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The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion of Sarah Winchester and firearm magnate William Wirt Winchester. This mansion has 161 rooms, including 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms (one completed and one unfinished) as well as 47 fireplaces, over 10,000 panes of glass, 17 (with evidence of two others), two and three.
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Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven, CT, around 1839. In her early 20's, she got married and several years later, Sarah gave birth to a daughter, Annie. Tragically, Annie died just a month later from Marasmus (severe malnutrition). From that point on, Sarah's luck only worsened. In the early 1880's, her father in law passed away and then her husband succumbed to tuberculosis a year later. Though she received an inheritance of $20 million - as well as partial ownership of the family's firearms company - she never remarried and was alone for the rest of her life.
A Boston Medium Psychic told Sarah that she should leave her home in New Haven and travel to West, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester Rifle. Sarah believed that she was haunted by the ghosts of the victims. Thus, she built a massive mansion to these ghosts in order to please them.
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In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the and began building her mansion. Carpenters (picture above) were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven-story mansion. She did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so the home contains numerous oddities such as doors and stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms and stairs with odd-sized. Many accounts attribute these oddities to her belief in ghosts. Environmental psychologists have theorized that the odd layout itself contributes to the feeling of the house being haunted today.
