The Winchester Mystery House, in case you’re wondering, was built by Sarah L. Winchester, the sometime heiress to the Winchester (rifles, paint, flashlights) fortune. After the deaths of her baby daughter and husband, Mrs. Winchester purportedly took the advice of a doctor and moved West to the San Jose Valley to take advantage of the healthy air and sunshine. In order to assuage her grief, Mrs. Winchester was also advised by the doctor to find an all-consuming hobby, like building a house without an architect. Legend has it that the highly spiritual woman also visited a psychic, who advised her that the souls of those killed by the Winchester rifle would collect her spirit if ever she stopped building on the house. Or something like that.

Mrs. Winchester bought a farmhouse in 1884 and began construction/remodeling immediately. She hired carpenters and staff, and she paid them in cash daily. Two dollars was nearly twice the going rate for good help at the time, but the extra incentive was necessary to keep folks on the place. You see, not only was Mrs. Winchester eccentric, but at 4’11”, she was also mean as an imp. From 1884 ’til her death some thirty-eight years later, the sound of hammers never ceased on the Winchester estate.

Architecturally speaking, very little of the design makes sense, other than having the traditional Victorian overlay of multiple shingle styles, turrets, and such. For over an hour, our very fast-speaking guide (a nineteen-year-old Trixie with the requisite perky breasts and glittery eyeliner) pointed out every oddity in every room we entered: stairs that take you up to go up to go down (i.e., up, turn, up, turn, no landing, down), cabinets one-inch deep, windows into rooms, doors that lead to eight foot drops, stairs that lead to the ceiling, and skylights in the middle of the hardwood floor. The house, when one first thinks on it, is bat shit crazy.

The house is considered one of California’s Most Haunted Places. Houdini held a séance in a room Sarah Winchester built strictly for communicating with the dead (three doors lead in, but there is only one exit). Her favourite number was 13. She spoke with ghosts every night.

However.

The Behind-the-Scenes tour guide (yet another perky-titted, pouty-lipped Trixie who just wanted to be tied up and flogged ’til her mascara ran down her pretty little face… but I digress) cleared most of the building anomalies up for us. We’d been herded through over an hour’s worth of rooms, walking over a mile and a half through this estate, saying to friends and complete strangers upon every turn “What the fuck was this crazy biddy thinking?!” How silly we felt upon learning that Mrs. Winchester’s preferred building style operated under the motto of “Never Tear Anything Down.” So, rather than renovating a room by removing its outer wall and then building on, Mrs. Winchester simply added another wall — sometimes utilizing the existing doors and sometimes not, but always utilizing the existing, heretofore exterior windows. So. Sometimes doors open onto walls. Sometimes five windows peer into a bathroom.

As a corollary to the above axiom of “Never Tear Anything Down,” various outbuildings on the property were consumed by the building project. Water towers provide angled and slightly curved walls which make up some rooms. A barn, complete with a sloping floor and hayloft, becomes an anteroom connecting the carriageway to the interior of the house.

Economy of thought. Economy of materials. Economy of emotion. Economy of fruit. What? Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that Mrs. Winchester built a successful dried fruit empire in her little part of the San Jose Valley. Rich people are crazy. But they’re still rich.

Footnote: I imagine with no small amount of satisfaction that Sarah Winchester would have efficiently dispatched the Trixies, were she still around.