← The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
Sarah Winchester and the Winchester Mystery House
01:22:46
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.
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Hello, and welcome to the show. First things first. Before we say anything else, if you haven't yet gone to Like Minds Travel and checked out our upcoming Paris trip, time is ticking. There are less than 20 spots left already.
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A
That's crazy. We only opened it up less than a week ago. Wow.
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Well, we knew that's how it would go. Yep. If you are dithering or in doubt, your window has closed.
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A
Come on, it's about to close. No kidding. No kidding.
- [00:39]
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Push pause. Go to lightmindstravel.com Anyway, with that little business out of the way, we thought we would bring you, for the spooky season, our coverage of the often maligned Sarah Winchester and her Winchester Mystery House.
- [00:55]
A
So it's kind of a trick or treat. Your treat might be this bonus episode. And the trick might be the reputation of that mystery house of Sarah Winchester's. And now, on with the show.
- [01:10]
B
Hello and welcome to the show. Just a quick note before we go on. This is a retelling, a re recording of an event that we did in partnership with the local NPR station here in Kansas City, kcur. And the live recording didn't translate as well to this audio format because we referred a lot to our slideshow. And there was a lot of applause, if we do say so ourselves. And it was a lot cleaner just to rerecord it and give it to you this way. So we'll put those pictures that we referred to in the show notes and you'll see them there. And without further ado, on with the show. And here's your 30 second summary. And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of.
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Each purple curtain thrilled me, filled me.
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With fantastic terrors never felt before. So that now, to still the beating.
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Of my heart, I stood repeating, tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door.
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B
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door.
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This it is and nothing more.
- [02:29]
B
Correct. The end. So you, the tourist, arrive in San Jose, California, after following those intriguing billboards you've been seeing for miles and miles. You pull up to the front of a giant house. A round tower on the left. So many angles and planes and dormers with red roofs. Gingerbread everywhere. It's already too much. Just from the front. Too bad you don't have your drone. From above, it looks amazing. What is even happening? The tour guide is more than happy to explain to you. He'll tell you there was once a woman named Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune that suffered the loss of her child and her husband and fell into a pit of despair. She consulted a medium who told her that the spirit world had it out for her. For, you see, her husband's fortune came from the Winchester rifle, the gun that won American west and its victims were legion. And they were angry. There was a curse on the Winchester family, and to avoid the wrath of the angry spirits, she had to move far away to California and build a house. The sound of hammers would keep the spirits at bay, and if construction ever ceased, the spirits would find her and have their revenge. Really? You say to the tour guide, all of this is about avoiding angry ghosts? Sure, he says, look at this weirdness. It was built to capture them and confuse them and trick them. He shows you things that are so strange that you're starting to waver.
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A
There are second story doors that lead outside, but not to any balcony or stairs. There's indoor stairways that lead at a dead end and others that have switchbacks, and some that are only a few inches tall. There's a chimney that goes through three stories but stops in the attic a mere feet from the roof.
- [04:20]
B
So the house is weird. But every night, Mrs. Winchester would take the blueprints into her seance room to ask the spirits what the next day's plans were. And she slept in a different room every night to evade the malicious ghosts. But don't they just follow her out of the meeting? You ask. He acts like he doesn't hear you. It's one of the most haunted places in America. 13s everywhere. Mrs. Winchester was obsessed with the number 13. 13 steps in a staircase, 13 hooks on a rack, 13 windows in a room, 13 holes in the sink drains. Huh? You say the organ plays by itself at night, mysterious hands pull their hair, and there's a ghost with a wheelbarrow in one of the basements. Even the famous skeptic Harry Houdini admitted there were ghosts everywhere. He says, whoa, whoa, whoa. You say the history chicks told me a whole different story. And it goes a little something like this.
- [05:19]
A
Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born sometime in the summer of 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut. She was the fourth of six surviving children of Leonard and Sarah Burns Pardee. Papa Leonard was a carpenter, and his family had come to the colonies in the 1600s with a slew of other Puritans who were thrown out of England. The ancestral Pardee was a tailor, but as the generations progressed, they became carpenters and taught their children to become carpenters. Until Leonard arrived. And he also was a carpenter. He was a joiner. He was the guy that created the pieces that the carpenters would put in on site. That was his job. Mama Sarah was the same age as Leonard, but her family came from a very small fishing village of Milford, Connecticut, which is no longer a small fishing village. It's a big town. Sarah herself was the seventh of 12 children. But the Burns financial situation was really bad. They could best be described as getting by. They would collect oysters and sell them. They would grow anything that they could just to help put food on the table. Sarah grew up. She was drawn to a revival preacher who held services on the Quinnipiac River. That's where one day she met Leonard.
- [06:33]
B
At the time of our Sarah's birth. And I actually would like to say something right now. Every time you read about Sarah Winchester, she's referred to as Sarah. Well, during her lifetime, anyone in a position to call her by her first name called her Sally to differentiate her from her mama Sarah. There was also a niece named Sarah, who everyone called Sadie. I don't know why we didn't just call them that in the first place. But despite her being called Sally her whole life, we, because that's how everyone, everyone knows her from history, we are going to keep referring to her as Sarah. So moving on. At the time of Sarah's birth, Papa was suffering from financial hardship and he had taken a job as the superintendent of the public baths. Not the same kind of thing as today. But until she was eight years old, Sarah's family lived in an apartment behind the New Haven bath house. Papa's side gig as a carpenter provided enough money to send all of his children to school, which was not a given in these days, certainly, especially since all but one of his children were girls. So the carpentry provided her with an elementary school education. But through hard work, reputation for quality, and the gentrification of New Haven, not to mention the Victorian fascination for overly decorated interiors and exteriors, Papa was able to set up several factories. A carriage part factory first and a factory part factory, and move on out of the industrial zone. It's their first step back into respectability. But the funny thing was, and I think New Haven is just really small in this way, that the front of the house was on the most fashionable square in town. Maids scrubbing the porches in the morning, Carriages moving slowly through the very well maintained streets. There was a park across the way, so that's all going on in the front of the house. But on the same block was Papa's millworks. So if you're inside with your French tutors and your music masters and your literature professors. Getting your advanced lady education. And had any wonder where the money came from. You could just point to the backyard and the sound of hammers and saws. The smell of sawdust was basically the soundtrack of her childhood. So I do love the smell of new wood. And someone else might have too. More on that later.
- [08:55]
A
Well, the kids all went from the house to the factory and back. It was just. That was their playground in their area. Also living in their area, in the same neighborhood. Was another family who had had a similar financial trajectory. It was the Winchester family and their three children. This is the family that they hung out with. Their kids were about the same age. They did the barbecue thing together. All right, probably not real barbecues, but they weren't in competing businesses. So the Papas could get along well. That was the family, the Winchester family, whose fortune was made in shirts.
- [09:30]
B
Meanwhile, at the par dinner table, it was full of social reformers. Among them the future founder of the aspca. Those dealing with the immigrant problem Caused by the Irish potato famine. In this case, not how dare those people come to our shores. But more, the problems of every industrialized city all over the world. There's no housing, the places are dirty. How do we care for the workers? How do we educate their children? Do we educate their children? A lot of those conversations were happening at the dinner table. Also abolitionists at the dinner table. Because what was percolating in the background, the rumblings of Civil War. And even though both families fortunes were tied to the South. Cotton in one case, raw material, four shirts. Customers in the other case. Many, many families in the south were building extravagant houses. Both families were strongly union supporters. Something else that was percolating. The courtship between William Winchester and Sarah. They have known each other since childhood. And as they say, they were quite fond of each other. It was good to see a 19th century love match. But let's talk about the boyfriend for a minute. William. His papa had a patent. This is very specific. On the way to sew the shoulder of a men's shirt. That made them fit better. And he was one of the first to have a factory using the new sewing machines. He took a risk and it really paid off. There were 500 of them in operation six days a week at the factory. In addition to thousands of workers, mostly women and children. Who put out half a million shirts a year.
- [11:10]
A
This is the industry that William was raised to take over. William himself, he was blue eyed with reddish hair. He was very thin. He was 59 with these massive mutton chops. He did not go to the Civil War, although he was of the right age. The reason isn't actually known. It could have been because he was sickly, because he never did look very sturdy. He was an only son. That maybe could have been the reason. Or because he was going to be head of an industry that's needed during the Civil War, that would be clothing manufacturing.
- [11:42]
B
Or it could be you only had to pay $300 to send a replacement man in your stead. And so that might have been the rich man's out that he took. But we have no record of that happening. William, having been educated very well and taken the well heeled young man's grand tour of Europe, was being groomed to take over the empire one day. His father had worked hard and become a self made man so his son would not have to. You're welcome.
- [12:11]
A
Sarah was known as the Belle of New Haven, although both of us looked for reasons why and we couldn't find them. She was very smart. She was interesting. She was tiny, she was 410 with brown hair and brown eyes. She must have been very cute. And next to William, they must have been a very striking pair. But as for why she was the Belle of New Haven, we have no idea.
- [12:33]
B
She was a little china doll is how she's been described. And polished and refined. Her papa had made sure his three youngest daughters were very ladylike, a credit to the house anchors of society events. She was perhaps poised to be just the hostess a millionaire might need. But she was no Scarlett O'Hara, you know what I mean. She's not sitting at a dance surrounded by 20 anxious to bring her some punch or anything. So perhaps the New Haven social scene required a more refined, calm Belle. There was nothing to stand in their way really.
- [13:08]
A
And there was everything in their favor. They knew each other really well. They had grown up together. Their parents knew each other, they went to the same church, they were about the same age, they got along great. There was nothing to stop them. And on September 30, 1862, 23 year old Sarah and 25 year old William were married.
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B
They were married in a quiet wartime ceremony as it was considered unseemly to have a big production with a war on not done. And due to wartime shortages and lack of manpower to build a house for them, the new Winchesters moved in with her in laws.
- [13:45]
A
It was a big old multi generational household. There was her in laws, there was Williams sisters, and there Was kids. It was a lot of activity going on, but it was a fairly large house. During the Civil War, Sarah herself did what a lot of society women did. She cut back on things. She sewed and she knit items then were sent to the troops. She followed along with the war in the papers. I'm sure she talked about it when she went on her social calls with the other ladies. But that's how she handled the Civil War. It wasn't like some big contribution.
- [14:18]
B
Her husband William, though, was getting involved in another scheme of his father's. Years ago, his father had scooped up a gun factory from these fools called Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson who were going bankrupt. Do those names sound familiar? They had a company called the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company. And literally he bought it lock, stock and barrel. The most appropriate use of that phrase that I will ever utter in my whole life.
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A
Bravo. Bravo.
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B
Well, patents, equipment, materials, all of it. And one of the mechanics at the shirt factory was given the task of taking the concept of the repeating revolver. Many shots, no reloading at all. And he adapted it to make the very first repeating rifle or long gun. It was called the Henry, after the man that designed it. And it was a giant leap forward in weapons technology. William's father aggressively marketed his weapon to the powers that be among the Union Army. He ran up against bureaucracy, that classic killer of common sense. The Union army instead bought millions of single shot muzzleloaders. And for those of you who've heard the Annie Oakley episode, you've already heard this. But here's what one has to do to fire a muzzleloader that the Union army was issuing. You have to pour powder down the barrel. Just the right amount, by the way, so it doesn't blow up in your hand. That's a little pressure. Put in a ball and a greased patch of cloth. And use the little ramrod included with purchase. Don't lose it or you'll never shoot again. To make sure everything is tightly packed. And then carefully, carefully put your percussion cap on and then you can shoot one time. And my husband assures me that with practice, the average guy can get up to a 30 to 60 second reloading time. Experts or people that were especially good at it might be able to get off three shots a minute, but likely not while being shot at and not actually being trained soldiers at all. Your Union soldier was nowhere near that time. And meanwhile, the Henry could shoot 15 shots. Shots in 10 seconds. This could save lives, Mr. Winchester said. Slap in a magazine, Go again, said the government. We want everyone to Use the same gun, they said. Is there no military genius that can see the situation clearly? Evidently not.
- [16:37]
A
But individual soldiers and officers purchased them on their own to take to war, which was very wise. It was worth the investment. It was $42 then, which is about almost $1,000 in today's money. But when they showed up on the battlefield, it quickly got a reputation. And the Confederate soldiers were known to say it was, quote, that damn Yankee rifle that they load on Sunday and shoot all week. So Papa Winchester wasn't selling to the United States during the war, but he was a very good marketer. And he looked at the globe and he said, well, the United States isn't the only people that are at war. So he went overseas to sell his guns, and he sold them to the French, he sold them to the Ottoman Empire, he sold them in South America, he sold them all over the world. A lot more than he was selling them in the United States.
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B
And then something happened that changed the course of the Winchesters lives forever. Having been left in charge over at the gun Factory, the designer, Mr. Henry, staged a coup. He had been left with power of attorney. And so while the boss was in Europe, he just stole the company, reincorporated it, cut the Winchesters out completely. And he thought the deed was all settled, and he settled down to count his profits. But when grandpapa came back to America like an avenging angel and made the banks call in all the loans Mr. Henry went under, he was defeated. And I would not be surprised to hear that he rolled all the way down to the gutter. But who now, said, grandpapa, am I going to trust to run this new Winchester repeating arms company that I have just reincorporated? I thought I could trust this guy, but now, evidently, I have no one on earth to trust with this but my son. So from now on, although Sarah Winchester got married to shirt money, she was now going to live on gun money.
- [18:51]
A
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- [19:19]
B
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- [19:46]
A
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- [19:56]
B
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- [20:20]
A
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- [20:54]
B
Goodbye shirts. Goodbye buttons. The junior Winchesters had hitched their wagon to the repeating rifle. Over the course of the next decades, the Winchester would be known as the gun that won the American West. It was all bound up in the romantic ideas of westward expansion, the pioneer spirit, the American way of life. For good reason, as it was the most likely gun to accompany you in your covered wagon, to shoot game for dinner, a squirrel for the stew pot or whatnot, to defend the settlement you carved out of the wilderness with your own two hands. To kill all the buffalo, to menace the Native Americans, to perpetuate violence in the lawless towns. Oh, dear. The legacy was not all good, perhaps.
- [21:40]
A
No. And we should probably point out that the Native Americans did get their hands on the rifle. Matter of fact, Colonel Custer, his last stand, was facing a Winchester rifle. But Stagecoach Mary, the first African American employee by the US Post Office, she was a carrier. She had a Winchester rifle. Billy the Kid, on the other side of the law, he had a Winchester rifle. This was the rifle to have, no matter what you were doing, the good or the bad.
- [22:09]
B
So we're jumping ahead in the timeline a little bit. But as the real Wild west faded, the Winchester was also the gun of, I guess what we're gonna call the nostalgic Wild West. This was the gun of Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, collectors, shooting enthusiasts. Teddy Roosevelt, that hero of the Spanish American War, the macho of machos was enthusiastic about putting his name and endorsement on their products. Winchester was the sportsman's choice, the most famous gun in America with Profits to match the absolute hit of America's 100th birthday, the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. So that's all a little bit ahead of us for now. William has a vertical learning curve ahead of him. How does one create a firearms empire? He had a lot to learn, and I imagine his days were just packed. But he did have great news to come home to.
- [23:04]
A
After three years of marriage, Sarah was finally pregnant. This was such an exciting time. I mean, they were in a new business. They were starting their family. The Civil War is over. Sarah gave birth to a little baby girl that they named Annie, after William's sister, who had died, unfortunately, in childbirth. Their happiness immediately turned to worry, and within a month, Annie died. I'm sorry.
- [23:32]
B
And they never had another child. So as the war was over and the country and the family were slowly rearranging themselves into some kind of new normal, the Winchesters senior began construction on the family's new home. Over 20,000 square feet is what it was going to be. With towers and porches and marble fireplaces and elaborate plasterwork likely to help the younger Winchesters through their grief, the senior pair treated them as full partners in the design and construction of this gilded age palace. Architecture and interior design became a passion for both of them. And blast from her childhood past, there's the smell of new wood again. Could lighten her spirits a little bit. The hubbub of scurrying workmen, perhaps with assorted colorful language. The choosing of a paint color, the negotiating a price, all of it. She was in love. Sarah and William spent evenings by the fire, drying up landscape plans together or sketching some trim they wanted for the doorways. After a couple of years there, it was a Gilded Age palace on top of a hill with more servants than served, overlooking the Winchester factory. So grandpa could open the front door and see the steam, smoke, steam out of the chimneys down there and know that all was well. I think that if his future had not been laid out like railroad track all the way through, William might have become an architect. Although that was not an option available to Sarah Winchester at the time. But alas, he was destined for guns.
- [25:03]
A
But Sarah and William were actually able to work with the Winchester Rifle Company together. Sarah traveled with William out to San Francisco, out to their west coast office. The office that had provided all those guns for the Taming of the west was in San Francisco. She traveled out there, and you would think, you know, Sarah was. She was kind of a lady and gentle, but she loved it. She loved the train travel. She loved the city of San Francisco, the people she loved learning about, the gun company. She loved the weather. Sarah had arthritis, so being out in that warm weather just felt good to her. New Haven is on the ocean, so in the wintertime, it's a really raw cold. So it must have felt amazing for her to be in California. So that was nice that they got to do that. There is one portrait of Sarah. That's it. There's just one. And we'll put it in our show notes. But that portrait was taken while she was in San Francisco with her husband.
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B
They also went to Europe and to Constantinople, not Istanbul. Why they changed it, I can't say. Oh, 80s music raps are better that way. Okay, Turkey.
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A
You are getting the groans from me today, Mrs. Graham.
- [26:19]
B
Well, all seem set for a perfectly genteel, regular old super rich lifestyle with little to worry them. Getting along with her politely salty mother in law might have been the only challenge she thought she would face. And then came the year 1880.
- [26:35]
A
Sarah was in her 40s. She and William had had 10 years of calm marriage, just working together on the house and then within the company. But in 1880, Sarah's mother became very ill and she died just four days before her 72nd birthday. Following that, just by a few months, Oliver Winchester suffered a stroke. It seemed as though he was rallying. But then he too died in December of that year.
- [27:03]
B
So before Sarah's own grief, her own very raw grief over her mother had even processed, she had to be a rock of strength for her husband and put her grief aside. He had not only lost his idol and his papa, but now he felt the weight of the Winchester company pressure settle on his shoulders. There was no one else. It took a lot out of him.
- [27:26]
A
It took everything out of him. He would never been really healthy. He had developed a chronic cough over the past few years. And just with the weight of all this stress, he left his position as president of the company only four months after his father died. And then just a week later, William Winchester also died. He was only 45 years old.
- [27:47]
B
Tuberculosis, which he may have actually been suffering from from as far back as before their marriage. History's not very clear on that. But he succumbed right after his papa died. So, as for Sarah, what do you do after a year like that? And the story goes that this is when Sarah consulted a medium to find out why her family had, you know, suffered this series of blows. And if she did consult a medium, she would have been in no way unusual for a woman of her time. Spiritualism was A respectable movement practiced through America and Europe. At the time, seances were very fashionable. If there had been any straw to grasp after my mother died, to talk to her again, I would have taken it. And Sarah's society said it was perfectly okay, even for respectable Christian women like herself, you know. And so if she saw a medium, there's no surprise. But the story begins that Sarah saw a specific medium by the name of Adam Koons.
- [28:48]
A
The reference to that name, Adam Koons, didn't actually happen until 1967. And since then, historians have been looking for Adam Koons in all the records of Boston, which is where Sarah supposedly went to see him. They can't find him. He disappeared. So maybe that's the mystery of the Winchesters. I don't know.
- [29:09]
B
Well, and he supposedly told her she had to go out west and build a big house and save herself from all the spirits. But where did she go immediately after all these deaths? She went the exact opposite direction, to Europe, where she stayed for over three years.
- [29:27]
A
We don't know exactly where she went. At that time, women only liked to be in the papers for a few reasons, for their birth, their marriage, and then their death. That's it. They didn't want their names in it, so there's no trail of where she went. The only thing that we know is that she was listed in the social directories as, quote, removed to Europe.
- [29:48]
B
So I have my own theory, which is a rich widow was in a unique position in Victorian society to be beholden to no one. A rich widow is one of the most powerful women in Victorian society. She could have been staying in every spa in Germany. She could have been doing nothing more than eating brie and drinking champagne right out of the bottle all over France. For, you see, she was now an extraordinarily wealthy woman.
- [30:19]
A
Sarah had inherited everything from William, who had inherited things from his father. It happened, really F. But that's a lot of money. And she had a bit of an inheritance from her own mother. So with cash, stocks and bonds, she inherited over $20 million.
- [30:36]
B
That is about $519 million in today's money.
- [30:40]
A
That is a lot of money. You'll see reports that she made $1,000 a day from investments and interest. Neither one of us could find that. Right?
- [30:50]
B
Correct, but. And if it was $1,000, it would have been in her money. But I just started to think, even today, how would I spend a thousand dollars a day? Assuming you had to spend it every day. $1,000. I mean, you're gonna buy 190 extra large coffee drinks, like, what are you gonna do with your money?
- [31:10]
A
Well, that's funny cause I did exactly the same thing. And I tried to spend it in one day. And I ended up renting a luxury car and taking my friends to an amusement park. And then I still had money left over at the end of the day. So they all got jewelry as souvenirs because I had to spend it really fast.
- [31:26]
B
I think every elementary school around here already has free lunch, so I can't do that. But that would be what I would like to do is find other cities to implement free lunch. That would be my first thing. But that's not. That's not what the challenge. I took the challenge. The challenge was to spend it. And so charitable things are not included. So just challenge yourself to do that. So she might have stayed in Europe forever but for the death of one of her sisters. And that brought her back into the orbit of New Haven society and that of her mother in law and sister in law. She could stay here forever, insulated by wealth from everything. Do charity work, pay calls, host events, shrivel up, blow away. No, no, thank you. It's time I went my own way. And again she chose distance, but in the new world rather than the old. But I think it's funny that she went as far as she could get away within the United States, given that Alaska and Hawaii were not available to her. She went back to California.
- [32:25]
A
She had great memories there. She knew that the weather was so much warmer than what she came back to in New haven. She was 46. Her arthritis was not getting any better. So she went back to a place that she knew and that she had good memories of. And she didn't go by herself. She had her remaining sisters, her remaining three sisters. They had a plan. They were going to all move out to California. They were going to all live in the same house, the same compound. They're going to live together. That was the plan.
- [32:56]
B
Let's construct a life for ourselves in a style completely new.
- [33:00]
A
And they were going to a state that was increasing in prominence just in Sarah's lifetime. It had actually become a state. The gold rush had come and gone. Development was happening. People were moving out there. And there was a tourist industry was also developing in the area. That's how staff established California is at this time. They're getting tourists.
- [33:21]
B
Sarah's main point of contact. There was a man by the name of Ned Rambo. Of course, that was his name. So Wild West. He was in charge of west coast operations for the Winchester Company. And so, just like you asking a local where the best brunch is or whatever, she asked Ned Rambo, where should I look to build this compound? Oh, did he have a place for her? She and Ned Rambo went out in his carriage to the Santa Clara Valley, which we would now call Silicon Valley. And it gave Sarah an enormous sense of deja vu. Have I been here before? She thought.
- [33:58]
A
And then Sarah realized she had kind of been there before. She and William had visited the Yanata Alabasa region in Spain. And the Santa Clara Valley looked exactly like it. Just mountains in the distance. There's wheat and fruit trees and farms and not much else built out there. It does look exactly like it.
- [34:19]
B
So she felt strangely at home. Sold, Mr. Rambo. Good. Good job.
- [34:26]
A
For $12,570, she was able to purchase a house and 45 acres of land. Now, this was an eight room farmhouse, I think Green Acres farmhouse. No, it was a Victorian house. It was in good condition. It was only about 15 years old. And if you saw it not in the middle of a field where it was, you would think it was one of the houses that she had left behind in New Haven.
- [35:14]
B
It's my favorite time of year, this weather sweater weather goes perfectly with savory and comforting fall foods, but with the light the way it is, you know, gets dark so early and everybody's busy schedule, it's just hard sometimes. And that's where Factor comes in every single year.
- [35:31]
A
At this time of year, my schedule gets so much faster. There's so many more things cramming in. And with the holidays ahead, there's going to be even more. That's why I love to get Factor meals delivered right to my door. And the Factor chefs do all the shopping and the chopping, and they bring me fresh, never frozen, fully cooked meals that I just have to heat up for two minutes.
- [35:53]
B
It's like science fiction. Super good.
- [35:55]
A
It is. And you have so many choices every single week. You have 35 wholesome meals to choose from every single week. And it's not the same foods. For instance, this week I had an option to get a brand new to me dish called cherry jam pork chop with mashed potato and celeric mash.
- [36:15]
B
Celeriac, I think.
- [36:16]
A
Celeriac. Well, I had to look it up. So it's a word that I've only seen written. And it's a celery root.
- [36:22]
B
That's a cool thing because you're exposed to novel ingredients that you wouldn't have bought on your own.
- [36:27]
A
Yes, absolutely. And it's not just dinners or eating them for lunches. There's breakfast, too.
- [36:33]
B
So head to FactorMeals.com HC50 and use code HC50 to get 50% off your first box and 20% off your next month.
- [36:43]
A
That's code HC50@FactOrMeals.com HC50 to get 50% off YOUR first box plus 20% off YOUR next month.
- [37:16]
B
So here's the existing farmhouse, which to you and I and our untutored spirits think is a perfectly large house. But that is no house to live in according to New Haven standards, of course. And so within the first six months, Lundada Vill is what it was called in homage to the place that she had loved in Spain, was expanded from its eight rooms to a 26 room mansion, not coincidentally, almost the exact size of the house that she had helped to build in Connecticut.
- [37:49]
A
At first, she did contract with some architects to work with her, but after she saw what they could do, she realized she could do it. She could have fun. She could make her own designs. She could consult with master carpenters and find out if something can't be done, how they could brainstorm, how can it be done. So that's what she did. It was all her own design.
- [38:12]
B
So we've reached 26 rooms. We are about the size of a New Haven mansion. And she just kept going, day by day. And if something didn't match in real life what she had pictured in her head or on the back of an envelope that she had drawn her plan on, just tear it down and start over. Or block it off and forget it for a while. You can flip a coin. She built what she wanted where she wanted. It's, I think, like a game of Sims where you've put in a cheat code for unlimited money. Money's no object. The house gets kind of unwieldy almost immediately. I'm sure we've all played it that way and. And you've added a lot of rooms that your characters don't even go into. Same, but of course, analog as the Sims wouldn't be released for 112more years. So she didn't work from a master plan, but from some inspiration or other. An article she'd read, a house she'd passed, a dream she had, just what if? What if? You know, it doesn't matter if she.
- [39:13]
A
Walked into a room and it was chilly. She had a fireplace built. If she didn't like the look of the California redwood floors upstairs, she had them refinished to look like the hardwoods that she's familiar with from Connecticut.
- [39:26]
B
She faux painted all the hardwood.
- [39:30]
A
There's parlors and balconies and a maze of hallways that connect the rooms that Sarah herself described as rambling.
- [39:39]
B
You think? Yeah, I think some people have comfort food. She had comfort sawdust. The whack of hammers was like the lullaby of her childhood home. It gave Sarah the most enormous and deep amount of pleasure to wander the completed areas of an evening, Comparing her notes with what had been accomplished. And so I just wanted to say, joy, not fear, accompanied her building process. She was busy. She was happy with her weird and giant hobby. She was just fine. And the room that she loved the best was the ballroom.
- [40:17]
A
The ballroom was extraordinarily ornate. It had a lot of the finishes like her father might have created in her childhood. The floors themselves were six different woods inlaid. There's a pattern across the whole floor. The fireplace has stained glass windows on each side, and one of the sides has a Shakespearean quote in it.
- [40:39]
B
So I did say that she had nothing but joy in her work, but that might not have been entirely true, because in the stained glass on one side of that fireplace, in her favorite room, the ballroom, is the following phrase. These same thoughts, people, this little world. That's from Shakespeare's Richard ii. Fair enough. Whatever. Well, the story of Richard ii, He was the king, he was rich, he was respected, and suddenly there was a coup, and he's been thrown off his throne. He is poor, he is friendless. He's put in prison. His glorious existence is reduced to being alone in a room. And the rest of that statement that Sarah immortalized on her stained glass window is this. I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live with the world. And because the world is populous and here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it yet. I'll hammer it out. Hmm.
- [41:36]
A
Oh. Speaking of stained glass, Sarah had contracted with, among others, Louis Tiffany for stained glass windows throughout the house. The one that I personally love the best is for her niece, Daisy. Daisy is the only person that's ever gonna live in this house with her. She had a window made for Daisy's room that has daisies on it. It's just beautiful. But Sarah loved these stained glass windows, this art glass. She loved it so much, she had more windows made than she had space for. And to this day, they're on display. But they've never been in a window.
- [42:14]
B
They're just a backlit, hung from the ceiling in, like, a museum like environment.
- [42:20]
A
It's very pretty. It had Always been believed that they were all Tiffany windows. You know, Louis Tiffany had made them all. But just this year, there was an envelope that was discovered during some renovations. And in it was an invoice for a commissioned window from the Pacific American Decorative Company. That is the company that all the upscale houses in California were buying their windows from, their art glass windows. So all the windows aren't Tiffany's. They could be made by other manufacturers as well.
- [42:50]
B
However, Lewis Comfort Tiffany has the unhappy distinction, like Kleenex and Bandaid, for having become the generic term for such a lamp. You know, if you go to J.C. penney and get a Tiffany lamp, you're not really getting a Tiffany lamp, but that's how they're referred to. So technically, they're all Tiffany lamps.
- [43:08]
A
Okay. I had never seen the term art glass before until I was researching this.
- [43:13]
B
I was like, oh, there's another name for it. Well, she also used the latest inventions in her house, not just the latest artisans. The annunciator was one thing she used that seems. We'll put a picture of it on the show notes. It seems very strange to our eyes, but to the average rich, rich person of the day, this is just what one had. You push a button in certain zones of the house, and hey presto. Down in the servants quarters, an actual paper card drops behind a number to tell you which zone of the house your mistress wishes for you to meet her in. Kind of like the bells that you'll see at Downton Abbey, although they're a lot more specific.
- [43:52]
A
Sarah's staff had to locate her a little bit farther. They got to the wing and the floor, and that was about all they could get to Marco Polo.
- [44:02]
B
So that wasn't radical for the time, though. Super weird to us. Now, what was radical for the time is pushing buttons to get light.
- [44:08]
A
What? Sarah had the house wired for electricity, but remember, she's out in the middle of nowhere. Where's this electricity coming from? It's not like we have it now, lines coming into our house. She had a generator built, and that generator powered water pumps, and those water pumps generated electricity so that she could go into her ballroom and push a button on the wall and her gas lit chandelier would light up. That sounds dangerous to me. Gas and electricity.
- [44:39]
B
You know, up until we did a remodel, I had light fixtures in this house that said on the sconces, stamped into the actual wrought iron, it said, illuminated gas, do not blow out. And so I must assume that they were triggered by electricity too, because you would push A button and the light would go on. And I assume that's just what happens when there was gas in the wall too. Well, and the reason they did that is everyone was used to candles and if you blow out a gas light, well, you're not going to wake.
- [45:08]
A
No, that's true.
- [45:09]
B
So in my house, they're a charming anachronism, but in at the time they were cutting edge. She also had the house plumbed.
- [45:17]
A
It's reported that she has 13 bathrooms. We honestly have no idea how many bathrooms she had. But she did have the whole house plumbed for them so that she could have her bathtubs and her newfangled shower.
- [45:30]
B
Running a shower, which right now looks a little bit primitive, but I assure you it was very avant garde at the time. And just like a college dorm that I was in at ku, the shower head is mounted very low. True, she was very, very short. But my dorm was built in 1962. And in 1962 the ladies with their big beehives did not want to get their hair wet. And the designers thought that is what women's hair is going to look like forever. And so all the showers are mounted so low that I, even at 5ft tall, find them very low. I don't know what kind of maneuvers men folk in that dorm have to do to get their hair wet these days, but so that shower is mounted extraordinarily.
- [46:12]
A
And speaking of water, Sarah had a solarium. Of course she had a solarium. I want a solarium. She had a solarium and all the plants that were growing in it. When they were watered, the water would run off the plants down into some piping outside the house to water the window boxes.
- [46:30]
B
And this was pre drought California. This was reuse and recycled before it was even necessary. So good. Also, it was so radical to have indoor plumbing at all. Even one cold water tap where you turned a faucet and the water would come out was so rare that less than 1% of American households had this feature in their house at the time.
- [46:52]
A
You know, even in my grandparents summer cottage on a lake when I was a kid in the 70s, we had to pump the water in the kitchen. That's how we got our water. Priming the pump and pumping it, which was fun for like the first time. And then it got to be set to drag. But this is in the 1970s, so that tells you just how advanced Sarah's house was in the 1890s.
- [47:14]
B
There were also elevators. Yes, three of them. So Sarah looked around and decided, hey, there's one dimension I haven't explored. So she decided she was going to build up. And there's a lot of up. So she had to hire between 20 and 30 craftsmen. And the house started to expand three stories, four stories.
- [47:40]
A
She built a seven story brick tower. And when it was completed, she looked at it and she said, mm, that doesn't match what's in my head. Tear it down, let's start again. Then she tore that one down 16 times. She tore this tower down before it was built to the vision she had in her head.
- [47:58]
B
And what did the workman think about this? Well, well, Moses Winchester paid double or triple the going rate. And looking around, there was always going to be work at this place. And so what they thought was, hey, we're the brawn, not the brains. Pass me the sledgehammer.
- [48:35]
A
This is the weirdest time of year because some days it's warm and you need those summer clothes. And then some days it's cold and you need the winter ones. So I am still swapping my closet out.
- [48:46]
B
Okay, so here's something that I like that goes both directions in this weird time of year. It's a cocktail that's called the Lionesses Tail. And it's got bourbon and allspice jam in it. And when I wanna serve it cold, I serve it with apple juice. And when I wanna serve it hot, I roll in the apple cider and the cinnamon stick. And that's exactly what's having to happen this time of year with your wardrobe. You know, the thing I'm completely a fan of from Quince is their washable silk skirts. And I either pair it with a tank top for the warmer days of fall or with one of Quince's Mongolian cashmere sweaters when the weather gets a little nippy.
- [49:29]
A
And Quince is known for those Mongolian cashmere sweaters that start at $50. All of their clothes are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands.
- [49:39]
B
They partner directly with top factories and they cut out the cost of the middleman, which passes the savings on to us. But more importantly to me, Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices.
- [49:53]
A
And I have found that within my friend group, once one of us started buying items from Quintz, another did. And now whenever somebody else gets something, we share it. For instance, my friend Heather bought her first Quince item. She got a brown cashmere boat neck sweater. And then my friend Brandy chimed in with, well, did you get the. And she calls them, I'm going to die in these pants. Because she's bought them in seven colors. Quince actually calls them super soft fleece joggers.
- [50:25]
B
Ah. So you, as well as Susan and us and all of Susan's friend group can get cozy in Quince's high quality wardrobe essentials by going to Quince.com chicks for free shipping on your order. And and 365 day returns.
- [50:42]
A
That's Quince Q U I N C E.com chicks to get free shipping and 365 day returns.
- [50:51]
B
Quince.com chicks and so Sarah and her workmen, when they're building up, really didn't regard what was happening down below. And they ended up with a lot of interesting architectural features. They would come to her, ma'am, there is now a skylight on the floor of this room. What would you like us to do about it? Well, she'd say, put a decorative railing around it and bring me another lamp for downstairs. And she'd clap her hands and they would just go do what she said. They had kind of a great relationship, actually.
- [51:46]
A
You'll read reports that they didn't. And you'll read reports that Sarah had to keep working on the house or else she was going to die. That these contractors and These workmen work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Not the case. There's records of her giving people time off. Off. People needed time off. She needed time off from them. She sent them away for weeks on end when the weather was too hot to do construction. So that 24 7, 365 thing isn't actually true.
- [52:17]
B
Maybe the construction isn't chasing away ghosts so much as keeping away house guests.
- [52:25]
A
Well, you know, what Elsa kept away was her sisters. You know, the original plan was for the sisters to live in the house with her. And then the extended plan was we'll have a compound. That never happened. But Sarah made sure that her sisters had houses in areas that they wanted to live. So they were as happy with their house as she was with hers. They're all still in the San Francisco area. They're all still getting together, but they're just not under the same roof, which is probably best for everybody.
- [52:53]
B
Now, what about this? There were other houses in America going up in this haphazard fashion, which actually even had a name. A crazy quilt house. Maybe not so big, because who else had this level of disposable income? But these houses were a thing among a certain class of women. And it was all women.
- [53:14]
A
There was even one right down the road from her there was this huge 22,000 square foot house with three separate houses under one roof so an extended family could live together without spending all their time together. It was just like Sarah's. It had 50 rooms and the turrets and the gables and all the Queen Anne flourishes that Sarah's house had. This house right down the street from them also had. And back in Connecticut, Elizabeth Colt, she was building a kooky house of her own. Colt is the other firearms manufacturer in Connecticut, in addition to the Winchesters. So it's not just happening in Sarah's backyard.
- [53:53]
B
I'm reminded of Marie Antoinette Hameau, her play farm. Shirley, you've heard one, one of our two episodes about Marie Antoinette. She had a little play farm where everybody would wash the eggs and they'd brush the sheep that had little ribbons on their tails. And all the fine ladies played at being peasants for a day. And wasn't it hilarious? Ha ha ha ha ha. And we know she paid for that. We know during the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette was singled out for ridicule, even though other rich women were building the same kind of thing. Marie Antoinette was not the first. So I did have that thought. All the ridicule came to Mrs. Winchester. The outside of Ms. Winchester's house was already a drive by tourist attraction, even if you couldn't go in. So it was already starting to attract that kind of alarmed attention even back then.
- [54:42]
A
Sarah, when she had moved out there, thought she could just move out as this wealthy widow. She didn't think that people would associate the name Winchester like they did in New Haven. You know, in New Haven, she'd walk by and it was like, ooh, there's a Winchester. She thought if she moved across the country, she would have none of that. She would have a little bit more anonymity and lot less celebrity. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. So when she didn't socialize with the ladies down the street, they started making stuff up about what she was doing in her house and nobody ever goes to visit her. Meanwhile, you know, her nieces and nephews and their kids are all playing in the yard, having so much fun. At Aunt Sarah's house, the tongues were wagging. If they had no answers, they just made them up. Sounds like Meghan Markle really does.
- [55:28]
B
Also, you'll hear some other rumors, one of which is Teddy Roosevelt, who had become the President of the United States, once came to the gate and was denied admittance by the curious, eccentric, wealthy Mrs. Winchester. Well, that's not true because Teddy Roosevelt had once been A great endorser of the Winchester rifle. But he thought it was very inappropriate to mix the office of the presidency with commercial concerns. And he had asked the Winchester company to cease using his image and his words in their promotional material. There was a bit of a delay, longer than he wished for there to be. So there was a little bit of. I wouldn't call it bad blood. I would call it tainted blood between those two at the time. And he would not have called on her, because calling on her would be tantamount to lending his name to her product. Again, he did not. He did not call on her. It wasn't. It, you know, he didn't snub her, but nevertheless, no. So she didn't snub him. If anything, it was more the other way around. And another persistent and malicious rumor is that she was creating an ark to save her from what she believed was going to be another great flood.
- [56:42]
A
She was creating an ark because that's what they called houseboats then, Arkansas. And she was building an ark for her niece, Daisy, her favorite niece and Daisy's husband, to live on. Daisy and her husband wanted an entree into San Francisco society. And to do that, they needed to have a fashionable address and a neat place to live and have people over this ark that she was building for them. It was 2,400 square feet. There was dark woods everywhere. It looked an awful lot like her house. Sarah even had a room. She had a cabin on the ark that she would stay in sometimes. And on the ceiling was a wooden engraving of William over her bed.
- [57:21]
B
So she never stopped mourning. It wasn't just Queen Victoria who did not cease mourning her departed husband. So I felt that was very touching to me. Well, she didn't help her reputation when she decided to go toe to toe with some of the most powerful people in America, railroad executives. As the railroad was expanding, they were taking more and more private land in a policy called eminent domain.
- [57:47]
A
And they wanted to build a railway through Sarah's property. Now, over the years, she'd been buying up farms in the area as they'd come on the market. And her personal property was growing and growing, and they wanted to cut it with a train.
- [58:01]
B
Not cool.
- [58:02]
A
No. So Sarah fought the bureaucracy. Daisy fought the bureaucracy. At one point, Daisy and her husband had a restraining order placed against them, because at night, they'd go out to where the surveyors had pound the stakes into Aunt Sarah's property and pull them up, and then they'd resurvey the next day, and they'd pull them up again. For a while, people thought it was Sarah that was doing it. Now she's getting to be a little bit older. I don't see her tracing through the fields. Before they found out that it was Daisy and her husband trying to help their aunt Sarah out, well, she lost.
- [58:35]
B
The battle and the railroad ended up crossing her property. And it was not just the powers that be of the railroad that were against her. The earth suddenly turned against her. In 1906, an event happened called the Great San Francisco earthquake, a 7.6 on the Richter scale that devastated the nearby city of San Francisco, which either fell down or largely caught on fire. 3,000 people died. And it is the earthquake that caused many of the anomalies that we point to today as strange and eerie.
- [59:10]
A
The damage to her house was extensive. That seven story tower that she had rebuilt 16 times that came crashing down. Floors crashed down into rooms below them. Turrets broke off. Porches on second and third stories fell off. There was broken and cracked plaster and shattered art. Glass, glass everywhere.
- [59:32]
B
Here's a rumor, unsubstantiated, is that during the process of the house falling in, Sarah had been trapped in a room for 24 hours. And it took the servants that long to find her in all of the assorted rooms. It's not even proven that she was anywhere near the house at the time. She did have other houses that she lived in.
- [59:51]
A
She could have raised all the property. She could have just said, forget it. But at this point, she didn't want to rebuild anything. She had had enough of it, enough of the project. So what she did was she had the least amount of work done to make the house safe. So she had stairwells that had collapsed. She just had them closed off so they really didn't go to anywhere. Those second story balconies, she'd had the door replaced, but not the balcony itself.
- [60:17]
B
So that's why you can look out onto the abyss and wave down at the kitchen maid. From a very precarious perch at a door that just opens onto a shaft.
- [60:28]
A
One of the chimneys had collapsed. Instead of rebuilding it, she just had it capped off in the attic so the chimney stopped. And she just wasn't going to use that fireplace anymore. She just was done with this house. There was nothing else that she wanted to do. And after this, there was no more building done on the house. But after all these modifications to make it safe, it looked even weirder than it was before. At one point, Daisy's husband said, quote, it looks like it was built by a crazy person. Sarah didn't move back into the house. First she moved onto her houseboat, and then she had kind of a burst of inspiration, forethought. She said, huh, if my boat is so comfortable here, wouldn't this harbor make a great place to have, like, a subdivision of floating yachts, of floating houses? So she actually had canals started to be built and locked, put in. And trying to make this community for houseboats, which now we know, okay, that exists. But then it didn't. Unfortunately, she had enough of that, too. After a certain point, she was running into a lot of bureaucratic red tape. One of her contractors kept ripping her off, and she said, okay, I'm done. Because she could. She didn't have anything to lose by walking away from it. And that's what she did. She walked away from that project. But she did move into her other houses. She had several houses in the area. And at this point, she started hiring staff, more staff than she'd ever had before. She had ladies, maids and nurses. She had a driver that drove her around in her new limousine.
- [62:06]
B
And that was radical because she was known long after coachmen were a thing that people had. He had a large top hat and was very distinctive looking. And she. She let go of that and got a new motor vehicle. Radical in her old age. Here's something else that I think is really illuminating as to her personality. She was fond of giving large gifts to charitable institutions. However, they were always anonymous.
- [62:36]
A
Her largest gift was 1.5 million to a New Haven hospital given anonymously to build a tuberculosis ward in memory of her husband.
- [62:46]
B
So the anonymous gifts were big, but some of her other gifts were very, very small. Anything she put her name on. For example, she gave $30 to the Red Cross after the earthquake that had.
- [62:59]
A
Damaged so much of her property in the area. She gave $150 to the town fund. That was it. 150 bucks.
- [63:06]
B
I imagine, though, she gave enormous amounts of money anonymously, I do, too, Especially.
- [63:12]
A
To people that she knew.
- [63:14]
B
Right.
- [63:14]
A
I mean, she's taking care of her sisters and their families this whole time. You know, I am switching over my closets, and it occurred to me the other day to head to my lingerie drawer. And I know that somebody listening right now agrees with me that not every single bra in that drawer belongs there. You do not like some of them. They are very uncomfortable.
- [63:57]
B
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- [64:49]
A
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- [65:22]
B
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A
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- [66:08]
B
Sarah's health started to fade. She was always suffering from arthritis, which accounts for the small risers in her house, by the way, which are considered very strange. She built them not for resale, but so that she could comfortably go up and down the stairs. There's nothing creepy about them at all. So there's a little destroyer of your of your dream. But on September 1922, Sarah Winchester died in her sleep at her sister's ranch. She was 83 years old.
- [66:39]
A
Per her wishes, Sarah's body was taken back to New Haven and she was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery near her parents and next to William and her baby daughter, Annie.
- [66:51]
B
So everyone that is her contemporary workers, friends, relatives describe her as smart, as great at business, as a good woman. And there's no mention of madness or ghost Haunting. So I just want to say real Sarah was maybe a little eccentric, but was not tormented by the spirits of the Winchester rifle victims. Honestly, the weirdest thing about her, Other than the house, Was the fact that her personal physician. Was a woman named Dr. Euthanasia Sherman Mead. But that's hardly Sarah's fault. So thus ends the physical life. Of the real, genuine Sarah Winchester. But the legacy lives on and twists.
- [67:41]
A
Because that's when the strange things really did start to happen. Sarah's estate was divided between her family to her closest employees. But the house itself, the big, weird house, Wasn't given to anybody. So they were going to have to sell this house. And put the money into the kitty to divide up. But they couldn't sell it. This was a weird house. Who wants this big, massive, strange house? Nobody. So eventually, it was rented out to the brown family. John brown and his wife, mamie. They were from Pennsylvania, and he had a history of construction and amusement park development.
- [68:21]
B
Aha.
- [68:23]
A
He had built one of the first roller coasters in the early nineteen teens.
- [68:28]
B
Although I think he did kill someone on his. I forget its name. Higgledy piggledy, something like that.
- [68:36]
A
Bigity bap.
- [68:37]
B
For real.
- [68:38]
A
Don't talk back.
- [68:40]
B
So if anyone were to be directly haunted, it should be him.
- [68:44]
A
So the browns looked around, and they kind of got a marketing plan in place. They invited journalists out to the house. This is when they invited Harry houdini there to stay the night. The stories started to develop about the ghost that lived in the house, how it was haunted.
- [69:01]
B
Harry houdini was invited. He was. Oof. He hated mediums. He hated seances. And his whole latter career was bent on proving that all of that was bunkum. And so they invited him to come there, and he did not say it was haunted. He said it was a marvelous establishment, which, of course, it was. And then he was fed all the stories About Sarah Winchester and how she was tormented by the souls of blah, blah, blah. And he determined that the house was very intricately laid out. As the woman did not want construction to cease. So nowhere in that do I sense an endorsement of the fact that it was haunted.
- [69:44]
A
No, but it still brought people, because the browns started to give tours. And with each tour, something else changed in the house. And Sarah was going from this solid, smart businesswoman. To this wacky spiritualist. They began adding things like the 13s. The 13 bathrooms. They could have closed off any number of rooms to make 13 bathrooms. There's 13 hooks in a closet Where Sarah hung her robes to go into her night nightly seances.
- [70:11]
B
There have been accusations, dare I say assertions, that many, if not Most of the 13s were added to the house after Sarah Winchester's departure from the world. In the interest of PR and marketing.
- [70:29]
A
No. There's a chandelier with 13 candles on it.
- [70:33]
B
And if Sarah Winchester had wanted a light with 13 arms, she would have commissioned a light with 13 arms and not a light with 12. To which she added a clumsy 13th arm.
- [70:44]
A
So every year there was new things added to the house tours. And the tour guides were instructed to give the tour as it was and just make references. We'll never know what Mrs. Winchester really wanted. But this is all just as she left it.
- [70:59]
B
Soon, this was the most famous haunted house in America. Mr. Disney himself was inspired by this house and the stories behind it when he created his haunted mansion over at Disneyland. I just wanna bring it on back. Back. During reconstruction or opening new rooms to the public, a safe was discovered, a big safe. What would the wealthiest woman in America have deemed so important to keep in this safe? And the excitement was growing and growing. Kind of like when Geraldo tried to open Al Capone's vault. You know, this is big. This is big news. And they opened up the safe, and inside was a lock of baby Annie's hair. A relic of the daughter she had lost so long ago, was her most, most prized possession. That does not seem eccentric to me. That seems very heartbreaking. So was it ghosts? You can tell which side we're on? I think it's pretty clear. But even after all this debunking, and I'm so sorry if we have destroyed your love of this particular haunted house, we don't want to discourage you. If you're in the area, pay your $40 and go through the house. You won't be disappointed. There's 10,000 window panes at least. Well over 160 rooms, two basements, two ballrooms, 47 staircases, 47 fireplaces, but only 17 working chimneys. That's curious. Six kitchens. I don't know why you need more than two.
- [72:22]
A
I would go just to tour the grounds. Sarah was really into landscape design, too. And she had designed all these gardens and places for herself and her family to have picnics or play. And now the entire property is surrounded by a very tall, thick hedge. And those gardens are maintained. That would be worth the 40 bucks to me to go in and walk those gardens.
- [72:44]
B
Some parts of those gardens were inspired by assorted World's Fairs, including our favorite, the 1893 World's Fair. There's elements that have been replicated from expositions, so don't miss that. Don't miss those gardens. Just go. It's worth going.
- [73:01]
A
I would think so. Even now, the house is privately held. It's owned by a company that is connected to the Brown family descendants. So it never left the family in all that time. And now, almost a hundred years later, what was a rambling experiment by Sarah Winchester has become a major tourist attraction. It is big business for somebody else who created the legend that has entertained millions.
- [73:28]
B
And let's do some media.
- [73:30]
A
There really is only one biography about Sarah Winchester. It's called Captive of the Sarah L. Heiress to the rifle fortune by Mary Jo Ignoffo. It's very detailed. I relied on it heavily.
- [73:44]
B
Well, I just want to clarify that it's not the only biography, but it's the only biography that doesn't delve deep into Freemasonry or, you know, a deep dive into Da Vinci Code territory or spiritualism or. Or treats the ghost as factual occurrences. I just. Let's see, how shall I say it? This is the only dispassionate biography of her that I have found.
- [74:07]
A
Yeah. Honest.
- [74:09]
B
Yeah. Yeah. It's written by a California historian who used a lot of primary sources, evidently.
- [74:16]
A
So I thought it was a good book. I enjoyed reading it. If you're into the Winchester guns. The Winchester, the Gun that Built an American Dynasty by Laura Trevilan is actually. It's a great history of the company. There's a bit about Sarah in there, but it's really about everybody else and the weapons. And as far as historical fiction goes, I found a really cute one for kids. Now, it's historical fiction, but it's called Winchester Mystery House, a chilling interactive adventure by Matt Dodin. And I had gotten it on my Kindle, and it's one of those choose your ending books. There's like 15 different endings. And so it was on my Kindle, so it was just, you know, like a. Like a game to push. I. I suppose as a book, it would be just as fun, but for.
- [74:59]
B
Kids, I loved those. Choose your adventure books. That was radical when I was growing up. Yeah, yeah. Of course, if you go to the Winchester Mystery House, you are certainly going to exit through the gift shop because nobody's snoozing over there. And there are plenty of books that have gorgeous color photographs of many of the rooms and sometimes even rooms that aren't open to the public on whatever specific tour that you went on. So those you can find online sometimes, but they rely heavily on the ghost aspect, which they would being tied heavily to the tourist trade in ghost paraphernalia. So just be warned about that. Although the photos are really good, and.
- [75:39]
A
If you can't get to San Jose, you can go online and visit the Winchester Mystery House. Online, there's not really a virtual tour, but there's information on the site to click around. There's a lot of events, especially around Halloween. They have very special events designed with a light show and. Sounds like fun.
- [75:59]
B
It does, it does. Now, what isn't fun, as far as I'm concerned, is the new movie starring Helen Mirren called Winchester. Talk about trading heavily on the ghost side of the story. It is actually a horror movie. If that is your thing, you should watch it. But historical accuracy is not its forte. Also, so go to the bathroom before you turn it on because there are some jump scares in there that will shock the liquid out of you. So if that's your thing, please do watch it. Helen Mirren is amazing, but know that it is taken really from the hysterical part of her legacy, you know what I mean? So it's not based on fact, which would not be nearly as exciting. Oh, I don't know. Bring me another. Doesn't sound as cool as ghosts haunting you down the hallway, you know, throwing.
- [76:51]
A
You against the wall in the rifle room or whatever it was. Yeah, I don't like scary movies. I watched this over two days in the bright sunlight and even the jump scares, I don't care. Didn't care for it. I thought the production values were pretty good, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you like scary movies. Like, I think you said that adjacent to the movie, I can link you up to a Sci Fi Wire video where they go through the hack with the producers of the movie so you can actually go into the house from the comfort of your sofa in the broad daylight.
- [77:24]
B
There are a couple of tours of the house online.
- [77:27]
A
There is. There's actually really an old one from Lillian Gish in 1963. It's done all in black and white and it's super creepy. And in it she says all houses where men have lived and died are haunted houses. Except she says it way creepier than I can. There's also a Buzzfeed Unsolved. Actually, there's two Buzzfeed Unsolved. The premise of this show is there's these two guys, a skeptic and a believer, who go and do all these paranormal events. Their very first episode, they went to the Winchester Mystery House and like us, they wanted to go back and redo their first episode. We redid Marie Antoinette and they redid the Winchester Mystery House. So I can link you up to that.
- [78:10]
B
You know what? Something else that I was dismayed not to find was an episode of Drunk History focused on the Winchester Mystery House, which seems. How many times are we gonna say this? Like a real hole in their catalog. So yes, I think that would be a fine episode for next Halloween's Drunk History. There you go.
- [78:31]
A
I don't have anything else.
- [78:32]
B
So the real Sarah Winchester. Not powered by ghosts, but by intelligence, diligence, unlimited income, and no one to tell her no. Thanks for listening.
- [78:43]
A
Bye.
- [78:44]
B
If you liked what you heard today, please tell a few friends or leave a review for us on Apple Podcasts or on your favorite podcatcher. We are sorry we didn't scare you for Halloween, but we do want to wish you a happy Halloween however you celebrate it. Eating candy, going out to a party party, dressing up with the little ones and going out, or just turning off all the lights, pretending you're not home and binge watching the good place. Happy, Happy Halloween from the History Chicks. Thanks to everyone who came out and heard this live down in Westport. We hope to do some more live shows. The song in the middle is from our old friend James Harper as Harper Active and it's called Jack My Swag. And the end song is called Ghost by Joey Feyerbach. And I picked it because I like that little chop chop chop sound in the background. Kind of reminds me of the hammers in the background. And that is that. Until next time, we will see you in the world of social media Sa.