Who Was Sarah Winchester?
Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1839. Those close to her called her Sallie. In 1862 she married William Wirt Winchester, whose family’s company, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, made the rifle that would become a symbol of the American West.
Her adult life was marked by loss. In 1866 she gave birth to a daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, who was diagnosed with marasmus, a severe wasting condition in infants, and lived only about a month. Between the fall of 1880 and the spring of 1881, Sarah lost her mother, her father-in-law and her husband. In 1884 her eldest sister, Mary Converse, died too.
Around the same time she began suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, and her doctor suggested a warmer, drier climate. In 1885, in her mid-forties, she left New Haven for California. Historians point to several likely reasons: medical advice, happy memories of trips to San Francisco with her husband in the 1870s, and the heavy advertising of the day promising Californian sunshine and health. She invited her three surviving sisters to follow, and they did.
That is a plain, human beginning. It is also the part of the story of the Winchester Mystery House that tour brochures have most often replaced with something stranger.
From Farmhouse to Labyrinth: How the San Jose House Grew
In 1886 Edward “Ned” Rambo, a San Francisco agent for the Winchester company, drove Sarah around the Santa Clara Valley looking for property. He showed her a 45-acre ranch near San Jose, and she bought it, including a two-story, eight-room farmhouse. She named it Llanada Villa, reportedly because the land reminded her of the Llanada Alavesa plain in the Basque country.
She and her husband had developed an interest in architecture and interior design years earlier while building a home on Prospect Hill in New Haven. In San Jose she hired at least two architects, dismissed them, and took over the planning herself. She designed rooms one at a time, supervised the work, and consulted the carpenters she employed. She drew ideas from the world’s fairs that were popular in that era.
Her habit of tearing out work she disliked and starting again explains much of the maze-like layout. A San Jose newspaper reported in 1897 that a seven-story tower had been torn down and rebuilt 16 times. As wings were added, older exterior windows and doors ended up walled in rather than removed, and some parts of the house rose to five levels. The style was essentially Victorian, with Gothic and Romanesque touches. At its largest, the house is thought to have had roughly 500 rooms.
The features visitors still notice
- The ballroom, with carved wood walls and ceilings and a floor inlaid with teak, maple and mahogany.
- Two art glass windows beside the ballroom fireplace, carrying lines from Shakespeare’s Richard II and Troilus and Cressida.
- Lincrusta wall coverings, an embossed material made to look like leather or metal.
- An annunciator, an early intercom for calling servants, common in large homes of the period.
- An indoor garden with slanted floors that drained excess water through trapdoors to pipes feeding flowers outside.
- A generator for a water pump and electricity.
- A stairway of 44 steps that rises only about ten feet, built with very shallow steps. Sarah stood about four feet ten inches tall and had arthritis, which makes the design look practical rather than eerie.
The windows have their own small mystery. For years, guides and articles claimed they were made by Tiffany, though that company rarely used beveled glass. An architectural historian noticed the same style at Craigdarroch Castle in British Columbia and traced it to a glass artist working for the Pacific American Decorative Company. That theory gained strong support when restorers found an envelope inside a dining room wall, postmarked July 1894, bearing the company’s seal and a note that appears to be in Sarah’s handwriting. Many art glass windows she bought were never installed at all and remain in storage. For a room-by-room walk through these details, see our guide to the rooms, stairs and myths inside the house.
The 1906 Earthquake and the Doors to Nowhere
On April 18, 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake struck, and Llanada Villa was badly damaged. The seven-story tower and most of the chimneys collapsed. An entire wing was destroyed, along with the third- and fourth-story additions.
A popular rumor says Sarah was trapped in the house that day. There is no evidence she was even there. She owned several California homes, and after the quake she spent most of her time at her property in Atherton, on the Peninsula.
She had the rubble cleared but did little else to the San Jose house. That decision explains several of the most photographed oddities: doors opening onto nothing where balconies once hung, pipes jutting from what had been window boxes, and staircases that end abruptly where upper floors used to be. These features are real, and they are genuinely strange to walk past. They are also, in large part, earthquake damage that nobody fully repaired.
After 1910, as her health declined, the work in San Jose was mostly maintenance, plus an elevator added in 1916. She turned her attention to managing her finances and building an investment portfolio, which by most accounts she did very well. When she died on September 7, 1922, at 83, the house had about 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms and 6 kitchens. The history of her other mansions and properties shows how much of her later life happened away from San Jose.
Where the Ghost Legend Came From
The haunted version of the story of the Winchester Mystery House did not appear all at once. It built up in layers, and each layer can be roughly dated.
Layer one: 1890s newspaper gossip
From around 1895, Sarah began turning up in local newspapers. She kept to herself, her money came from firearms, and her house kept growing, which was enough to feed speculation. In March 1895 the San Jose Daily News ran a piece claiming she believed she would die once the house was finished. Over time the idea shifted from bad luck to death to something supernatural.
Not everyone bought it. Another local article of the period quoted an unnamed acquaintance calling the superstitious stories nonsense and describing her as an unusually sensible woman, and it argued that a wealthy resident should be free to build as she liked without having her motives mocked.
Layer two: the medium and the rifle ghosts
The most famous element, a visit to a Boston medium who warned her that the spirits of everyone killed by Winchester rifles were haunting her family, seems to trace to Susy Smith’s 1967 book Prominent American Ghosts. In that telling, the medium, named Adam Coons, ordered her to move west and build a house for the spirits that must never be completed.
Historians allow that a visit to a medium is plausible. Spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the dead, was popular among well-off women of her era. But there is no evidence it happened. Researchers who combed the spiritualist newspaper Banner of Light and Boston city directories, which listed local spiritualists, found no one called Adam Coons.
Layer three: tourism
The house became a tourist attraction just nine months after Sarah’s death. It was in disrepair and considered to have no monetary value. Investors bought it and leased it to John and Mayme Brown, who opened it to visitors and bought it outright in 1931. Mayme Brown was its first tour guide. Former neighbors, friends and workers were reportedly upset to see superstitious claims made about a woman they remembered as clearheaded and shrewd with money, and they objected to the Browns profiting from falsehoods.
Harry Houdini paid a brief visit in 1924 and was reportedly impressed by the layout. Some accounts credit him with suggesting the name “Winchester Mystery House,” though that detail is not firmly settled. In 1973 Keith Kittle, a former Disneyland and Frontier Village employee, became general manager of a house in poor shape. He renovated it through the 1970s and 1980s, added a Winchester rifle museum, pursued landmark status and launched highway billboards showing a silhouetted mansion with a hint of ghosts. Attendance rose. He stayed until 1996.
The Story of the Winchester Mystery House: Fact vs Legend
Laid side by side, the documented record and the popular telling look like two different women. Here is how the main claims compare.
| Claim | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| A medium told her to build for the spirits of rifle victims | No evidence; the tale appears to trace to a 1967 ghost book, and no medium by that name has been found in Boston records. |
| Construction ran 24 hours a day for 38 years | She paused often, sometimes for months; little was done after 1906 and almost nothing major after 1910. |
| She believed she would die if building stopped | The idea appears in 1890s newspaper gossip, not in her own documented words. |
| She inherited $20 million and earned $1,000 a day | Her husband’s 1881 estate was valued at about $362,330, much of it stock she would not inherit until 1898; her company shares paid roughly $7,770 a year in dividends in the early 1880s. |
| She was trapped in the house during the 1906 earthquake | No evidence she was there; she spent most of her later years in Atherton. |
| The windows are Tiffany glass | Evidence points to the Pacific American Decorative Company instead. |
| The odd features prove an obsessive mind | Many oddities came from earthquake damage, repeated remodeling and accessibility needs. |
Even official paperwork absorbed the legend. A federal architectural survey connected with the house’s historic listing repeated the 38-year construction claim and the fear of dying, and gave the purchase date as 1884, though county records show 1886. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 7, 1974, and is California Historical Landmark No. 868.
The fuller haunted-house side, including reported apparitions and ghost tours, is covered in our piece on the Winchester Mystery House legend versus the record.
Why Did She Keep Building?
If not ghosts, then what? The honest answer is that Sarah left no full explanation, so every theory is an interpretation. The main ones:
- Art and design. She had a long interest in architecture, designed the house herself, and borrowed ideas from world’s fairs. Some writers see her as an unusual architectural pioneer for a woman of her time.
- Employment. A San Jose State College graduate student who wrote a master’s thesis on her in 1951, after interviewing people who knew her, concluded she built partly to keep her workers employed.
- Grief and occupation. A widow who had lost a child, a husband and much of her family, with money and time, may simply have found purpose in a long project. This is a reasonable guess, not a documented motive.
- The supernatural reading. The case for something stranger rests on the house’s unsettling layout, her reclusiveness, the moral weight of a rifle fortune, and the era’s enthusiasm for Spiritualism. It is atmospheric and emotionally compelling, but it lacks documentary support.
Skeptics also point out that large, ornate homes built by the wealthy were not unusual in that period. What made Sarah’s different was that she was a woman directing the work herself, and that she would not explain herself to the press. Silence, in the 1890s as now, invites stories.
The pattern is familiar. Like the Amityville haunting, the Winchester legend shows how a real place, a few true oddities and a good narrative can fuse into something that outlasts every correction.
Visiting Today: A Tour of the Winchester Mystery House
The house still stands at 525 South Winchester Boulevard in San Jose, now surrounded by the city rather than orchards. It has been run since 1963 as Winchester Mystery House, LLC, a private business representing the descendants of the Browns. Many rooms have been added and removed since Sarah’s death, so what you walk through is not a perfect time capsule. For directions and the area’s history, see where the Winchester Mystery House is.
If you plan to visit Winchester Mystery House, it helps to know that the tour leans into the legend. A historian of the house has written that guides follow a script emphasizing the spooky material, and has described at least one guide’s discomfort at repeating claims about the number 13 and other “kooky” details. That does not make the tour a waste of time. It makes it two tours at once: one of a remarkable Victorian building, and one of a century-old ghost story.
Mistakes visitors make
- Treating every oddity as a clue to the supernatural. Ask which features predate 1906 and which are earthquake scars.
- Taking the room count as fixed. Figures shift across eras; about 160 rooms at her death is the commonly cited number, not the peak.
- Assuming she lived there to the end. Her later life centered elsewhere.
- Dismissing her as eccentric. The people who knew her described a capable businesswoman, and the record of her investments backs them up.
What is genuinely still open
Some questions have no firm answers. Sarah never publicly explained why she built the way she did. Her private beliefs about Spiritualism remain unknown; a visit to a medium is plausible but undocumented. And visitors’ reports of strange sounds, figures or cold spots continue, as they do at many old buildings. Those are accounts, not established facts, and readers can weigh them alongside other paranormal accounts and hauntings.
Perhaps the most honest version of the story of Winchester Mystery House is that the real woman was overwritten by the legend almost as soon as she stopped speaking for herself. The house is strange. The woman, by the evidence, was not nearly as strange as the house. If you enjoy long-form conversations about places like this, the Troubled Minds Vault collects the radio show’s archive, and more haunted landmarks wait in our folklore and legends section.
Questions and answers
What is the story of Sarah Winchester's house?
Sarah Winchester, widow of rifle maker William Wirt Winchester, bought an eight-room farmhouse near San Jose in 1886 and spent years expanding it to her own designs. The 1906 earthquake wrecked parts of it, leaving stairs and doors to nowhere. After her death in 1922 it opened as a tourist attraction, and the claim that she built nonstop to appease ghosts became its famous legend.
Why didn't Sarah Winchester have more children?
Sarah and William Winchester had one daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, born in 1866. She was diagnosed with marasmus, a severe wasting condition, and lived only about a month. No reliable record explains why the couple had no further children. Any claim about her private reasons, including supernatural ones, is speculation rather than documented history.
Is there any Winchester family still alive?
Sarah Winchester had no surviving children, so she left no direct descendants. Her only daughter died in infancy and her husband died in 1881. She did have sisters and a niece, Marion Merriman, who lived with her and worked as her secretary. The company that runs the house today represents the descendants of John and Mayme Brown, who opened it to visitors.
Did a medium tell Sarah Winchester to build the house?
There is no evidence she did. The tale of a Boston medium named Adam Coons, who supposedly told her to build forever for the spirits of people killed by Winchester rifles, appears to trace to a 1967 book of ghost stories. Researchers checking spiritualist periodicals and Boston city directories from the period found no one by that name.
Was the Winchester Mystery House really under construction for 38 years?
Not continuously. Building happened over many years, but Sarah Winchester took long breaks, sometimes for months, because of her health. After the 1906 earthquake she did little more than clean up, and after 1910 the work was mostly maintenance, plus an elevator added in 1916. The round-the-clock, 38-year figure is part of the legend, though even a federal survey once repeated it.
Who owns the Winchester Mystery House now?
After Sarah Winchester's death, investors bought the run-down property and leased it to John and Mayme Brown, who turned it into an attraction and bought it in 1931. Since 1963 it has been run as Winchester Mystery House, LLC, a private business representing the Browns' descendants. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a California Historical Landmark.
Stay curious. Keep the question open.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads.
