SYSK Selects: What's with the Winchester Mystery House?

And she was as interesting as her house was. So um, hopefully you'll enjoy this one. Uh. It probably won't scare the pants off of you, but it's at the very least interesting, So check it out and enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and happy Halloween, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Go do what you're about to do, Chuckers and Jerry. Jerry's saying, uh, well, you put the three of us together,

me Josh Clark, there, Chuck Bryant and there Jerry. Yeah, and you've got stuff. You know. The Halloween edition. We got a big old tup of candy corn. Here we got have you Have you tried Starburst candy corn? My goodness, I don't like candy corn, and I like Star Wars candy corn. Now is it Starburster? Is it candy corn? It's candy corn with Starburst flavors, but not Starburst texture. No candy corn texture. Okay, some mad scientists threw it

all together. Interesting, Yeah, I'll try it. You got one. I have a warm one in my pockets, been in there for a few days. Perfect. Here you go, soften it up there. Oh that's delicious. Make a chewing Yeah, it's straw strawberry and lint. Yeah, it's exactly right. Chuck. Uh. Yeah, so we got candy corn. It's a Halloween edition, and we hope you enjoyed our Halloween episode. Our story. It's probably my favorite thing of the year that in Christmas episode,

we've gotta get cracking on the Christmas extravaganza. Yeah, work, running out of stories, I probably you know, I got one up my sleeve. I've got an idea. Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise we can just make stuff up. Yeah you know. Yeah, and then everything worked out okay because it was Christmas the end Chuck. Yes, have you ever heard of the Winchester Mystery House. I have, indeed, I have to thank God, because that'd be a surprise. If I was completely unprepared,

it would be I would be surprised. I can tell you that. Yeah, uh yeah, I've heard of it. I've never been there, but I would like to go for sure and check it out. I might. I might do that next time I'm in the Bay area, I might venture towards San Jose to check this thing out. Yes, well, I've already cleared it with you me that we're going next time. We're in the San Francisco area. Right, how far aways San Jose from San Francisco, I don't know close? Right? Do you know the way to San Jose? I do

not know the way to San Jose. Apparently, Um, but if I could find my way there, we would find the Winchester Mystery House, because apparently it sticks out like a sore thumb. I bet um. It was originally in some pretty rural area, and over time, the the acreage I think a hundred and sixty two acres is what the Winchester House grounds eventually covered, has been whittled away and now it's just like the suburbs with this enormous Victorian mansion situated in the middle of it. Yeah, and

when we say enormous, we mean enormous. Um supposedly about a hundred and sixty rooms. Even though, and I think this is part of building up the lore, some say they cannot be counted because you will get lost in the house and never get an accurate count and never escape. I say that's hokem, hokem, because hey, if you can put a man on the moon, you can count the rooms in a house. Yeah, and what do you suggest

using a post it note? Just put a post it note up and yeah, you don't even need to write that. Just the very presence of a post it note indicates you're you've been there before. Then counter all the post it notes, Right, you could just you could write the numbers on them. Even better, you wouldn't even have to count them. You just write one and then keep in mind the last number you wrote down the right, the next number that comes after that on the next post

It note. Right, And you know we should do it would be funny if we did a little video series where you and I are big smart guys tried to do this and we kept getting confused I would watch that. I would watch that over and over, and then we find the lost wine cellar, and everything's kind of peters

out from there. Alright, So what we're talking about, well, let's clue those of you who don't know what we're talking about in we're talking about the Winchester Mystery House, which was, as Chuck said, an enormous mansion of an indeterminate number of rooms. I think they estimate a hundred and sixty. But even um, the state of California on their tourism website says, um, it is an odd dwelling with an unknown number of rooms. A tourism website said that, yes,

because a tourist attraction exactly. They're trying to, you know, draw people in with the mystery of the mystery. Yeah. And the whole thing was the brainchild and the result of a four ft ten inch little uh firecracker. Yeah. Nicknamed the Belle of New Haven in her day, named Sarah Pardi who became Sarah Party Winchester. Yeah, new Haven, Connecticut. She's born in eighteen thirty nine, not New Haven, New Jersey. Um. And she was very smart, spoke four languages, could play

the piano like a champ with her elbows. Yeah, she's beloved. Um. She married in eighteen sixty two William Winchester of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, because it's a big part of the story, it is h they developed what was known as the Peter the Repeating Rifle, which is the coolest rifle ever. The Lone Ranger head one did he According to the Lone Ranger placet that I have, he did. I believe that he mainly used the old revolver though, yeah,

and the um, the cudgel. Yeah, the rifleman famous for the Rifleman used the repeater for sure. The Lone Ranger did too, okay, Um. But basically it was a revolutionary gun that you could fire really quickly. Um. And yeah, you can fire once every three seconds, which was pretty amazingly fast for a rifle especially. It was the gun that won the West, and it was the gun that helped the Northern troops defeat the Southern troops in the

Civil War. And when the west depends on your vantage point, but yes, it was the The westward expansion took place at the barrel of the Winchester Repeating Rifle. M So she marries William Winchester, heir to that fortune. Uh. They started family in eighteen sixty six and very very tragically lost their lone daughter, Annie in infancy, and it was something that Sarah never recovered from. Basically, No, it was

a pretty sad thing to see it. Apparently the child Um was alive for either twenty eight days or forty two days, I guess, depending on who you ask. Um, So she made it the term she was born, and then she died of a wasting disease called morasthmus, which is a disease of malnutrition. So no matter what they fed her, she just wasn't taking in the nutrients and she died of malnutrition. And at the time morasthmus was still mysterious, so it seemed like, what the heck just

happened to my kid? I'm feeding the kid. Also, here I go right along the edge of completely losing my sanity forever, and I'll never be quite the same again. But I'm gonna come back a little bit. And then when I do a few years later, my husband's going to die an early death at age forty three. Yeah,

fifteen years later to be exact. And Um, which, by the way, can I take a second here, Sure, so money wrote in, and I don't I can't find the email, but they wrote in for our dying podcast, we mentioned life expectancy and we said that, um, you know, we made the assumption that people used to um only lived at like age thirty or something like that, because the average life expectancy was so low. And this this person pointed out that that's not the case. That people typically

lived to old age like they live now. But the infomortality rate was so high that if you took all of the infant deaths and all the people who survived it and put it together, you had an average life expectancy of thirty. Right, So it's not like everyone was dying in their forties. They were dying in their ones and twos exactly. So if you made it out of your ones and twos, you would probably live a pretty long life. So that was the discrepancy that I never

understood until the person wrote in. So, whoever wrote in, thanks for writing that in. You didn't catch you a name or anything. I don't know. Uh so where are we? She she's lost her daughter, she's lost her husband. She's very distraught. UM goes and sees a medium which was a big deal at the time. Yeah, in Boston a man named Adam Coons, And which was strange that it was a male medium. It is because you know ladies, um, which is why they're all called lady so and so.

You know, uh yeah, like you know, oh Madam, yeah, or madam or like Lady Charlotte or whatever. Um, Lady Charlotte's who I go too. That's why I buzz marketed her. No, you don't, do you really know? I con see Lady Adam. Um. So anyway, she goes and sees Lady Adam, and he says, you're gonna be haunted by ghosts for the rest of your life because you married into a fortune of killing and murdering with that Winchester rifle. Remember haunting you Remember I said it was important that she married um Mr

Winchester right here, William. The Winchester family supposedly had a curse, according to Lady Adam, that all of the people who had died at the at the um other end of the Winchester rifle now haunted the family, and they had a listed demands that Sarah was going to have to put up with or else she would be gotten by the spirits too, and that's where the house was born. Basically, Yeah, the guy said, these spirits need a house, so you're

gonna have to build a house for him. More and more of people are dying from the the rifle that your husband's family created every day, so you're gonna have to make it a big house. And you can never cease construction. If you cease construction, you'll die. And there's two different interpretations here, and they're not quite sure how Sarah Winchester interpreted it, but whether if she stopped construction she would die, or if she kept construction going she

would live forever eternal life. Because the people who are into spiritualism, we're into that whole thing a lot too. But either way, she had her her walking papers, her instructions, um, and she decided to take them out west and follow her husband, who who she believed was leading her, who supposedly told her all this through the medium, and headed

towards California. Yeah, she visited had a Nissan Menlo Park and eventually found a property three miles west of San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley there and she said, you know what, I'm gonna buy this land. I'm gonna take this house and I'm going to build on it until forever. And um, Lady Adam had a his cousin was a contractor. That's not true. That would have been great though. Yeah, it's like, so you have to build and non stop. Here's my cousin, John Hanson. John Hanson

was in fact her foreman. Uh, even though Ms Mrs Winchester was her own architect, so hold on. So Mrs Winchester, um, who's just really slightly off a rocker now at the loss of her child and her husband has instructions that she is to move west, start building forever a huge house to how's the ghosts of all the people who have died at the hands of her um husband's company's rifles. That's where we're at right now. Before we're going to

further let's um, let's do a message break. Okay before we left, UM, I sort of hinted that she was her own architect, and she was. Not only did you hint it, you said it. Not only was she her own architect, but see she supposedly got instructions on building through seances, right, and she had an architect at first, but she fired him later on, apparently, I think, because he wouldn't listen to her. Oh, and she was like, look, I'm getting instructions from the other side. Pal are you

getting instructions from the inside. No, Well, then we go my way. So she had a seance room and UM, here's how she would conduct her seance. Would try and trick the ghosts into not following her and disrupting the seance um. So she would set out for the seance room. Um, she would traverse basically a labyrinth of rooms and hallways like she would push a button and a panel would fly up. She would step quickly into their shut the door.

She would open a window to that place, climb out onto like a flight of outdoor steps that took her down a story, come back inside like through a window. And she was basically trying to to lose these spirits that she felt like we're tailing her until she could finally get into her comforting seance room where she would receive instruction on what to build next. And then when she got into a seance room, which was the Blue room. It was at the center of the house and I

think the second floor. Um, she would get instructions I think from her husband, supposedly, and then also a spirit caretaker named Clyde, and she would get the instructions. At twelve there would be a bell rung that's when the spirits arrived at to another bell would ring, signaling their exit.

And she would do this every night, and then in the morning she would go meet the foreman Hanson, John Hanson, and say, here's what you guys do today, and he would go, all right, but we should say that all through the night, including at midnight at two and the time when she was sleeping after the seance and before she met Hanson, there was construction going on. Yeah, and um, like it was twenty four hours a day, sixty five days a year, including Sundays, including holidays. There was always

somebody doing construction on that house. Yeah. She she apparently like as long as she could hear those hammers nailing nails, then she felt at ease. Um. She would uh sign rooms that would be built on top of other rooms. She would build rooms apparently to get to those hundred and sixty rooms. They estimate they may have built five or six hundred over the span of those years, right, because if there was something that got in the way, she would either build around it have it torn down.

Sometimes there was even um it was even less explicable why a room would get torn down, but she would just order it torn down, even though say they've been working on it a month up to that point. Yeah. And the whole trick to all this is to pay well. Um, if you weren't paying well, then you probably would have had dudes walking off the job being like, you're crazy lady, I'm out of here. Right. She paid double the day, right, yeah,

which is three bucks three yeah. And so the construction dudes were happy to keep working on this what they thought was this crazy old lady's plans um and they probably frustrating, but that you know, they were getting rich or not rich, but they were doubling their money, right, And I think over time to Chuck like, I get the impression and that the people who worked for her, both the construction workers who you know, I mean like there would be once they came, they didn't leave unless

they were fired because the money was so good. Um. So when you work for some crazy old lady for twelve, fifteen, twenty years or whatever, like you're gonna start to develop a sense of loyalty. And they She was very much protected from the outside world by these people because her neighbors thought she was a total wacko, maybe a little evil who knows what's going on. She was very she lived in seclusion. She always wore black, she always wore

a veil. Yeah. She Uh. One of the first things she did was had built a private had a private planet around the entire house. But she was also very kind of children, especially orphans, would have them over for ice cream. So it's not like she was some awful, mean old person. She was just mysterious and liked her

privacy mainly. Yeah, and apparently once she moved into town, um a lot of the local charities started getting anonymous donations that they never got before she and she of course she didn't need all the glory, but she was still very charitable woman. Yeah, she had a bunch of money. Um. The reason she was able to pay double was um a big inheritance obviously about twenty million bucks and a lot of stock in the Winchester Company, and um it

afforded her. They guessed about a thousand dollars a day to spend on construction, which is like twenty grand now seven and change a day. Day. And this is the money mostly prior to the era of the income tax, So like that was all hers um I and she ended up spending I think five point five million on the house in nineteen two dollars. That's a lot of dough, it really is. But she didn't have anything else to do with it except give it away to orphans. That's true.

So um, all of this construction led to some very strange design decisions. And we should say this is probably a pretty good point to say, Mrs Winchester didn't leave any diaries, any journals, she was never interviewed. Uh. All we can say for sure is that she went to a medium in Boston, received these instructions that she had to build the house to appease the spirits, and that's what she did. Uh. Everything else is kind of conjecture,

like her motivations. Beyond that, the details of her motivations and what she thought and believed, um is conjectures. We should probably say that, UM. And there's a lot of room for misunderstanding. Like the staircases that she built had

lots of steps and they were like two inches high. Well, the reason that she did that was because she had very bad arthritis, and those are the only types of stairs that she could um climb, but they would also double back all of a sudden, or go around in crazy circles of A lot of people say that she thought that you could kind of screw with the spirits and throw them off your trail, I guess on your way to the science room. Um, by having ars constructor

like that. At any rate, there's a lot of weird design elements in this huge mansion. Yeah, the switchback stairs, Um were seven flights that rose only nine ft forty four steps total. She had stairs that would go down leading two stairs that went up stairs that would go into a ceiling. Chimneys that would stop short of the ceiling. Uh, you know, hidden doorways, covered up stairwells. It was just

sort of a big, beautiful mess of design. There was a there were doors that led from the inside out to the outside, but it would just be a sheer drop if you stepped out the door like that last step as a doozy right. Um. There was an inside door in the sands room, a closet door that opened up onto the kitchen sink another story below. Um, there was a corridor behind a cabinet that went along the backside of thirty rooms. It's just all sorts of neat stuff.

There's the very famous stairs that lead to nowhere. Yeah. Uh, there were cabinets or only like two inches deep. Um, there was a grand ballroom, and you know, it wasn't all just wacky stuff. It was like really gorgeous design in places. Um. The grand ballroom was built without nails, which was a feat of engineering in itself and was gorgeous, but never used because of an earthquake that was pretty significant in her life. In nineteen o six, there was

an earthquake that Um. She was known for sleeping in different rooms every night so she wouldn't be found out by the ghosts, and she was actually trapped in the Daisy room and not found for a little while by her employees because they didn't know where she was after

this earthquake cabin right. Not only did the ghosts not know where she was sleeping, her servants didn't either, So she was in there for a few hours and it f freaked her out, I'm sure, because despite the fact that it had like totally killed a lot of people in ravaged San Francisco and burned it down, she took it as a sign that the ghosts were mad at her.

Um that they were afraid that construction was nearing an end, and so to appease them, she boarded up a lot of the damaged um interior so that it could never be repaired and then therefore the house could never be finished. Um. We should also say that by this time the house had reached seven stories, and the earthquake was so bad it knocked off the top three I believe. Yeah, she ended up sealing the front thirty rooms of the home. Uh, including the front entrance to the home. These like grand

front doors that they had just put in. Apparently only three people the two guys that put in the door and her were the only people to walk through them before she sealed them off forever. Um. Well, she had a beautiful tiffany stained glass window installed and then built a wall behind it so no light can shine through it. Yeah, you can only see it from the outside. I'm sure

it looks kind of dull. And then after the earthquake earthquake, which I said freaked her out, Supposedly she went and lived on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay for six years. But that was nice. And then when she came back there was it was different like before, there wasn't necessarily much of a plan and so like if she ran into trouble architecturally she just teared the thing down or

build around the problem. This was like a different kind of frenetic pace and it was just like build whatever wherever. Um after the earthquake really got to her, just like crazy person building. Yeah, alright, chuckers, before we go any further, how about another message break? Okay, so back to it, Um,

here's some numbers for you. Forty seven fireplaces, seventeen chimneys, uh, two basements, six kitchens, ten thousand window panes, and four hundred and sixty seven doorways, and only two mirrors in the whole house because of course, ghosts are rate of their own reflection, and apparently the staff would sneak hand mirrors so they can occasionally see what they look like after getting out of the shower. But she didn't want to have anything to do with the mirrors though. Yeah.

She Um also supposedly would fire staff who saw her without her veil on. Apparently her butler, Um and her niece were the only people who could see her without a vail and if you saw her without a vail, no hard feelings, but you're cute. So we've talked a lot about the fact that she worked as her own designer and made all these weird, terrible choices that made no sense. But we also mentioned earlier on she was

a very smart lady. So she actually learned over the years more about design and architecture and got better at it um and developed a skill. And she actually had some innovations in her home that were brand new at the time. UM. For instance, they say she was the first person to use wool for insulation. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Uh, they had carved I had gas lights in the house that had their own gas manufacturing plant for the estate, which is brand new. And she had electric push buttons

installed to turn the lights on and off. She had an inside crank to open and clothes outside window shutters. First person to do that that eventually became the norm. Uh. What else she had she I guess it was sort of green at the time. She had drip pans under the windows and a zinc sub floor in the north conservatory so when you watered plants, the runoff from those plants would be captured by drain pipes for the garden

below it. It's pretty cool. And she had something called the Annunciator, which is a servant call system allowed her to summon servants from anywhere in the house and it would drop a little card to show the servant which room she was in at the time. That's pretty awesome. So it wasn't just crazy weird steps that lead to nowhere. There were actually some innovations at the time, and it was it's a gorgeous Victorian like when you look at it,

really really beautiful house. Yeah, and apparently the construction by the time she died took up six acres six acres of the house, not just the the grounds, because the grounds are like a hundred and sixty acres um. And when she she dies, finally it's a And apparently the legend has it that she died at a time when construction stopped. The workman took a break or something to play cards and never started back up again because they discovered that she died in her bed sleeping ino and um.

Right afterwards, she left everything to basically her nieces and nephews, and one of her nieces I think the only one who was allowed to see without a veil, came in and was like, let's just auction this stuff off, and um, it took six weeks supposedly to get everything out of the house because there was that much stuff and it was that difficult to find your way out and you

really got into the interior. Yeah, and some really valuable things too that were locked away in storage that were never even uh used, like you know, furniture and furnishings, just sitting and wait. Basically, didn't you say that there's a wine seller that's lost. Yeah, I think they can't find the wine seller to this day, which also sounds a little like lower to me. It does. Why can't you find the wine seller? I don't know, it's lost. Uh. It is a popular tourist attraction today and um, still

being renovated and maintained. Apparently it's continually being painted. The exterior is all year long. They finished painting it and they start once again, because it takes sixty five days to complete the job, I would imagine. So, and it's been a tourist attraction almost since she died. Like the house was sold to a group of investors who wanted to start it as a tourist attraction UM for a

hundred and thirty five thousand dollars. That's that is crazy, even though she dropped five point five million into it. UM And again like, if you're interested in this, you can go check out the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. UM. They have a website. I just imagine you type in Winchester Mystery House, but also look up UM something called Mrs Winchester's House. It's a documentary from nine kp i X I think is a San Francisco television station. It's

narrated by Lilian Guess. It's just a half hour long, but it's really spooky and black and white and just interesting. It's a neat one, very cool. Yeah, check that out. All right, so we're going, okay, let's go before that though, chuck. UM. If everybody wants to read this article, you can type in Winchester Mystery House in the search bar at how stuff Works dot com and we'll bring this up. And I said search bar, So that means it's time for a listener mail. Yeah, I'm gonna call this a sexuality.

Uh callback I just listened to your A sexual podcast. Guys, found it very interesting. One thing really caught my attention. You said a sexual rules were classified, there's a separate group outside the range of homosexual to heterosexual. I think it could be different. So Paul is proposing an idea here, instead of the range being in number line with a subgroup that doesn't fit, it should be more like a

coordinate plane. Not all people are equally sexual. I'm sure you know people who don't really think about sex often, and then people who it dominates a large portion of their lives. That made me think that it could be a coordinate plane with homo and hetero on the left and right, and a sexual too extremely sexual. I want to say nymphomaniacal even but I feel like nymphomania is more complicated than a born sexuality, or at least we don't know enough about it to say whether it is. Yeah,

so what is describing as like a plus sign? Yeah, so sexual orientation on left and right, and then the intensity of your sexuality going up and down exactly, so you can have like, uh, high homosexuality, low heterosexuality, and so on exactly. It's a good idea. I've actually seen

that elsewhere, to coordinate plane. It just makes sense. He says that way, all the people could be accurately plotted it to some degree, at least, not saying it would count for everything perfectly, but I think it would clarified a bit more. Anyways, I'd love to know your thoughts on that idea you just got him. Yeah, has it been done before or have you read about that? I

have not. I do not know. I saw in a paper somewhere somebody proposing that similar thing that it's um, who was it the the sex study year Kinsey Kinsey? Yeah that he yeah, he um. They really kind of missed a really obvious aspect of intensity rather than just orientation. It's just stuckt orientation. Dummy. It's a good idea. I agree. So Paul of Uniontown p a. Uh, we we think it's a swell idea. Get to work on it. Yeah, go Paul. Maybe you can call it the Paul Paul's

sexual plane. Paul's a one sexual plane and a girl. Yeah. Uh that's good. Thank you, Paul, Thank you for that. And if you like, Paul has some great thoughts ideas on things that we've talked about, more expansive ideas. Um, we want to hear them because we like that kind of stuff. You can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook, dot com slash Stuff you Should Know, and Hey guys, come

hang out with us at our website. Stuff you Should Have dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff works dot com