The house the dead built
Manteca, California. A chance to try what I was filing in my head under real Americana. Marching bands, fields of 12-foot corn, homemade sloppy joe. That week, people cared I was English.
Braving the optional lane system of the regional highways, we took a trip to San José’s Winchester Mystery House™. Expectations were low. Sounded a bit Scooby Doo.
The house — a mansion, really — was built by Sarah Winchester, widow of William Wirt Winchester, treasurer of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company who died of TB aged 43. (Him, not the TB). Sarah built the mansion with her inheritance.
As buildings go, it’s fucking weird. It’s ugly, for starters, to European eyes. America and Britain are two nations divided by Queen Anne architecture. Exhibit A: Winslow Hall (Buckinghamshire, England, lovely). Exhibit B: Carson Mansion (Old Town Eureka, USA, hideous). Clearly we’ve stumbled into a major Transatlantic taxonomical anomaly.
More significantly, it makes no sense. None. Winding stairways meet ceiling. Huge cupboard doors open up to walls. Upstairs doors lead to sheer drops. There are internal windows, nonsense circuitous layouts, and my favourite: a north-facing stained glass window.
The explanation peddled through the tour headsets was that Sarah Winchester designed the house to the exacting specification of her dead husband, as relayed by her spirit medium.
Winchester Mystery House’s oddities were designed to confuse the vengeful spirits that met their demise at the noisy end of a Winchester rifle.
Sarah’s private rooms — the only nice bit of the house — are surrounded by a labyrinthine buffer so the ghosts couldn’t find her.
Judging by the guestbook, visitors hoover up the stuff. And fair enough.
Expect jump scares. Peer into a nook and it’s very possible you’ll come face to face with someone peering into it from the other side of a wall.
Wandering around an old house which is a physical embodiment of fear is creepy.
Still, I wonder if she really believed those things. For all its oddness, there is some novel design going on. There are shallow stair cases that fill whole rooms, doubling and tripling back on themselves, built for the ailing Winchester.
There are conservatories with grilled floor tiles, with drainage underneath. Watering the plants? Go nuts.
There was a lively mind somewhere in the equation — living or dead. Pick whichever amuses you most.