Sarah Winchester - Biography

Biography

She was born in 1839 in New Haven,Connecticut. Sarah Lockwood Pardee, a daughter of Leonard Pardee and his wife Sarah W. Burns. On September 30, 1862 in New Haven, Connecticut, Sarah married William Wirt Winchester, the only son of Oliver Winchester, the owner of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The couple had one daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, who was born on June 15, 1866, but died after a few weeks on July 25, 1866 from the childhood disease marasmus. Sarah fell into a deep depression following the death of her daughter, and the couple had no more children. Oliver Winchester died in 1880, quickly followed in March 1881 by William, who died of tuberculosis, giving Sarah approximately 50 percent ownership in the Winchester company and an income of $1,000 a day. (This amount is roughly equivalent to $22,000 a day in 2008.)

According to the legends surrounding her, she felt that her family was cursed, and sought out spiritualists to determine what she should do. A Boston medium, believed to be a psychic, allegedly told her that the Winchester family was cursed by the spirits of all the people who had been killed by the Winchester rifle, and she should move west to build a house for herself and the spirits. The medium is claimed to have told Sarah that if construction on the house ever stopped, she would join her husband and infant daughter. In 1886, Sarah moved west to California and purchased an eight-room farmhouse from John Hamm. It stood on 161 acres (0.65 km2) of land in what is now San Jose, California. Immediately, she began spending her $20 million inheritance by renovating and adding more rooms to the house, with work continuing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the next 38 years. She was fascinated with the number 13 and worked the number into the house in many places. (There are thirteen bathrooms, windows have thirteen panes, thirteen chandeliers, and so forth.) Contemporary scholars dispute the veracity of the claim that construction work continued, except for brief periods, after the 1906 earthquake.

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Sarah was trapped in her bedroom for several hours. However, when she got out, she told the construction crews to stop working on the nearly completed front part of the house and had her carpenters board it up, leaving most of the extensive earthquake damage unrepaired. Again according to the legends, she thought the spirits were angry with her because she was spending too much time decorating and working on the front rooms. Construction resumed on new additions and remodeling the other parts of the structure. Sarah Winchester's full-time address from the earthquake until her death was in Atherton, California. She visited the ranch and house in San Jose only periodically.

Due to constant construction and the lack of a master plan, the house became very large and quite complex; many of the serving staff needed a map to navigate the house. The house also features doors that open into walls, staircases that lead nowhere, the recurring number thirteen, and windows that look into other walls. There are two theories as to why Mrs. Winchester built such an unusual house. The first is by far the most popular and states that she built the house to confuse the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles. The second, much less popular, is that while Mrs. Winchester was an exceedingly wealthy woman and could build her house any way she wanted, she had no architectural training at all, so some of the oddities could be simple design error. The Winchester Mystery House is a National Historic Landmark, a San Jose CA historic landmark, and California historic landmark number 868.

In the 1920s Sarah also maintained a houseboat on San Francisco Bay at Burlingame, California, which became known as "Sarah's Ark" as it was reputedly kept there as insurance against her fear of a second great flood, such as the Biblical one experienced by Noah and his family, but a more mundane answer is that many people of her social standing in California at that time had house boats or yachts. The "Ark" was located near the eucalyptus grove at Winchester Drive, south of what was to become the intersection of Anza Drive and U.S. Highway 101. The ark was destroyed by fire in 1929.