WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE REVIEW FREE

One of the first rooms we visited was the “Séance Room,” built deep inside the house. Aside from the fireplaces, elevators, a chandelier, an organ, and some original marble and tiling, all that remains now is the house. The tour guide informed us that it took eight weeks to remove all of the furniture from the premises, at six truckloads per day! Only twenty-four of the rooms are now furnished sparsely with donations, all genuine period furniture but not the original household décor. Upon Sarah’s death, her sole relative, niece Frances Marriot, auctioned off most of the furnishings. Sadly, none of the original furnishings adorn what must have once been an opulently decorated home. I attended the complete Estate Tour of the house, including a guided tour of the mansion and the estate grounds. Apparently, Sarah’s goal was to never complete the remodelling, lest the spirits exact their revenge upon the last living Winchester. The construction began in 1884 and ended on the day of Sarah’s death on the fifth of September, 1922. All other plans were sketched onto scraps of paper, napkins, or even tablecloths and were destroyed upon implementation. However, there were only ever two sets of formal blueprints, for the elevators and the boiler. In total, the mansion was remodelled over six hundred times at a cost of five and a half million dollars. It’s said that Sarah had builders working twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, over the four decades of construction. On what was once a hundred-sixty-acre estate, the contemporary building boasts some staggering statistics: one-hundred-sixty rooms and four stories (in its prime the house had seven stories), with six kitchens, forty bedrooms, nineteen chimneys, forty staircases, forty-seven fireplaces, fifty-two skylights, nine-hundred-fifty doors, three elevators, two ballrooms, and ten thousand windows! Coons’s cruel counsel commenced Sarah’s mission to create a house that became a constant thirty-eight-year work in progress leading to an astonishing labyrinthian mansion. Utterly convinced by Coons and desperate to remove this “curse,” Sarah relocated to San Jose and purchased an eight-room farmhouse.

As long as the house was being built, the spirits would not harm Sarah. He advised that his client move west and build this home. Others claim she was told to build a house to confuse the spirits. The only way Sarah could appease the spirits was to build them a house in which they could live. Sarah was next.Ĭoons had a peculiar solution. He explained that the spirits of those people and animals who had died at the hands of a Winchester rifle, “the gun that won the West,” were avenging their deaths by claiming the lives of her husband, child, and father-in-law. Allegedly, she travelled to Boston to consult with psychic medium Adam Coons (also reported as “Coombs”), who confirmed the wealthy widow’s fears that the Winchester family was cursed. But do the facts end here? Sarah, now alone and vulnerable, was reputedly convinced her family members were victims of a curse.

Sarah slipped into a deep depression following the deaths of her family members.

WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE REVIEW FREE

Her husband bequeathed to her fifty percent of the Winchester Company and the substantial income of $1,000 per day, tax free as it was then. As the last Winchester, Sarah became an independently wealthy woman. Her husband, like her child, died of tuberculosis and Sarah became a major benefactor to pulmonary research, donating $2 million during her lifetime to this cause. Oliver died in 1880 and was quickly followed by William, who died in 1881. The couple only had one child, Annie, who died in infancy of tuberculosis. In 1862, during the height of the American Civil War, Sarah married William Winchester, the sole child of Oliver Winchester, owner of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Legend has it that around 600 rooms were built, but with so many changes, around 160 rooms remain to this day.Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1839. The house was built without any blueprints, and if she dreamt something new and strange, they would add it to the plans! Mrs Winchester was concerned with evil spirits, so you might find some weird constructions - such as upside-down columns, and stairs that go round and round in circles to confuse them! She even built a Seance Room to discourage the spirit of an Indian chief! Winchester built some strange traps to warn off the ghosts that resided in the house. Have you ever seen miles of twisting hallways and secret passageways through the halls? Rumor has it that Mrs.

Winchester mystery house review