San Jose, CA –
There’s something about eccentrics that fascinate us.
You know, those people that are just different.
They don’t quite comply with the accepted norms of society in some way.
Maybe in lots of ways.
Most of us don’t want to be one, but we still love to be entertained by them.
If you ask me, I think many of us envy them.
We are often burdened with trying to blend in with the crowd.
Trying to live and behave the way society expects us to.
And we respect and admire those among us who don’t care what society thinks.
It’s almost as if we see marching to the beat of a different drummer as an act of bravery.
An act of defiance.
Well, maybe it is.
Or maybe it’s more an act of fear.
I think it depends on the nature of the eccentricity.
I’ve long been interested in the Winchester house.
I’m related to Winchesters, and as a kid, my mom wouldn’t do anything to discourage my thinking that we were descendants of the Winchester.
The one who started the rifle company.
So, whether it’s true or not, I grew up believing that I had a gun manufacturer in my family tree.
Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.
At this point, it doesn’t matter.
But when I first learned about the Winchester house, it was personal.
Sarah Winchester, the widow of the company founder, became an eccentric Great Aunt.
You know, the kind that most families discuss in hushed tones, or keep locked away in the attic.
But not me.
No, I wanted to display this Aunt front and center.
After all, it’s not everybody that has a relative that builds a sprawling mansion for a bunch of ghosts.
It’s kinda like taking the concept of a spirit house to a whole nother level.
And it was something I could relate to.
When I was very young, I had a friend who lived in an eccentric house.
It was an old, two story house, with both a front and back stairway.
The front stairway was a normal stair, straight with a landing partway up where it made a u-turn.
But the back stairway was this winding, curving stair that turned this way and that.
And near the top, it split in two, with one branch turning off to the left and ending in a wall.
It was a stair to nowhere.
So, when I heard about the Winchester House, with it’s stairway to nowhere, it reminded me of my friend’s house.
Only much larger.
With many more odd features.
See, according to various legends, Sarah Winchester believed she was haunted by the ghosts of those killed by the rifle manufactured by her husband’s company.
So, she kept building and building on her house, either to accommodate the ghosts.
Or to confuse them.
Or maybe both.
Then again, maybe she just kept changing her mind.
After all, she was building on and changing this house for 38 years.
All without a plan.
So now, no one knows whether the stairs to nowhere actually once went somewhere.
Like maybe to another floor.
After all, the place once was seven stories tall, but now is only four.
When they tore down those extra stories, they may have left the stairways in place.
Only now they ended in a ceiling.
Or a wall.
And maybe that door leading outside on an upper floor was originally to lead out to a balcony that never got built.
Or did get built, and then removed.
Or to another room that is no longer there.
At this point, we can only speculate.
Since all of this building was done without any plans or blueprints, there’s no way to know what the intent was, much less how it might have changed.
All we know at this point is that there’s this one door where the first step is a doozy.
So, the question is, is the place really haunted?
Or was it just a matter of Sarah feeling an overwhelming sense of indirect guilt?
Good question, and one I don’t think has, or even can be, answered.
The fact that the house was built in the Victorian style lends itself to believing that it could be haunted.
But that’s just a stereotype.
After all, not all Victorian-style houses are haunted.
It’s just a style that has lent itself to many old horror movies and television shows.
So that’s more a guilt by association thing.
And if some ghost decided to visit, there are so many twists and turns in the house that the ghost may get lost and have to take up residence.
Of course, being a ghost, they could just start walking in one direction, go straight through the walls, and eventually get out.
But it doesn’t make sense to me.
From what I’ve heard over the years, ghosts tend to haunt the places where they died, not the people who were married to the maker of the weapon that may have caused their death.
That’s almost like the six-degrees of Kevin Bacon.
My character was killed in one movie by an actor who was in another movie with another actor who was in a third movie with Kevin Bacon; therefore I’m going to haunt Kevin Bacon.
I don’t think it works that way.
Still, it probably won’t stop them from playing up that angle in marketing of the place.
After all, when we visited, they were setting up their annual haunted gardens, where they bring in a bunch of bales of hay to build a maze in part of the gardens to use as a haunted house.
Why not?
It’s the perfect location.
Add some spooky lighting, and maybe a few cobwebs, and you’ve already got the atmosphere for a haunted house.
You just need to add the spooks and other scary stuff.
And maybe, if you entice it, you could get to include a real ghost in the scaring.
It’d be an angle that all those other haunted houses built in warehouses couldn’t compete with.
Maybe…
For more photos from the Winchester House, click here.
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