by Aaron Mahnke
In October 1860, one of the plant managers filed a patent for a new type of rifle. This new rifle would hold sixteen shots, and it didn’t need to be loaded by inserting gunpowder and a bullet down the muzzle. In an era when a well-trained soldier might be able to fire three shots per minute, this new rifle was a game-changer.
It was officially known as the Henry Rifle, named after Benjamin Tyler Henry, the employee who patented it. Although it wasn’t the most common rifle used in the Civil War, it was certainly the most sought-after. Infantry would save up their salaries for them or use their reenlistment bonuses, believing that its greater firepower might just save their lives.
It’s hard to tell if that hypothesis really played out in reality. What we do know is that by the time the war was over in 1865, the firearm had been so popular that William’s father went all in, putting his last name right there on the company and the star weapon it produced.
In doing so, he gave it a name that nearly everyone today has heard of: the Winchester Rifle.
RUNNING
What did Oliver Winchester name his new 1866 model? Creatively, the Winchester Model 1866. I know, not the sexiest name in the world, but it got the point across in a way that even Apple could be proud of. This firearm was new. It was better. While the Henry had been a hit, this new Winchester model came with a few improvements, and that only served to increase demand.
France would later buy six thousand of them, along with over four million cartridges. That’s roughly the same number of Henry rifles that sold during the whole span of the Civil War, all in one transaction. But it got better: when the Ottoman Empire needed weapons for war against the Russian Empire, they purchased forty-five thousand.
All of this success brought an explosion of prosperity to the Winchester family, but there were still moments of darkness. In order to put his name on the rifle and take full control of its financial destiny, Oliver Winchester had had to wrestle the weapon out of the hands of its creator, Benjamin Henry, who spent the rest of his life working alone.
The Model 1866 wasn’t the only Winchester born that year. Sallie—who at this point had dropped her childhood nickname in favor of her given name, Sarah—spent the first half of the year pregnant. In July 1866, she and William became parents to a baby girl. They named her Annie, after William’s sister.
But that was a joy they barely had time to soak in. Just nine days after she was born, Annie Winchester passed away, leaving her parents in utter and absolute grief. Most new mothers struggle with some level of postpartum depression—and many fathers do as well—but this was something darker. After months of anticipation, they’d lost their child.
Sarah fell into a deep depression. By some accounts, the loss of Annie was a blow that would take her years to recover from, although I’m not sure you ever fully come back from something like that. So when I tell you that the Winchesters had a new home built just outside of New Haven and moved into it a couple of years later, we have to see that move through the lens of her pain.
She was running. Starting fresh, in a way, offered her hope.
I imagine the next decade was a bit of a blur for Sarah and William. He worked as the treasurer of his father’s empire, watching the company coffers fill at a mind-boggling rate. The Winchester Model 1866 gave way to the Model 1873, which was even more successful, if you can believe it. It would become known as “the gun that won the West,” and it would stay in production for fifty years.
Sarah and William would never have another child. Maybe they just didn’t have the courage to risk more heartbreak. But that’s the trouble with grief; you can build yourself a world without risk, but nothing will stop pain from breaking in on its own. And in 1880, that’s just what happened. That’s when William’s father, Oliver, passed away.
If there was a bright side to this new wave of grief, it was William’s inheritance. The Winchester company, those overflowing bank accounts, and that incessant demand for more of their rifles—all of it translated into a massive windfall. In modern currency, William inherited close to half a billion dollars from his father.
He wouldn’t have a chance to enjoy it. Less than three months later, William Winchester died at the age of forty-three. Like a lot of tragic deaths in the nineteenth century, his killer was tuberculosis. The disease moved quickly, and when it was over, Sarah was alone. Alone, and looking for answers, because she’d lost her only child, her father-in-law, and her husband in a span of just fifteen years. Maybe that was normal in the late 1800s, but to Sarah, it felt unusual. In fact, it felt intentional.
We’re told that her deep grief in the spring of 1881 led her to seek out answers. The growth of Spiritualism had put mediums—those individuals who claimed to speak for and with the spirits of the dead—firmly in the public eye, and so Sarah talked to a number of them. Finally, it was a man from Boston, Adam Coons, who delivered an answer she believed.
Those rifles that had made her family incredibly wealthy had accomplished something else, something more horrifying; they had led to tens of thousands of deaths. And according to William’s spirit, with whom Coons claimed to be speaking, those deaths had cursed their family. But there was a way out, if she was willing to try.
William told her, through Coons of course, that she needed to follow the sun west. When she had traveled far enough, he would tell her to stop. She was being invited to do something she’d become so very good at: she needed to run away. So she did.
After selling her estate in New Haven, Sarah Winchester packed up everything and began her long westward journey, always listening for the voice of her dead husband to tell her she’d gone far enough. She crossed the Midwest and the Mississippi, the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. We don’t know how long it took her, but in the 1880s it was a journey that was far from comfortable and easy. Still, she did it.
When she finally stopped in 1886, she’d traveled all the way to California’s Santa Clara Valley. Once there, she purchased a small farmhouse on a large piece of property and then began to build a new life for herself.
But as you might have guessed, that’s not all she would build.
CONTAINMENT ISSUES
If Sarah Winchester’s goal was to escape the past, California was a great destination. It was new and fresh and so full of possibilities, and that made it ideal for someone starting over. The state itself had only become part of the Union less than four decades earlier, and the pain and conflict of the Civil War had barely left a scratch on the culture there. It was a brand-new world.
But you can’t run away from everything. By the early 1880s, the press had begun to look more compassionately on the Native Americans who had suffered under the march of westward expansion, and one of the things they pinned the blame on was the Winchester rifle. Without it, they said, countless lives might have been saved.
That’s not to say she rejected the wealth that came with her ownership of the company. The entire fortune her husband had inherited from his father was now hers, along with a large monthly income of $1,000, roughly $25,000 in modern currency. That’s monthly, not yearly. But don’t worry; Sarah had a plan for how she was going to spend it all.
The house she bought was a simple eight-room farmhouse. I doubt it was the structure itself that interested her. No, it had to be the 162 acres of land that surrounded it. That represented a lot of space between herself and the rest of the world. It was a wall made of distance, designed to keep the public out.
Her demons, though, were another story, and she was going to have to do something even more dramatic to keep them at bay. Back when she had visited the medium in Boston, the man had passed along another set of instructions from her dead husband. Build a house, he told her. Build a house that can hold all the spirits, and if you do it right, you’ll find peace.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that much of what we know about her meetings
with that medium comes down to guesswork. We don’t have transcripts, and Sarah herself never went on record with a detailed account of those conversations. This is the place where legend pokes its head into the story, like Kramer sliding into Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment. It’s there, uninvited, and now we have to deal with it. That’s how a lot of stories go.
What we do know is that Sarah Winchester started remodeling her new house as soon as she bought it. She had a bottomless pit of money, all the space she needed, and a whole lot of self-inflicted guilt, all of which powered the construction project. More and more rooms were added on, eventually expanding the original eight to a massive twenty-six. But she was far from finished.
A railroad line was added so that building materials could be brought closer to the house. Legend says that a team of construction workers toiled on the house every hour of the day, seven days a week. And she lived there, in the middle of all that chaos, managing the foreman and drawing up new plans herself.
Over the years, that house exploded with new rooms and features. The structure itself grew to become seven stories tall. And with no architect guiding the process with skill and logic, the results were more than a bit unusual. I don’t mean that things were crooked or poorly made; I mean that the house began to look more and more like an M. C. Escher drawing come to life.
For example, there are staircases in the house that lead nowhere, literally ending at a blank wall or a ledge that a person could easily fall off. There are chimneys that you can see from the exterior, but when you look for their corresponding fireplaces or stoves inside, they just aren’t there. You might come upon a massive door and open it, only to find a tiny closet. Or, because opposites are fun, you could open a small door and discover an enormous room. All told, the house has roughly fifty fireplaces, ten thousand windows, forty staircases, and two thousand doors.
Some people have speculated that Sarah Winchester was simply trying to confuse the spirits that haunted her. That somehow, if the home was illogical and unpredictable enough, those spirits wouldn’t be able to get out. They see the house as one giant puzzle box, designed to trap things inside. To prove it, they point to the near lack of mirrors, and the overwhelming abundance of objects with thirteen parts, like steps or window panes.
In 1906, nearly two decades after construction began, San Francisco suffered a massive earthquake. The entire front portion of the Winchester house, along with the top three stories, all collapsed, leaving portions of the house in ruin. Sarah found herself trapped in her bedroom, and when she was finally rescued, she ordered the collapsed parts of the house—a section with at least thirty rooms—to be boarded up and ignored.
The work finally came to an end on September 4, 1922, thirty-six years after it all began. According to one legend, Sarah held a séance that evening and spoke with the spirits in the house. Then she went to bed and never woke up. She was eighty-three years old.
Sarah Winchester had finally achieved her goal—she got away.
TRAPPED INSIDE
Sarah Winchester spent her life running from pain. That’s not something I’m faulting her for, believe me. Each and every one of us carries a bag that’s overflowing with regret or guilt or suffering. We’re all just too busy managing our own to notice everyone else is doing the same thing.
So Sarah ran. Maybe her story is powerful and unique because she took running to a new level. She literally got on a train and headed west, and then built walls around her inner struggles. Perhaps her story is attractive because she built a crazy house, or maybe because it feels familiar. She did what many of us wish we could.
What she left us with is a monument to forgetting. That eight-room farmhouse she purchased in 1886 grew into a complex maze of stairs and halls and room after room of space. Heck, it’s so confusing that there’s no official room count. I’ve seen estimates ranging anywhere from 148 to 161. If the stories are true, even the staff who worked for her had to use a map to get around.
There’s a colorful rumor that Sarah hid a treasure somewhere in the house, locking away a piece of her vast fortune for some intrepid explorer to discover later. But of course, no one has ever tracked it down, if it even exists at all. The truth is probably a lot more simple: most of her fortune was poured into the very building itself.
There are other stories, too. Legends without a lot of proof, but they’re threads that add color to the tapestry of Sarah’s story. They say that the moment the workers learned of her death, they just stopped and walked away, leaving nails sticking out of the wood. Visitors to the house today have noticed doors that shut on their own, cold spots, floating lights, and the distant sound of breaking glass.
Trust me, I get it. A lot of people view the Winchester House as one of those ultra-cool, can-you-believe-it’s-true sort of places. It’s fascinating and eerie and so very rebellious and insane. But when we simply stare at the house and marvel at its eccentricities, we risk missing the pain inside those walls. After all, a person built that house, however broken the reasons.
Today, the house exists as something more inspiring. Legendary author Shirley Jackson, who grew up nearby, makes mention of it at the beginning of her 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House. When Disneyland built their Haunted Mansion, they took their inspiration from the Winchester House. And of course, the building is a state landmark and tourist attraction, open to the public for guided viewings.
In the fall of 2016, the preservation team at the Winchester House made a discovery. It was a new room, one that had been boarded up and hidden away for over a century. Their best guess is that the room was one of many that were closed up and abandoned following the 1906 earthquake.
It wasn’t empty, either, but rather than finding that lost, hidden treasure everyone seems to whisper about, they found a snapshot of everyday life: a Victorian couch, a dress form, a sewing machine, and even a couple of paintings. It was a time capsule, locked away and forgotten.
Exactly as Sarah would have wanted it.
EPILOGUE
Sarah Winchester built her mansion as a way of confusing and tricking the spirits that she felt were chasing her. Some say that’s why there are only two mirrors in the entire house, while others point to the symbolic number 13 that pops up in almost every room in one shape or another, a number that was considered evil and acted like a ward, fighting off the ghosts of her past.
But did it work? Well, if the stories that have been told about the house since her death are any indication…it’s hard to tell. What’s certain is that even though the house is empty now, there has been a lot of activity reported inside it.
One tour guide once reported hearing an audible sigh as she led a group of tourists into one of the bedrooms. When she paused to listen closer, she claims that a small, dark shape drifted in through one door and then vanished around a corner. No one was able to identify the source of the sound, or find the mysterious shape.
Over the years that people have been visiting the mansion and its surrounding grounds, multiple witnesses have reported the sensation of being watched. Some have even seen a figure of a dark-haired man watching over them, sometimes from inside the house and sometimes outside. And while the witnesses and locations are always different, the descriptions of the ghostly figure are always the same.
One more revealing tale comes from a few years ago, when a contractor was doing some restoration work on a fireplace inside the house. According to his story, he was up on a ladder in a room all by himself when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to look, more out of reflex than any sort of expectation that someone might actually be there, but saw nothing.
A moment later, it happened again. Only this time the tap was a shove, and he almost lost his balance and fell off the ladder. Frightened for his safety, he said that he stopped his work, climbed back down, and didn’t return to that room for the rest of the day.
And honestly, it’s hard to blame him. With so many rooms in a place like the Winchester Mansion, they can’t all be empty, can they?
IN 1890, THE tiny Greek village of Messaria, on the island of Kythnos, was plagued by something otherworldly. Whatever it was, the villagers claimed that it would enter their homes, eat their food, break their dishes, and then move on to repeat itself elsewhere.
They named this creature Andilaveris, and they claimed it was a vrykolakas, a close cousin to the traditional European vampire. Andilaveris drank their wine and smashed their belongings, howling like a wolf and making a horrible mess.
But the most interesting feature of this story is that no one actually saw Andilaveris do these things. The villagers claimed to witness it all, of course, but they said he was invisible. He was, in essence, a noisy spirit, but the only cultural lens they were able to view him through was as a vampire. And they weren’t the first. Between 1591 and 1923, people across Europe told similar stories of an invisible monster that raided their homes and destroyed their belongings.
Today we see events like these play out across the screens of our local movie theater. Hollywood has been fascinated with invisible, violent forces since the early 1980s, when it brought us Poltergeist. What once was looked on as overly spiritual and easily disproven is now attracting the attention of popular culture.
But poltergeists have a history that runs far deeper than just the 1980s. From first-century Roman accounts to modern newspapers, stories of humans interacting with angry ghosts have been told for a very, very long time.
Some are clearly hoaxes. Some are misinterpretations of natural events. Oftentimes they are a grab for attention, or a cry for help. But sometimes—on very rare occasions—a story comes along that is nothing short of haunting.
