We walked past the “Door to Nowhere”, the stairway to the ceiling, and windows with no view. We were then taken to all of the usual attractions. We were only one floor up and the story was shorter than usual! The doorway also lead to a stairway with over 200 steps, going through turn after turn, and seemingly lasting enough time that we thought we had gone up as least two floors. From there we were taken through a normal sized doorway, although right next to it was a doorway that was only four feet off the ground which Sarah would walk through instead! It was incredibly odd to see, but apparently very convenient for her as the doorknob was closer to the ground and she could access it more easily. We started by walking through where Sarah Winchester would arrive on a normal day through the entrance where the horse carriage would show up. We hopped straight onto the first tour of the morning and we were off. To the right of the entrance was the gift shop where the tours formed. The vastness to the house was behind it however, hidden behind a beautiful yellow Victorian style facade, which in front of it laid a gorgeous garden. When we pulled up to the mansion, it was beautiful, however not quite as big as we would have thought from the front view. The destroyed parts are still in the same state today, although structural renovations have been done. In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake destroyed much of her home, which she took as a sign from the spirits that she was getting too close to completion, and ordered for that half of the house to be boarded up and to start adding to another section. She even had special doors built for her that were only a few feet off the ground, as she was an unusually short lady. Most of this was built as a way to confuse the spirits that were after her, going through great lengths to even stay in a different room every night and take secret passages to get from one side of her house to another. The labyrinth style mansion house is filled with 160 rooms, 40 bedrooms, stairways to nowhere, 15 foot drops into the kitchen, doors that open up to the outside, a seance room, and secret spying corridors that the paranoid Sarah could use to spy on her help. It started out as an 8 bedroom farmhouse, but once she began to be haunted by the spirits of all those who had been killed by her husband’s rifles, she transformed the farmhouse into $5.5 million renovation project that took almost 36 years, only stopping in 1922 on the day of her death. The Winchester Mystery House was built in 1886 by Sarah Winchester, the heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune made by her husband, William Winchester. So you can get a visual of what I’m describing however, I’ll use photos from, since they actually have photos of the inside! To start off, I went with my husband back in 2013 and I CANNOT for the life of me find our pictures!! To be fair though, we were not allowed to take any photos inside the mansion, only outside, so they would be fairly generic photos anyway.
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