A wealthy loner built one of the strangest homes in America with over 200 rooms, staircases that lead nowhere, and doors that open on walls – all to appease the spirits of her family's gun victims.
This colossal property has its origins in an estate linked to the deaths of hundreds of people, while its vast corridors are the fruit of a grieving mother's tortured conscience.
Sarah Winchester, known as the “gun lady,” inherited the fortune of her father-in-law, Oliver Winchester—the creator of the automatic rifle that revolutionized killing by eliminating the need for reloading. After the death of her only daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, at just one month old in 1866, Sarah became convinced that the tragedy was a revenge by the spirits of her family’s gun victims.
She employed 16 carpenters, who she paid three times the usual wage, working non-stop, day and night, from 1886, even after the death of her husband Will in 1881, until her own death in 1922.
From a modest eight-room house, the property grew into a labyrinth of over 200 rooms, 10,000 windows, 47 chimneys and 2,000 doors, with hidden entrances and peepholes. Sarah would draw plans on paper or napkins for the workers, ordering additions, towers, domes or rooms that often had no practical function and were covered over the next day.
In 1975, workers discovered a hidden room with two chairs, an early gramophone horn, and a 1910 lockable door, which Sarah had then built over without realizing it.
Her behavior shocked all observers; she lived in near isolation and was tormented by her family's violent history, believing that her personal deaths—that of her husband and newborn daughter—were revenge from the spirits of the Winchester gun victims.
Laura Trevelyan, a descendant of the Winchester dynasty, wrote in The Guardian: “Sarah Winchester was so fallen into sin and influenced by the spirits of gunshot victims that a medium advised her to build a house without end to appease the dead. The construction only stopped when she died.”
Inside the villa, its eccentricity is evident: one of the 40 staircases leads nowhere, doors and cupboards open onto walls, rooms are boxes within boxes, balconies and windows look inwards instead of outwards, chimneys stop before the roof, and ceilings contain windows. A large clothes closet sits next to a wardrobe less than an inch high.
Pamela Haag, who was inspired by Sarah for her book on the history of guns in America, observed in Smithsonian: “The Winchester Cottage reflects a clever, fragile, obsessive mind, and the interweaving of a troubled conscience. She poured pain into creation, just as every artist puts his impulse into his work.”
Trevelyan added: “My great-great-grandfather was proud of the revolutionary Winchester rifle, one of the first guns to fire continuously without the need for reloading. Company officials were always afraid to write the history of their beloved guns, because they were used to kill local residents defending their historic land. The special summer cottage is the company’s legacy for our generation.”
This house remains a symbol of the eccentric, fragile and dark history of the Winchester family, a place where the art of pain and obsession are intertwined in an extraordinary way. /GazetaExpress/
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