HAUNTED PLACES / California

WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE,
SAN JOSE.

The Winchester Mystery House is a 160-room Victorian mansion in San Jose, California, built by Sarah Winchester from 1886 to 1922 and open for tours since 1923. The record and the legend are kept apart here, then the reports, the television visits, and how to run a session.

The history

Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1839 and in 1862 married William Wirt Winchester of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Their only child, Annie, was born in 1866 and lived a few weeks. William died of tuberculosis in March 1881, leaving her a large block of company stock. She moved to California on a doctor's advice, and in 1886 bought an eight-room farmhouse on 45 acres outside San Jose.

She spent the next 36 years remodeling and adding to it, most heavily between 1890 and 1900, when the house reached seven stories. She drew her own plans, and her letters show she sent her carpenters away for months at a time. The earthquake of April 1906 brought down the tower and most of the upper floors; she had the wreckage cleared rather than rebuilt, which is why some staircases and doors now end at a wall or open onto nothing.

Sarah Winchester died in the house on September 5, 1922, at 83. John and Mayme Brown leased the property in April 1923 and opened it for tours that June 30. They bought it in 1931, and a company formed by their descendants still owns and runs it.

The usual count is 160 rooms, about 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 47 fireplaces and 47 stairways; a sealed attic room opened in 2016 made it 161. It became California Historical Landmark No. 868 in January 1974 and joined the National Register of Historic Places that August; the landmark plaque dates construction from 1884, where the house's own timeline and Sarah Winchester's biographer say 1886.

Then there is the legend. In the familiar version, a Boston medium told the widow that the ghosts of everyone killed by a Winchester rifle were after her, and that she would be safe only while the building never stopped. That version was set down in Susy Smith's 1967 book Prominent American Ghosts; no one has found a record of the medium it names. The house's own timeline traces the first printed hint that she was building to hold off death to a San Francisco Chronicle story of 1895, and notes that she never said publicly why she built. Historian Mary Jo Ignoffo, author of Captive of the Labyrinth (2010, revised 2022), could not document a single séance, found that construction stopped and started many times, and calls the ghost story a century of marketing. The house itself says how much truth the stories hold remains a mystery.

What people report

Staff and visitors describe footsteps in empty corridors, doors that close by themselves, flickering lights, cold spots, the smell of cooking from unused kitchens, whispering, and the feeling of being watched. In the Grand Ballroom, visitors report hearing an organ. In the Daisy Bedroom, people describe sudden changes in temperature. In the basement, cleaning staff have said they saw a man in coveralls by the boiler.

The account that reached the news came in July 2013, when staff member Chris Turner filmed a chandelier in the Venetian Dining Room swinging for several minutes with no earthquake recorded; tour guide Suzanne Hirsh and four visitors said a second chandelier moved elsewhere in the house at the same time. The house told CBS San Francisco that nobody could account for it; SFist noted that no one could rule out a push before the camera started.

The skeptics are on record too. Joe Nickell, in Skeptical Inquirer in 2002, put the reports down to suggestion after a century of publicity, temperature swings in a huge wooden house, and settling timbers and wind; one reported ghost turned out to be a member of staff. Ghost Hunters, filming in 2005, said it found nothing conclusive.

Accounts of hauntings here are folklore and entertainment, not verified events.

On television

The house was filmed for Ghost Hunters in 2005, on the same California trip as the Queen Mary in Long Beach. Ghost Adventures filmed the fifth-season episode "Winchester Mystery House", broadcast on October 14, 2011, and returned for an episode shown in July 2016. BuzzFeed Unsolved: Supernatural opened its fifth season there with "Return to the Horrifying Winchester Mansion" on October 19, 2018, and Ghost Files and Project Fear filmed there in 2026. Watch The Twisted Tale Behind the Winchester Mystery House on Travel Channel's official channel, or the BuzzFeed Unsolved episode on the BuzzFeed Unsolved Network channel.

Visiting and running your own session

The house is open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas; check the venue's site for hours and seasonal dates. The Mansion Tour is a guided hour through about 110 of the rooms. A Basement and Attic add-on requires a hard hat, Flashlight Tours run after dark on selected evenings, and a Halloween production called Unhinged takes over part of the house each autumn. The grounds are wheelchair accessible; the interior is not.

The rules matter for a session. Photographs without flash are allowed inside on daytime tours; video and live streaming are not allowed on a tour. The house does not offer overnight stays or private paranormal investigations to the public, though it runs occasional public paranormal events. One person is known to have died in the building: Sarah Winchester herself, in her bed, on September 5, 1922. Treat it as her home, and as the workplace of its guides.

So a Spooky Box session here belongs on one of the house's evening or paranormal events, once staff have allowed recording. Set the phone down on a still surface in a room the group has moved on from, away from electronics and the crowd; the Grand Ballroom and the upper-floor landings are the quiet corners people name. Failing that, the gardens after your tour are the next still place.

Try a session there

Run a Spirit box session there with Spooky Box. The phone's sensors decide the moment and chance decides the word, each word shows the reason it came up, and a magnetic shift in a 140-year-old house reads as exactly that. Record the session as audio or video and replay it from any word.

Read next

• The Queen Mary, Long Beach: the ocean liner Ghost Hunters filmed on the same 2005 trip.
• Alcatraz, San Francisco: the island prison in the bay, closed in 1963.
• Taking a phone on a ghost hunt: what its sensors can and cannot measure, and how to run a session.
• The Spooky Box home page, and every place on this site.

Sources

• Winchester Mystery House: Timeline: the house's own year-by-year record.
• Wikipedia: Winchester Mystery House: the history, the legend's origin, the reports and the skeptics' view.
• California Office of Historic Preservation: Winchester House: the record for California Historical Landmark No. 868.
• KQED: After 100 years, the mysteries of the Winchester House endure: Bay Area public radio on the legend, with biographer Mary Jo Ignoffo, 2023.

Questions

Spooky Box is paranormal entertainment. It uses device sensor activity and a word engine to create atmospheric sessions. Generated words and sensor readings do not establish the presence of spirits or verified communication.