It’s that time of year when we seek out eerie or downright scary experiences, and a day trip to San Jose to tour the Winchester Mystery House is one of the best ideas you’ll have this October.
I visited in August as an end-of-summer treat, but you’ll find the house—the peculiar, myth-making Victorian-era project of a firearms magnate widow—especially decked out for Halloween, emphasizing the home’s supposed haunted history.
For me, the scariest part isn’t seeing staircases leading to nowhere, the windows built with spider web leading or even the Séance Room, where Sarah Winchester nightly communed with the spirits. No, it was seeing the bedroom where she’d been trapped while the 1906 earthquake rocked the mansion. Imagine being a widow convinced that ghosts bent on revenge are pursuing you, and then you awake in the dark to feel the entire house shaking—and you can’t leave. The 1906 earthquake took place at 5:12am on April 18, an hour before sunrise. Poor Sarah was trapped in the room for several hours because the shifting walls meant that the door was stuck in place, blocked by rubble. Scratches at the door jamb show how she tried to break her way out. Finally, servants were able to unblock the door and release her. Since that day, the room has been left untouched. Sarah left it to deteriorate and it has ever since.
So let’s talk about those vengeful ghosts. Sarah’s deceased husband’s father had invented the Winchester repeating rifle. Before its advent, the loading of a single, fresh bullet was a laborious process. According to legend, a medium in Boston told Sarah that the ghosts of those killed by the efficient weapon held it against the family… which by marriage now included her. It’s said that this gun allowed the West to be settled, and so many of its victims were Native Americans.
When I first toured the Winchester Mystery House years ago, the tour guide’s narrative used to be that Sarah believed that if she kept building the mansion—with the wealth from the gun’s sales—the spirits could not find her and kill her. That was a good explanation for why the house sprawled to 24,000 square feet and why Sarah built nonstop for 36 years before her death in 1922. It’s also a good explanation for why stairs ends at ceilings, leaving you no option but to turn around and retreat, or why another staircase zigzags for 44 feet while only climbing 10 feet, possibly confusing the not-quite-all-there spirits.
But in more recent visits, that reasoning has been abandoned, although the idea that Sarah felt pursued by ghosts remains. The explanation for her endless building may be more prosaic, that she was trying to keep workmen employed during an economic downturn. Or perhaps she liked the bustle of an active construction site as a woman alone, although of course servants were a part of her household and were the ones who busted her out of her earthquake bedroom.
Sarah was quite diminutive at 4’10” and in a very strange coincidence our tour guide was also that exact height. As the tour begins, you see a yardstick glued to the wall showing Sarah’s height, and our guide stood next to it to show us their height in common. It was interesting to experience the house with someone who could show us, for instance, how the small step risers in the zigzag room were good for someone her height—especially if, like Sarah, they suffered from severe arthritis and found it difficult to lift their feet more than a few inches.
Legend says that Sarah held séances every night from midnight to 2am in a strangely built room, small enough that it’s difficult to photograph (and has no furniture inside). You can enter by one door, and then there are three exits: the door you came in through, a door that opens into mid-air—if you were to step through without looking, you’d fall into the kitchen sink a floor below you—and a door that is “one way” because there’s no way to open it from the other side. It’s unknown exactly why she had nightly séances. Perhaps she was trying to appease the victims of the Winchester repeating rifle or maybe she was connecting with her husband, who had died of tuberculosis at age 43, and baby Annie, who died at one month old from cholera. It certainly is creepy to think about a small woman in a small room inside a labyrinthine mansion calling the dead to come talk to her.
So of course the house is rumored to be haunted—how could it not be with a history like that? People say they see Sarah in the window looking out onto the vastness of her domain. Another ghost is a gardener. On the tour, you see a framed historical photograph of a work crew from Sarah’s time. The man at the far right is a gardener who’s said to haunt the house; people have claimed to see him as a full apparition pushing a wheelbarrow. Our guide said that he was treated so well by Sarah that he just didn’t want to stop taking care of the property.
(The 2018 horror film Winchester is a very bad, fact-free rendition of this story with a lot of jump scares and most of it wasn’t even filmed at the house. We love Helen Mirren, who plays Sarah Winchester, but this was a rough distortion of the facts—and a far inferior experience to visiting the actual house in person.)
Today, you can barely see the odd Victorian house from the street, hidden by foliage and fencing, except for its high towers. Its sequestered grounds sit directly across from the retail and dining hub Santana Row. Once you pay entry, you can access its beautiful front grounds with statuary and fountains, plus the backyard with its gardens. The tour used to start at the front door like you’re visiting Sarah, but now begins at the servants’ back entry. When I was there, a man was on our tour who had last visited 50 years ago with his parents; now he was taking his daughter who was a student at nearby San Jose State University. On early tours, you were not permitted to take photographs inside the house; that’s no longer the case.
Our tour took place in the daytime, but you can take a candlelit tour to up your scary game. Thanks to spooky season, there’s currently a haunted house walk-through immersive experience taking place called Unhinged: Hotel. Even the extensive gift shop carries on the creepy vibe with goods displayed on a vintage horse-drawn hearse. Tickets for the regular house tour are $39 for adults; tickets for Unhinged: Hotel start at $70.
If you’re someone who loves history as well as the paranormal, this house provides a great reason to do a quick roadtrip from San Francisco. Just zigzag while you drive home so the spirits can’t follow you.
RECOMMENDED: Is this San Francisco’s closest thing to a haunted mansion?