The Winchester Mystery House is a well-known mansion in Northern California. It once was the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester. It was continuously under construction for 38 years and is reported to be haunted. It now serves as a tourist attraction. Under Winchester's day-to-day guidance, its "from-the-ground-up" construction proceeded around the clock, without interruption, from 1884 until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased. The cost for such constant building has been estimated at about US $5.5 million (if paid in 1922; this would be equivalent to over $71 million in 2010).
The Queen Anne Style Victorian mansion is renowned for its size and utter lack of any master building plan. According to popular belief, Winchester thought the house was haunted by the ghosts of the people who fell victim to Winchester rifles, and that only continuous construction would appease them. It is located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, California.
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Famous quotes containing the words winchester, mystery and/or house:
“Up from the South at break of day,
Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,
The affrighted air with a shudder bore,
Like a herald in haste, to the chieftain’s door,
The terrible grumble, and rumble, and roar,
Telling the battle was on once more,
And Sheridan twenty miles away.”
—Thomas Buchanan Read (1822–1872)
“Like most vigorous-minded men, seeing that there was no stopping-place between dogma and negation, he preferred to accept dogma. Of all weaknesses he most disliked timed and half-hearted faith. He would rather have jumped at once to Strong’s pure denial, than yield an inch to the argument that a mystery was to be paltered with because it could not be explained.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“If you feed a man, and wash his clothes, and borne his children, you and that man are married, that man is yours. If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stoves, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.”
—Truman Capote (20th century)