Winchester mystery house photos inside movie#
Winchester mystery house photos inside full#
Winchester mystery house photos inside windows#

Without a guide, one might set off anywhere. My group tour somehow maps a trajectory onto a space that appears to lead in all directions simultaneously.

Sarah herself believed that the house would protect her against the ghosts that pursued her. In fact, the house seems designed to confuse anyone other than its owner it is a place in which you might lose yourself. When Sarah was alive, Llanada Villa was a world unto itself, inhabited only by herself, her servants, and her niece Miriam. It is a local institution, and it may soon be the subject of a thriller starring Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester. The house hosts special events and Spirit of Christmas Tours, as well as nighttime Flashlight Tours and Bell Ringing Ceremonies every Friday the 13th. The Winchester property boasts not only the house, but also a number of other original buildings, including servants’ quarters and the fruit drying shed, and tourist trappings that include the Winchester Café, Winchester Estate Wine & Spirits, and a museum of firearms.

Winchester mystery house photos inside movie#

Next door is a holdover from another era: Century 21, the shuttered, domed, midcentury modern movie theater designed by Vincent Raney in 1964. Today, the Winchester Mystery House is surrounded by parking lots, strip malls, and rising condominium developments.

But occasionally, when I can look out over the roof and its fairytale turrets, the expansiveness becomes clear. Sarah added onto Llanada Villa, room by room, and the parts that were unfinished when she died are now painted black, as if they are in mourning for their own incompleteness.Īlthough aerial photographs of the house provide a sense of its size, it’s difficult to apprehend its hugeness when you’re inside, as the space is so compartmentalized and divided. It was built from the inside out, and in the unfinished ballroom, where Victorian-era furniture is stored in neat rows behind velvet ropes, you can see the original color of the house’s exterior: light green with a dark green trim.

Winchester mystery house photos inside windows#

It has doors that go nowhere, stairways that lead into the ceiling, windows that look into other rooms (and one set into the floor), a chimney that doesn’t actually leave the house, and endless nooks and corridors. Sarah Winchester’s house is known not only for its size, but also for its oddness. My tour group laughs nervously at the psychic’s judgment as we make our way through this place. All the grief she had experienced was because of guns, she was told, so she decided build a house to atone for her sins. After a dramatic pause, he reveals how Llanada Villa came to be: the psychic told Sarah that the guns were to blame-she was responsible for the deaths of '100 million souls,' and she was being punished. 'She sought out a Boston psychic to find out why she had suffered so much,' he says. Standing in Sarah’s bedroom, my guide speaks of her personal grief in hushed and reverent tones. From him she inherited more than $20.5 million and received nearly 50 percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Her husband died of tuberculosis in 1881. Sarah was gun royalty, but life was not always happy. The company manufactured the Winchester repeating rifle, which had been developed in 1860 by B. Sarah Winchester was New Haven native Sarah Lockwood Pardee, and she married William Wirt Winchester, the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, founder of the legendary Winchester Repeating Arms Company, in 1862. The story of the Winchester Mystery House is a story of guns, and of one gun in particular: the Winchester rifle. Then, as my tour guide says, 'The hammers fell silent.'

Winchester mystery house photos inside full#

When she died in 1922 at the age of 83, the Queen Anne Victorian mansion had 40 bedrooms, six kitchens, 47 fireplaces, a hydraulic elevator, and an aviary full of tropical birds. There was no blueprint for the 160-room house she made notes and sketches on napkins. But Llanada Villa was much more than a farm: it was Sarah’s obsessive, 38-year construction project. She called it Llanada Villa, or the 'house on flat land,' and she sold its walnuts, prunes, and apricots under her own label. In 1884, Sarah Winchester purchased an unfinished farmhouse that sat on 160 acres of farmland and orchards in the Santa Clara Valley. It is a study in almost unbearable sadness that refuses to be transformed into stories and snow globes. Some of these mysteries have been commodified for the many visitors that pass through its rooms and corridors each year, and some remain stubbornly beyond the reach of tourism. The Winchester Mystery House bills itself as 'an extravagant maze of Victorian craftsmanship-marvelous, baffling, and eerily eccentric.' As one of the most famous haunted houses in the United States, it certainly has its mysteries.