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Sarah’s signature touches can be found throughout the mansion – in particular, her obsession with spider webs and the number 13. Money was not an issue for the widow Winchester – Sarah inherited nearly half of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company upon the death of her husband and stepfather, earning around $2,000 per day. Rotating teams of construction workers operated around the clock. It was here that she laid the foundation of what would become the mysterious Winchester Mystery House.īuilding began immediately. In 1884, she found a quaint farmhouse near San Jose, California. So Sarah Winchester left Connecticut and visited her niece in Menlo Park, California. Related: 9 Terrifying Stephen King Novels You May Not Have Read If construction ceased, the spirits would come for her. Just who or what was behind the haunting? Why, the untold number of victims gunned down by Winchester rifles.Īccording to the clairvoyant, there was just one way to appease the angry spirits of slaughtered American Indians and fallen Civil War soldiers: Head west and build a monstrous house. The widow sought advice from a clairvoyant in Boston, who informed her that her family was cursed. The string of fatalities devastated Sarah – and spooked her into believing she may be next. Then, in March of 1881, William Wirt Winchester succumbed to tuberculosis. With the birth of their daughter, Annie, in the summer of 1866, it seemed as if life was perfect.īut the married couple’s happy days darkened when their infant daughter died of marasmus, just a few weeks after her birth.ĭeath struck again in December of 1880, when Oliver Winchester passed away at the age of 70. Sarah and William were happy together, traveling amongst the wealthiest social circles of New England. 44-40 model was so successful, it became known as “The Gun That Won the West.” Her husband William Wirt Winchester was the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, founder of the booming Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Related: 16 Scariest Haunted House Movies to Freak You Out in Your Own Home

The structure’s strange tale begins on September 30, 1862, when a young Sarah Lockwood Pardee married into an American dynasty. Yet the question remains: Was it a labor of love or madness? It’s been nearly a century since the séances ceased and the hammers fell silent in Sarah Winchester’s sprawling Winchester Mystery House.