Valkyre

Winchester Mystery House Garden and Basement Tour

Took me long enough to get around to posting this. Sorry about the crappy pano shot. I just wanted a picture that would show the whole front of the house. Thanks for cleaning it up, Mike!

After the tour of the inside of the house, came Basement and Garden tour. There were only four of us. Children under a certain age aren't allowed to take the basement tour.

It started out with a tour of the stable and some of the outbuildings on the property. We also got to the the greenhouse, which is absolutely beautiful from the outside:

Sarah Winchester also made sure the guard dogs, for the property, were well taken care of. This was their doghouse:

You can see the grave markers, just off to the right, in the above photo. After we toured most of the outbuildings, we were brought around towards the front of the house and the gardens. This is a sideview of the house. Would be the left hand side, if you are facing the front. Just behind the palm tree, you can see the Door to Nowhere, on the second story.

This is a shot of some of the trees, in the garden:

Here is a view of the front gates. The street out front is Winchester Boulevard:

This is a shot of the front entrance:

And a close up of the front doors:

Two views of the house from the right hand side:

Then it was on to the basement. We had to wear hard hats, for this part of the tour. This was the only shot I got of our group going into the basement, unfortunately, it's blurry:

This is a shot of Mike standing up in the basement. He's 5'8". The basement was retrofitted with some pipes that hung down and meant we had to duck a lot. I'm 6' 1" and it was difficult for me. The other gentleman in our group was even taller and he hit his head several times. Good thing we were wearing those hard hats:

This is a look of the foundation of the house. When I saw this, I remember what our guide said while we toured the inside of the house. Winchester Mystery House was only 10 miles from the epicenter of the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake. I would not have wanted to be under that house huge during an earthquake:

As I posted earlier, there were 47 fireplaces inside the house. It would have been difficult for them all to be cleaned. It would have taken days. So, she had several fireplaces dump their ashes into one chute. And that chute would end up in the basement. I think there were a total of 7 chutes, which made it easier to clean. This is a pile of ash that is left over from the days when Sarah Winchester occupied the house:

After we exited the basement, there were a couple of more behind the scenes areas we toured. When the house was added onto, outside walls were not torn down. Instead they built around them. If you look closely through this framing, you can see the outside windows that were enclosed. This was part of the unfinished ballroom.:

Well, that concludes my tour. I wish I had brought along my laptop, so I could have dumped my pictures and taken even more. I ended up filling both cards. Oh well, that gives me a reason to go back. Mike and I would really like to go back on either Friday the 13th, or around Halloween, when they do night time flashlight tours.

Posted by Valkyre at September 6, 2008 04:06 PM