![]() The home has undergone renovations recently to open more of the mansion to visitors. Two stained glass windows contain mysterious Shakespeare quotes like “Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts.” Despite the beauty and extravagance of the room, it was apparently rarely used when Winchester was alive. Rich hardwoods cover the walls and floors. The Grand Ballroom inside the home cost $9,000 alone, at a time when an entire home could be built for around $1,000. There’s A Lavish Ballroom That Was Eerily Empty A major earthquake in 1906 severely damaged the home, leading several upper floors to be torn down. Other parts of the house were closed off after that natural disaster.Ĥ. One of the most famous parts of the Winchester Mystery House are its numerous staircases that lead to nowhere. If someone were to get lost inside this home, they’d have 160 rooms, 40 staircases, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows and 24,000 square-feet of space to wander through.įlickr | ridingsilky 3. While builders did not always work on the house day and night (there were some breaks, notably during a 1906 earthquake), construction projects were pretty much continuous from the time Winchester moved into the home until her death in her early 80s. ![]() Listed below are seven intriguing facts we do know about the Winchester Mystery House. But since she was notoriously private, most of that is speculation. Many rumors and tales have circulated for years over why Winchester kept adding to her odd, enormous home. The building didn’t end until her death in 1922. In 1884, Sarah Winchester, the Winchester rifle heiress, bought what was a modest, two-story home in San Jose, California and kept adding on to it for nearly 40 years until, at one point, it had at least 160 rooms and stood seven stories tall. She funded her projects with an inheritance that would be valued at about $500 million in 2017. ![]() But the real-life home that inspired the movie has just as many thrills. The Winchester house has been open to tours since 1923.“Winchester,” a new thriller starring Helen Mirren, may have taken some cinematic liberties with the true story behind the Winchester Mystery House. “Legend has it when Sarah’s around, you catch the smell of roses and I was watching through this hallway in pitch black after doing a shoot and right as I hit a cross section of the hallway - boom - roses,” Williams said. Some say the heiress still haunts the rooms of her own home. “Sarah would come in here during the evenings and consult the spirits to see which room she would build next,” Williams told Inside Edition. Marketing director Jacob Williams says the widow sought guidance in the séance room. Sarah Winchester reportedly believed that if she ever stopped construction on the house, the ghosts would get her. ![]() There are countless windows on interior walls with no clear function, including a window in the floor in the middle of a room. The peculiar residence has 40 staircases and 2,000 doors, including one that allows you to leave one room with no floor beneath it. The mysterious mansion has no floor plan or blueprint. One door in the sprawling room opens to a fire safe door that opens to a safe that opens to a smaller safe. The grand ballroom is one of the most ornate rooms in the behemoth home. It’s not clear why the heiress was compelled to build such a labyrinth of a home, but legend says she believed a medium who warned her that the family was cursed by the victims of rifles made by Winchester Repeating Arms Co., and the ghosts of those victims would only be satisfied if Winchester built them a home, spawning the large-scale and constant construction. What started off as a meek two-story farmhouse ended as a four-story 24,000 square-foot enigma of a residence, leaving Winchester to sink most of her inherited fortune into the construction of the house. The Winchesters had only one child who died during infancy, leaving the matriarch to inherit her husband’s fortune - valued at $20 million.Ĭonstruction began on the mansion in 1886, but according to historians, never ended until her death in 1922. Sarah Winchester, who is portrayed by Mirren in the film, moved to California with her sister and niece after her husband, William Wirt Winchester, died in 1881. Inside Edition went inside the 160-room Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion in San Jose, Calif., which is filled with elaborate hallways, staircases that lead to nowhere and more doors than one can imagine. Helen Mirren’s new horror movie, Winchester, tells the frightening story of what is widely regarded as the most haunted house in America, and what awaits inside may be more terrifying than the film.
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