The Winchester House is the home of Sarah Winchester - heir to the Winchester Rifle Fortune.  In 1884, she began a construction project of such magnitude that it was to occupy the lives of carpenters and craftsmen until her death thirty-eight years later.  The Victorian mansion, is filled with so many unexplained oddities, that it has come to be known as the Winchester Mystery House.

We visited the mansion because my children had seen it on the Discovery Channel, and they were very interested in seeing the mansion and all of the mysterious rooms and oddities that the house has throughout it... If my husband and I were traveling alone, we probably would not have chosen this particular tour.

The mansion consists of 160 rooms.  The mansion tour visits 110 of those rooms.  The tour shows a window built into a floor, staircases leading to nowhere, a chimney that rises four floors stopping just 1 and 1/2 feet from the mansion's ceiling, doors that open to blank walls, and upside-down posts.  But why did the carpenter's hammers keep pounding 24 hours per day for 38 years - well, one belief is that a medium convinced Mrs. Winchester that the continuous building would appease the evil spirits of those killed by the famous "Gun that won the West" - the Winchester..... no one really know though.

I don't profess to believe in evil spirits, so I tend to think that she was just depressed from the untimely deaths of her baby daughter and husband.....

But, Sarah Winchester was ahead of her time in her thinking and architecture.  She added many features to the house to take advantage of natural resources - like collecting rainwater for use in other areas of the house, designing sinks with drying areas slanted in towards the sink to help drain the water off the the dishes as they were drying. The window that was built into the floor was built to offer sunlight to plants that were in an area of the house that did not get sun through any windows.... so not really eccentric there.....

I guess we all just need to make up our own minds.

Winchester Mystery House reviews

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