Truth about the Winchester Mystery House

Spectral faces peer from walls and mirrors, and phantom hands grasp from cupboards. 

In her new Gothic horror movie Winchester, which opens in Britain next Friday, Mirren plays Sarah Winchester, a woman haunted by guilt and ghosts. 

“I feel their presence in the air, in the walls,” she says in a chilling whisper. “It has found us.” 

Yet the film is based on the disturbing true story of a haunted house that still stands today – and the woman who built it. 

Millionairess Sarah Winchester, 19th-century heiress to the fortune reaped by the Winchester rifle – “the gun that won the West” – was convinced her family was haunted by the spirits of the thousands killed by her company’s firearms. 

To appease their spirits Sarah began construction on a mansion, convinced that she would not die so long as she kept building. 

She slept in a different bedroom every night to evade haunting spirits, and built numerous fake toilets to fool ghosts, though the mansion had only one working WC. 

The Winchester mansion grew from an eight-bedroom cottage into America’s largest private home, a chaotic architectural jumble that continued to be built – night and day – for 38 years. 

Stairs go nowhere or lead into the ceiling, doors and cabinets open on to walls, balconies sit inside the house rather than out, and skylights rest in floors. 

Small rooms are built within larger ones, secret doors can only be opened from one side, several chimneys don’t reach the ceiling. 

A door on the first floor opens up on a deadly drop to the ground below. 

Rooms were hidden and lost behind fresh construction. 

Almost a century after it was built, a room was found in 2016 containing a pump organ, Victorian couch, sewing machine and paintings. 

A room discovered in 1975 housed chairs, an old phonograph speaker and had a 1910 latch on the door. 

The house, now known as the Winchester Mystery House, in San Jose, northern California, has 10,000 windows, 2,500 doors, 47 fireplaces, 40 staircases, 13 bathrooms and nine kitchens. 

It’s the legacy of a wealthy widow’s mind haunted by ghosts only she could see. 

“There are many understandings of her,” says Mirren, 72. 

“Was she haunted? Was she crazy? If you have made a fortune out of death, you have to pay the price – a psychological and a spiritual price.” 

Sarah Lockwood Pardee was 22 in 1862 when she married William Winchester, whose father Oliver founded the Winchester Repeating Arms Co in 1866. That same year her only child died at six weeks old. 

Oliver died in 1880 and when Sarah’s husband died the following year she became one of America’s wealthiest women, inheriting $20 million – worth around $450million (£315.9million) today.

More than eight million Winchester rifles helped forge the West – many of their victims being Native Americans.

Lamenting her family’s personal tragedies Sarah sought guidance from a Boston psychic, who convinced her that the spirits of Winchester victims were haunting her. 

The solution: leave her Connecticut home, move West and build a mansion to house the spirits. 

Sarah moved to San Jose – now the heart of California’s Silicon Valley – where she began construction of a home designed to be haunted. 

Legend has it that she held nightly séances to receive new construction plans from the spirits.

Others believe that she built the rooms to trap the apparitions. 

She employed shifts of 16 carpenters on the house 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, paying them three times the going rate to ensure their hammering never stopped. 

Her hastily sketched designs on napkins became towers, cupolas and rooms with no purpose. Much of the construction was plastered over the next day. 

“Sarah simply ordered the error torn out, sealed up, built over or around, or… totally ignored,” said one of the builders. 

In the movie, Helen Mirren’s haunted widow secures rooms shut behind wooden planks hammered home with 13 nails. 

“The spirits killed by the rifles, we lock them away,” she says. 

“Thirteen nails seals them in. I will do whatever it takes to protect my family.” 

In real life, Sarah made the number 13 an integral part of the mansion’s macabre theme. 

Chandeliers had 13 arms, clothes hooks sprouted 13 knobs, drain covers had 13 holes.

Many windows had 13 panes, ceilings 13 panels and stairways had 13 steps. 

Even Sarah’s will was divided into 13 parts – and she signed it 13 times. 

Spiders also crawled into the home’s design, in the window of the 13th bathroom, in fireplace grates and even in the Tiffany stained glass windows she had designed – worth millions today. 

The mansion, in Queen Anne revival style, grew to more than 400 rooms, standing seven storeys high until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shook the wooden home, collapsing several cupolas and its 100-feet-tall Observation Tower. 

Sarah survived but was trapped in a bedroom buried behind a wall of rubble until construction workers could dig her out.

The home that remains today is a physical expression of her chaotic mind, yet many of the rooms are magnificent. 

The wood-panelled grand ballroom, built almost entirely without nails, includes a parquet floor of six woods that changes colours with the light. 

The Crystal ballroom is wallpapered with sparkly mica. And the “Witch’s Cap” is a daunting conical tower whose purpose remains hidden. 

As Sarah confessed in a letter: “This house looks like it was built by a crazy person.” 

Yet not all see madness in Sarah’s sprawling construction. 

Winchester House historian Janan Boehme believes she was trying to provide gainful employment for her builders. 

“She had a social conscience, and she did try to give back,” he says, noting the hospital Sarah founded in Connecticut. 

“This house, in itself, was her biggest social work of all.” 

When Sarah died in 1922, at the age of 82, the builders put down their hammers and never returned. Rooms were left abandoned in disrepair. Some had spent their entire working life on that one home. 

Originally nestled amid 161 acres of apricot and olive orchards, the mansion today is a tourist attraction marooned between the eight-lane Interstate 280 freeway and a mobile home park. 

Much of the movie was filmed in Australia, but Mirren visited the house for exterior shots.

After touring it, she understood the guilt that might torment a woman whose fortune was built on blood. 

“I can only imagine that people who make fortunes to this day from selling armaments have pause at some point, especially if they are Christians: ‘Am I going to pay?’” 

The price of Sarah Winchester’s guilt is built into the walls of her mansion.