was an earthquake, and the top three floors collapsed. Hostess, afraid of persecution evil spirits, slept in a new place every night, and after the earthquake, the servants, who did not know where she was this time, did not immediately find her under the rubble. Sarah interpreted what had happened as an intrusion of spirits into the front of the house. 30 unfinished rooms were locked and boarded up, construction continued. Unsuccessful fragments were destroyed, new ones were built in their place.
Sarah Winchester died in September 1922 at the age of 85. The construction cost her treasury: there was no money in the safe. There were only strands of hair, male and infant, and the death certificates of her husband and daughter, as well as a 13-point will, signed 13 times. The will was silent about the fate of the house.
This story is too grotesque, too melodramatic. It's hard to take her seriously. However, she is perfectly truthful and, as such, chaste. Sarah Winchester may seem like a deranged, eccentric rich woman who squandered multi-million dollar inheritance, and her house - an expensive cumbersome nonsense. His space seems tattered; the children are tired and crying. Winchester House is simply ugly. But just this rare ugliness, and also that nausea with which the consciousness responds to a certain critical, it should be assumed, the thirteenth turn of the staircase, indicates that this house belongs to the field of art.
The name Winchester has long been associated with mysticism and mystery. The creator of the famous rifle left behind a rich legacy and a history written in blood.
Everyone knows that money does not make a person happier. So it happened with Sarah, the only heiress to the huge fortune of the Winchesters. Her difficult fate will be discussed in this article!
Spouses Winchester
It’s worth starting with the head of this famous family, Oliver Winchester. It was his invention, the famous rifle, that turned out to be the decisive link in the Civil War in the second half of the 19th century. The repeating shotgun, which was then a novelty, became an indispensable attribute of the Wild West and the times when all disputes were resolved with the help of gunfights.
Oliver and his wife had several children, but the heir to his company was The only son William. The young man at the age of 25 married Sarah Purdy and worked all his life as a treasurer in the company founded by his father. But his name became known only after his death.
In 1866, the Winchesters had a daughter, Annie, who did not live even a month. The death of the girl broke Sarah, and she spent several years in the hospital. Returning home after treatment, the woman faced serious trials - first her father-in-law Oliver died, then her husband William. The husband suffered from tuberculosis and died in March 1881 at the age of 43.
Widow of the Winchesters
Since that time, Sarah has become the heir to a huge fortune. At that time, at the end of the 19th century, she had an inheritance of $20 million (the modern equivalent of $500 million). The woman also received a daily income from sales of $ 1,000 ($ 25,000) and half the shares of the Winchester company. This made her one of the richest women of that time. However, this did not make her happy, on the contrary, Sarah was inspired by a strange idea.
She was sure that her family was being pursued bad rock and turned to mediums. Before marriage, she was devout, but a series of deaths broke her, and Sarah decided to look for an answer in the other world. In those years, mediums were very popular, so she easily found someone who told her the truth. Medium Alan Kuhn from Boston told the widow that he had communicated with her husband and accurately described him. This assured Sarah that she was doing the right thing.
The medium, on behalf of William, declared that the family was indeed cursed. The reason for this is the souls of those who died from the deadly rifle created by his father. Sarah had to build a house for them and for herself, where the spirits indicated. There was one more condition - the knocking of hammers should not stop in the house.
Sarah, inspired by Alan, traveled west and in 1884 reached the small Santa Clara Valley mansion. There she heard the voice of her husband, who said "Here", and the widow immediately began construction. This house is known to this day as the most mystical and mansion in the world.
House of Winchesters
For the rest of her life, namely 37 years, Sarah devoted herself to construction. She spent all her fortune for this business and went down in history as the strangest widow. Not for a single day did the knocking of hammers stop until the woman's death in 1922.
From an unfinished mansion, she made a seven-story building according to her personal drawings. Sarah did not use the services of an architect and gave all instructions to the foreman directly in the morning. There was no construction plan, which is not surprising, because this house is absolutely different from the others.
Sarah did her best to keep the spirits coming into the mansion from reaching her. That is why the house was filled with traps and had many connections with the number 13.
The seven-story building had hundreds of rooms that were connected to each other by secret passages. Stairs led to the ceiling, corridors ended in dead ends, and some doors opened onto the street, so that the guest could easily break. There were 13 fake chimneys on the roof, and many of the rooms had tiny secret windows for observation. Sarah ordered the construction of secret passages, thanks to which she found herself in another part of the house in a couple of minutes.
In 1906, the building was hit by a powerful earthquake that destroyed several floors. Four floors of this mysterious house have survived to this day. Even during the life of the widow Winchester, this house attracted the attention of the press and lovers of the paranormal. According to one story, the Austrian Schulz Reicherd decided to count how many rooms there were. After a few days of drawing chalk marks on the doors, he realized that it was useless. In the morning it turned out that the doors with numbers lead to a dead end. Therefore, Schultz agreed with the widow and asked to leave him alone for a couple of days to personally check everything.
Surprisingly, all the workers and Sarah herself left the mansion, only the carpenter who made the fence remained (remember the knock of the hammer?). A few days later, it turned out that Schultz had disappeared from the house without a trace, and was never seen again. After this story, mediums became interested in the building, who strongly advised the widow to leave it - it was full of spirits.
The builders said that at night Sarah meets with hordes of spirits that come here and stay until dawn. Carpenters left work because they saw ghosts and strange phenomena. Of course, this all turned into legends that frighten lovers of mysticism.
However, Sarah did not leave her offspring until her death in 1922. She passed away at the age of 82 and left her legacy to her niece. The Winchester mansion still stands today and is popular. By the way, not all of its mysteries have been revealed yet, for example, in 2016 a secret room with paintings and a sewing machine was discovered. Many rooms remain unfinished.
The story of Sarah Winchester is full of mysteries, it is still unknown what actually inspired her to build such a mystical mansion. Perhaps she herself believed in the curse of the Winchester family ...
A haunted house, a cursed house, a strange house, the disgrace of the Winchester family - this is about him, about an unusual building called "The Winchester house" (The Winchester house).
This building is located in San Jose, California, USA. It was the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, widow of William Wirt Winchester, the same arms magnate who revolutionized gunsmithing. It is clear that he was very rich - perhaps this fact became the determining factor in the construction of this house. But first things first.
William married Sarah in 1862. In 1866, their daughter Annie was born, but the baby lived only a few months. The couple had no more children. Sarah, deeply shocked by the death of her daughter, withdrew into herself, completely stopped communicating with others, and eventually left for parental home. The pain began to subside, but in 1881 William died of tuberculosis. Sarah became the heiress of $20 million and the arms business.
In those years it was very popular to engage in spiritualism, and Sarah began to attend such seances. The medium strengthened her belief that the death of her loved ones was connected with the curse of the Winchester family - and the curse was connected precisely with the weapon invented by her husband, which killed thousands of people. Dead Souls took Sarah's relatives with them ...
To cope with the curse (this is also according to the medium), Sarah had to leave her native places and find a place to build a new house - for herself and for the evil spirits that pursued her. The house was supposed to be a labyrinth in which the spirits that came after Sarah would get lost. And the house turned out just like that.
It was built for 38 years, without a project, everything was redone many times and even more confused. This is a large building - it has 40 bedrooms and 160 rooms, 2 ballrooms, 47 fireplaces (and some of them have no exhaust pipes), 40 stairs and a cult of the number 13. Many stairs have 13 steps, many rooms have 13 windows, many windows have 13 panes each. 13 candles are lit in the chandeliers, and every Friday the 13th at 13:00 the bell rings 13 times.
But that's okay - the house is actually a labyrinth with dead ends and riddles: stairs lead nowhere, resting against a blank wall; in one room the window is on the floor; some toilet doors lead to a blank wall; from the upper floors there are also doors to the street - in general, a ghost can get lost, not to mention a simple person.
Mrs Sarah Winchester died in 1922 at the age of 82. Five months after her death, the house was opened to the public and is now a popular tourist attraction. They are attracted by the very legend of the Winchester family, as well as the opportunity to personally verify the existence of ghosts. They say that they live in a house - doors slam there, door handles turn by themselves, steps, creaks and rustles are constantly heard. In my opinion, nothing surprising - where else would they live, if not here?
This story began in 1855, when Oliver Winchester, the owner of the manufactory, bought the Smith-Wessen gun factory. Financial Success allowed him two years later, in 1857, to buy the New Haven company "Volcanic Repitting Arms", successfully reorganized by him into the "New Haven Arms Company", and in 1867, into the Winchester Self-Loading Arms Company.Oliver designed a rifle that used a lever mechanism to load bullets into the breech. The new weapon had the ability to fire one shot every three seconds, unique for those times, becoming the first repeating rifle, long time who knew no equal. Winchester soon became the owner of a huge fortune thanks to a government contract for the supply of weapons and other lucrative deals.
His father's fortune was inherited by his son William. Since 1857, William Wirth Winchester became one of the leaders of the company, reorganized it, applied technical innovations, and began to produce the very carbines and rifles that “conquered the West”, namely the Winchesters with the Henry bracket. This weapon turned out to be the fastest and most popular in the Army of the North during the Civil War.war, so that the Winchester family prospered.
In 1862, at the height of the American Civil War, William Winchester married Sarah Lockwood Purdy.
Sarah was born in 1839 in Connecticut. The best private schools, four languages, piano and violin. Miniature (only 147 cm) Sarah was considered one of the beauties of Connecticut and, of course, the courtship of such a prominent groom in society as William and Winchester were received favorably.The family grew rich rapidly on military orders, the newlyweds lived in love and prosperity, but soon numerous inexplicable misfortunes began to haunt the Winchester family
In 1866, Sarah and William had a daughter, Annie, who died at the age of two weeks. The mother's grief knew no bounds, and for seven days she did not eat anything and did not talk to anyone, sitting over the body of the deceased child. The woman fell into a deep depression and spent several years in the hospital, still remaining silent.
Sarah almost went insane, and only after ten years, as they say, did she come to her senses. The Winchesters had no other children. Soon a new misfortune befell the family. William fell ill with tuberculosis and died in 1881. Sarah turned out to be the owner of a twenty-million dollar fortune, which at that time was fabulous.
In addition, the widow owned a 50% stake in the company, Winchester Repeating Arms Company (“blood money,” Sarah later spoke of her capital), producing weapon bringing in about $1,000 a day. This was a huge wealth, because the dollar in those years was worth twenty times more than it is now. There are many widows who will not grieve long under such circumstances, but Sarah was inconsolable.
Despite the huge wealth, the heiress felt like the most miserable person in the world. Sarah was advised by a friend to consult a Boston medium who was said to have the ability to communicate with the spirits of deceased relatives. The woman was very pious and at first flatly refused to turn to mystical forces, but, in the end, she decided to take a risky step.
During the séance, the medium said: "Your husband is here" and accurately described William's appearance. Spirit had never met the deceased and could not know what he looked like in life, so Sarah implicitly believed him. The medium said that the spirit of Winchester said that the family was cursed, which caused the death of Annie and William. The curse is the result of an invention and production by Oliver Winchester deadly weapon, which, as they say, decided the outcome of the Civil War.
Tens of thousands of people in different parts of the world died from bullets fired from a rifle, and their souls yearn for revenge. Sarah was told by the spirit of her deceased husband to sell all her property in Connecticut and move towards the setting sun (Sarah decided that she meant the Pacific coast).
The husband will be the guide on this journey, and when she reaches her new home, William will let you know. A woman must build a dwelling. The logic here was somewhat strange: all the incorporeal spirits of the dead needed a roof over their heads. The spirit warned never to finish building. If the knocking of hammers stops, Sarah will die immediately.
The Winchester heiress followed the advice, sold the property and the New Haven house, and went to California, sincerely believing that her husband's spirit guides all her actions. Sarah stopped in Santa Jose in 1884, where she took a liking to Dr. Caldwell's small six-room house (where she claimed her husband's spirit had told her to stay). The area of the estate was 166 acres, Caldwell was not going to sell the property, but Mrs. Winchester offered such an amount that he simply could not refuse.
Sara hired workers to demolish old house and started building a new one. She intended never to finish building. The work did not stop even for a minute. Hired twenty-two carpenters worked all year round, 365 days, twenty-four hours a day, and so on for 38 years.
The construction of the house was not carried out according to a specific plan, as is usually done, but was completely disorderly, chaotic. Every morning she gathered the workers and announced to them the plan of work, and since they were well paid, and it was clear that they would be provided with work while the mistress was alive, they carefully followed her instructions. Even if it was necessary to destroy everything that they had been building for a week.
The work stopped on the day of her death, the workers left everything and left, leaving half-driven nails, because Sarah paid them at the end of the day.
The house was built in such a way as to confuse the spirits that would come to the soul of Mrs. Winchester. Therefore, the house abounded with doors, behind which there was often a blank wall, and stairs rested on the ceilings.
The corridors are narrow and winding like snake loops.
Some doors of the upper floors open outward, so that an inattentive guest will fall straight into the yard, onto the lawn; others are arranged in such a way that, having passed the span, the guest must fall into the kitchen sink on the floor below or break through the window arranged in the floor of the lower floor.
The doors of many bathrooms are transparent. Secret doors and windows open in the walls, through which you can quietly observe what is happening in neighboring rooms.
Rooms were added to rooms, gradually becoming another wing of the building, clumsily connected to the rest of the house.
Some bedrooms had fireplaces total number 47. Elevators were built inside the house, hatches opened onto the roof, opening directly from the rooms.
False pipes adorned the roof. According to Sarah, in this way it is possible to deceive the ghosts, because it is through the pipes, according to legend, that the latter enter the houses.
Dozens of fire escapes were attached to the outer walls. Year after year, a floor was built on top of a floor, a wing was attached to a wing, which looked completely unnatural, different parts of the house had a different number of floors, from one to seven. Real architectural madness.
Before the famous San Francisco earthquake in 1906, there were seven floors in the house, after that there were four: three floors collapsed into the garden and it was decided not to restore them.
Sarah saw the cataclysm as a signal that the spirits didn't like the finished façade. She boarded up 30 rooms at the front of the house and never returned to them.
Sarah was literally obsessed with the number 13. Luxurious stained glass windows from Tiffany consist of 13 segments, windows had 13 glasses, parquet floors contained 13 sections, walls consisted of 13 panels, flights of stairs totaled 13 steps, the roof of the building was crowned with 13 domes. In expensive foreign chandeliers, the number of candlesticks changed from 12 to 13, and the number of coat hooks on the walls was always a multiple of 13.
Inside the house and even outside, many mirrors were fastened, for Sarah believed that ghosts and evil spirits were afraid of their reflection.
She ordered to build secret passages in the house, so as to be able to disappear unnoticed in one room and suddenly appear in another at the opposite end of the building. In addition, the matron had a habit of wearing several dresses at once, one on top of the other, in order to quickly change her appearance. All these tricks pursued one goal - to deceive the forces of evil.
In general, in relations with the spirits, Sarah was rather inconsistent. It seems that she invited them herself, and then she ran away from them. The widow, for example, hid from them every night in different rooms, and none of the 18 servants knew which of the 40 bedrooms she slept in.
Sarah devoted the rest of her life until her death on September 4, 1922, when she died quietly at the age of 83, to Winchester House.
Mrs Winchester left everything to her niece Frances Marriott. Frances believed that somewhere in the house there was a safe filled with gold that belonged to the Winchester family, but they could not find it. The bank account was not as large as it once was, Sarah spent too much money on the construction and improvement of the estate. If the amount of the construction estimate is translated into modern money, it will amount to 70 million US dollars.
Over time, the heirs sold the house to a group of entrepreneurs who wanted to turn the building into a tourist attraction. They wanted to draw up a plan for the building, but it turned out to be not so easy to do.
At first, 148 rooms were counted in the house, but with each new attempt to find out the exact number of rooms, their number turned out to be new. This was mainly due to the different heights of the floors in different parts buildings, corridors, stairs and rooms had such a complex layout that even the engineer and architect who took part in the construction sometimes got lost and found it difficult to find a way out.
The Winchester Manor is now a historic landmark. Many people believe that the house is haunted. Anyway, Sarah's ghost has been seen repeatedly.
Now Winchester House has three floors. It has approximately 160 rooms, but there is no complete certainty about this (including 40 bedrooms), 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, 40 stairs. The rooms have 2,000 doors, 450 doorways, 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 2 cellars, and 3 elevators.
Every Friday the 13th at 13:00 the big bell rings 13 times in memory of Sarah Winchester.
What a coincidence!
Probably everyone remembers the seventh file of Gosthant, in which the action took place in a mansion with "strangely" arranged rooms.
This mansion is incredibly reminiscent of the house of Sarah Winchester.
Winchester House, San Jose, California
Sarah Winchester is the wife of "the same" Oliver Fisher Winchester (1810 - 1880), who in 1854 invented the rifle of the same name, making a huge fortune for himself. Only one child was born in the Winchester family, who died after living for two weeks. The Winchesters did not have any other children. Fifteen years later, Oliver Winchester died. After the death of her husband, Sarah turned to a certain occultist, who "having talked with the spirits", told her that the spirits of those killed with the help of weapons created by her husband were angry, and that they killed Oliver and his child and now long for the death of Sarah. He also told Sarah that she should immediately start building the house, and that the spirits would not touch her until the house was being built.
The "Magic" Winchester House is a colossal structure with many prejudices associated with it. A fortune-teller told Sarah Winchester, heiress to a gun company, that the ghosts of those killed by Winchesters would haunt her unless she left Connecticut for the West and built a house that couldn't be finished in her entire life. Construction began in San Jose in 1884 and did not stop for 38 years until Sarah died. Now the ghosts of her madness live in 160 rooms of the house: stairs going straight to the ceiling, doors that open in the middle of the wall, spider motifs, candelabra, hooks. Ever since the house was open to the public, there have been constant complaints about slamming doors, footsteps at night, moving lights, doorknobs that turn of their own accord. Even if tourists do not believe in ghosts, the place blows the roof with its magnitude.
Anything with a red roof is Saa Winchester's house
The room has 160 rooms, 47 fireplaces, before the earthquake of 1906 there were seven floors, now there are four. But the most interesting thing about this building is not its size. Window in the floor The fact is that after the death of her husband (or maybe earlier) Sarah had oddities.
Since Mrs. Winchester designed her house herself, all these oddities were fully manifested in its architecture. The house is full of all sorts of frightening absurdities. Stairs ending at the ceiling; windows in the floor; doors behind which there is a wall or cliff; stairs with many flights, but rising to a tiny height of one foot; a chimney running from the first to the fourth floor and ending right in one of the rooms, which makes its use impossible and similar delights ... Everywhere there is a favorite number of the hostess - thirteen. Thirteen candles in a candlestick, thirteen steps in a staircase, thirteen panels on the ceiling, thirteen windows in a room, thirteen elements in a stained glass window... All the clocks in the house always show 13:13. There is also a room in the house that the hostess used to communicate with the spirits. This room has three entrances, but only one exit.
The house was built in such a way as to confuse the spirits that would come to the soul of Mrs. Winchester. Therefore, the doors here open into the walls, and the stairs rest against the ceilings. The corridors are narrow and winding like snake loops. Some doors of the upper floors open outward, so that an inattentive guest will fall straight into the yard, into the bushes; others are arranged in such a way that, having passed the span, the guest must fall into the kitchen sink on the floor below or break through the window arranged in the floor of the lower floor. The doors of many bathrooms are transparent. Secret doors and windows open in the walls, through which you can quietly observe what is happening in neighboring rooms.
Tours are now regularly held at Winchester House. The ticket costs about 30 dollars. According to numerous tourists, illusory footsteps are heard in the house, the doors open and close by themselves, the temperature in some rooms suddenly drops sharply to minus levels. Frequent guests in the mansion are psychics. They claim that the house is literally filled with the ghosts of people killed from the hard drive ...
There is only one famous photograph Sarah Winchester, who avoided filming, which, in her opinion, attracts evil forces A servant, hiding in the bushes, managed to photograph the hostess, who went for a walk in an open carriage. It is not known if Mrs. Winchester ever saw this picture.
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