![]() Some sources make the wild claim that the Winchester House is “Certified as Haunted by the US Department of Commerce.” This tale probably originated from a brochure aimed at promoting foreign travel to the US. Since Houdini’s visit, subsequent investigations of the Winchester Mystery House read like a list of who’s who in the paranormal world, including Zak Bagans from Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, renowned psychic Sylvia Browne, and famous medium James Van Praagh. New since Diana’s visit, there is now a Houdini-inspired escape room on the Estate: Houdini‘s Spirited Escape! We hope we can review it for you soon. His visit elicited more questions than answers. He wanted to disprove Spritiualism by debunking the lore that surrounded the recently-deceased Sarah Winchester’s massive, mysterious mansion. Legendary magician Harry Houdini stopped by the Winchester Estate during his 1923-1924 tour. ![]() In the ballroom, there are stained glass windows with quotes from Shakespeare, and there's a room called the Witch's Cap that's so oddly shaped it causes a weird acoustic effect akin to surround sound.Winchester Mystery House, Photo courtesy of Travel + Leisure The Haunting of the Winchester Mystery House and also had spider webs included on various window panes. She incorporated the number 13 throughout the house - 13 panes in a window, 13 steps in a staircase, etc. Those who prefer the paranormal side of things think Sarah built all these rooms and misleading passageways to confuse the ghosts who were tailing her, and whether that's true or not, she did have some unusual décor predilections. At one point, Sarah actually built over another room that she'd forgotten was there, and according to legend, she could not actually find the house's original eight rooms. ![]() It was seven stories tall and had more than 200 rooms before parts of it were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 it is currently four stories tall and has 160 rooms. Sarah didn't hire any one architect to oversee construction and added rooms and features haphazardly, so there are lots of weird elements to the house – staircases that lead to nowhere, doors that lead to nowhere, and windows that look into other rooms. Sarah's mysterious motivations for building it aside, the house is objectively nuts. Espousers of this theory believe that she made the house so large so there would be room enough for all the souls of Winchester victims she also switched bedrooms within the house so any alleged ghosts would have a more difficult time finding her. According to one legend, Sarah believed that her daughter and husband's untimely deaths were retribution for all the people killed by Winchester rifles, especially after a medium told her that her blood fortune was cursed. There are various theories as to why she continued working on the house for so long, but one of the most popular involves her interest in spiritualism. Sarah bought the property that would become the Winchester Mystery House in 1886 and continued construction on it until her death in 1922. In 2018 dollars, that equates to more than $450 million. William's father died in 1880 and William died in 1881, leaving Sarah as the heir to their $20 million rifle fortune. They had one child together, Annie, who died just over a month after she was born. ![]() Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in 1840 in Connecticut, and in 1862, she married William Wirt Winchester, son of the owner of Winchester Repeating Arms Company.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |