Not to be confused with Winchester Cathedral...

I recall seeing the Winchester Mystery House featured on the TV show Ripley’s Believe it or way back when I was in high school. We finally got to see it for ourselves, driving to San Jose one rainy afternoon. The story goes that there was an eccentric millionairess Ms. Sarah Winchester who manically built rooms in her house, expending it from an 8 room house to a 100+ room mansion. The twist is that she built contraptions and secret passages to confuse the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester rifle, which her husband’s company manufactured. The under-the-floor contraptions turned out to be water saving devices. The secret doors led a commune-with-the-spirits room, where incidentally she could also eavesdrop on her household help. She was a weird woman, all 4'8" of her.

Actually visiting the place was creepy, sorta gave me an I’m-being-watched vibe and the entire house reeked of something old and dead. Being inside the house gave me no sense of location. After walking miles of stairwells that lead nowhere, winding corridors and passing through secret closet doors, I was exhausted. I wonder how dark and twisted Ms. Winchester’s mind was to design a monstronsity of a house.

Check out the official website of the Winchester Mystery House here.