August 30, 2008
Winchester Mystery House Tour
As promised, I am posting some photos. Arrived at opening time to find the parking lot empty. Here's a shot of my lonely little car. Was it even open? Yes, it was.
We were part of the first group of the day. There was about 9 of us total, which made it nice. No crowding.
There is actually two tours. One that takes you around the inside of the house. The other takes you around the grounds and down into the basement. If you combine them into one, you get a discount. We bought the combined tours. The first part took us into the house first.
Sarah Winchester was all of 4' 11" tall, and she had tiny doors built that were suitable for her. This is one of the first things we saw on the tour. Mike uis 5' 8", so this gives you an idea how short the door was.
There were two things going on while she was building the house. One, she had terrible arthritis and it was difficult for her to negotiate stairs, so she had staircases built with low risers, to make it easier for her to climb. This is a picture of one of them. You can see that Mike had to duck in order to go up:
The other thing was the hodgepodge of building. Doors that lead nowhere, blocked doors and bizarre cupboards, etc. It was rumored that she did this to confuse the spirits. What spirits? The spirits of the dead Indians that were killed by Winchester rifles. She lost her only child and husband within months of each other and was lead to believe that she was cursed and would be next. So, if she kept adding to the house, she would never die.
The next part of the tour, showed us the stairs to nowhere:
We were also shown what looked like regular cupboard doors that opened onto walls:
We also got to see what was called the $25,000 room. This was a room with doors and window inlaid with Tiffany Glass. $25,000 in 1884 dollars. These would be priceless now:
She also had some short railings installed. Just high enough for her to reach:
We were shown a couple of rooms that were never finished, as building stopped when she died:
There is a total of 47 fireplaces in the house. I got a picture of a couple of them. Absolutely beautiful:
As you can see from the $25000 storage room, she bought some beautiful doors and windows. There were others installed around the house. These are a few of them:
One of the many bedrooms we got to see was Sarah Winchester's bedroom. The Winchester Rifle company was pulling in around $1500 a day. You can see that she had money to burn and spared no expense:
She also had a "themed" room called the Oriental Room:
The following are pictures of some of the other rooms in the house:
When the 1906 Earthquake struck, the Winchester House was only 10 miles from the epicenter. The house took significant damage. Sarah was trapped in a room and it took her servants several hours to get her out. She closed off the damaged part of the house. This is why there are some staircases that are still "normal", like the ones in the following shot. As you can see, they are very ornate:
This is the last room of the tour. I wish I had remember our tour guides name. That is her, over to the side. All I can remember is that she was a retired school teacher. She did a great job.
That is all the photos I am going to post for now. The Basement and Garden tour will be in a future blog entry.
Posted by Valkyre at August 30, 2008 03:26 PM