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Winchester Mystery House

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Winchester Mystery House - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

Winchester Mystery House Opening September 12th

• September 9, 2020 September 9, 2020 By Jacob Gospodnetich
• Winchester News

WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE REOPENS SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12th WITH SELF-GUIDED MANSION TOURS

TICKETS ON SALE NOW

SAN JOSE, CA (September 9, 2020)—The Winchester Mystery House announced today that on Saturday, September 12th, visitors will once again be able to explore the 160-room mansion on a new Self-Guided Mansion Tour. The touchless, self-guided experience allows guests to independently navigate the world’s most bizarre home and expansive estate. Tickets will be available today at winchestermysteryhouse.com/buy-tickets and also include access to the estate gardens.

Said Walter Magnuson, Winchester Mystery House General Manager: “We are so pleased to be able to once again reopen our doors – all 2,000 of them! We have been anxiously awaiting the opportunity to share this iconic attraction with the public, and the Self-Guided Mansion Tour will allow our visitors to explore the various rooms like never before. This experience leverages the house’s unique design elements and provides guests with ample time and space to engage with the estate’s history while remaining compliant with social distancing guidelines.”

Winchester Mystery House management and staff have worked extensively to prepare for reopening. The new self-guided tour has been designed to prioritize the safety of guests and staff and is compliant with all current county and state guidelines.

Tour Hosts will be positioned throughout the estate to assist guests as-needed, but the experience will be entirely self-guided with educational and engaging audio and signage. To ensure social distancing protocols can be followed, tour groups are restricted to members of the same household, tour capacity has been reduced to meet the state guidelines for indoor museums, and the tour route has been modified to focus on the largest rooms of the estate. Additional safety measures include mandatory masks for all guests and employees, timed ticketing, a one-way linear tour path, and sanitization stations throughout the estate. For a complete list of health and safety guidelines, visit winchestermysteryhouse.com/health-safety- guidelines

About Winchester Mystery House For nearly 100 years the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, has stood as a testament to the ingenuity, singular vision and lore that surrounds its namesake, Sarah Pardee Winchester (heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune). Originally known as Llanada Villa, today it stands as an architectural wonder, a time capsule of a bygone era and one of America’s most celebrated haunted mansions. The estate is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is a California Historic State Landmark, a San Jose City Landmark, and is one of the leading attractions in the Bay Area. Since tours began in 1923, more than 13 million people from around the world have toured the ornate rooms of the Winchester Mystery House. It has intrigued visitors, scholars, and media from throughout the United States, and around the globe, with its combination of the beautiful and the bizarre, its story of heartbreak, tenacity and invention and its legends of the paranormal. For tickets and additional information, visit www.winchestermysteryhouse.com.

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Take a Free Virtual Tour of the Winchester Mystery House

The California landmark is closed, but you can explore its bizarre architectural features from afar

Brigit Katz

Correspondent

The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, is one of the nation’s most curious landmarks. Built by a millionaire widow over the course of 36 years, the sprawling mansion features more than 200 rooms , 10,000 windows, trap doors, spy holes and a host of other architectural oddities.

A popular tourist attraction, the house, along with many other cultural institutions in the United States, has closed to help curb the spread of coronavirus. But as Michele Debczak reports for Mental Floss , you can now explore the Winchester House from afar via a detailed video tour posted on the mansion’s website.

The narrated video tour spans more than 40 minutes, providing insight into the property and the mysterious woman who built it: Sarah Winchester , wealthy and reclusive heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which manufactured an innovative rifle that became a fixture of Westward expansion.

Sarah Lockwood Pardee married into the Winchester family in 1862. Four years later, she gave birth to a daughter, Annie, who died about a month later. Her husband, William Wirt Winchester, died in 1881, leaving his widow with a vast fortune: 50 percent ownership in the Repeating Arms Company and a $20 million inheritance.

Winchester decided to leave her home in New Haven, Connecticut, and head to California, where two of her sisters lived. In San Jose, she purchased an eight-room farmhouse that she began to renovate in 1886. The construction project continued until Winchester’s death in 1922, producing an enormous, labyrinthine mansion filled with logic-defying features: staircases that end at the ceiling, indoor balconies, skylights built into floors, doors that open onto walls. The designs, wrote Pamela Haag for Zócalo Public Square in 2016, were Winchester’s; she sketched them onto napkins or pieces of brown paper, then handed them over to a team of carpenters. Sometimes, she would have features built and plastered over the next day.

Exactly why Winchester embarked on this dizzying cycle of building, undoing and rebuilding is impossible to say. Popular lore has it that she was a keen follower of the Spiritualist movement , which was rooted in the idea that dead souls can interact with the living, and consulted a medium who told her she had been cursed by victims of Winchester rifles . The medium reportedly instructed her to constantly build a house for these ghosts. If construction ever stopped, she would die.

But as Katie Dowd of SFGate points out, there is “scant proof” for this theory. Winchester could have been engaging in an eccentric brand of philanthropy, as she built her home during an economic depression, and the continuous construction project provided jobs for locals. When she died, in fact, the heiress left most of her money to charity.

“She had a social conscience and she did try to give back,” historian Janan Boehme told Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times in 2017. “This house, in itself, was her biggest social work of all.”

The true nature of Winchester’s motivations is likely to remain a mystery. But as the video tour points out, the house she built was not only bizarre—it was innovative. Take, for example, the north conservatory. Winchester loved to garden, so the conservatory featured an indoor watering system and wooden floorboards that could be lifted up to water plants resting below.

Though visitors can watch the video tour for free, the Winchester Mystery House is asking visitors to consider purchasing a voucher for use at a later date.

“Like many other [Bay Area] businesses, closing our doors until April 7th will severely impact the employees who maintain the estate,” the website explains . “Come when you are ready, but please come!”

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Brigit Katz | | READ MORE

Brigit Katz is a freelance writer based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including NYmag.com, Flavorwire and Tina Brown Media's Women in the World.

The Winchester Mystery House: California’s Original Haunted Mansion?

A creepy house, stairways to nowhere, fake doors, séance rooms, and tales of mysterious spirits; you may be thinking that this sounds like a visit to the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland, but California has its own original haunted mansion in San Jose; the Winchester Mystery House. 

I have known about this famous mansion since I was a child.  Many years ago, a publishing company put out a series of books that featured cut-out paper models of various haunted, mysterious houses.  I took the time to meticulously put together a model of the Winchester Mystery House.  I even remember that one of the windows had Sarah Winchester peering out from behind a curtain.  I often wondered what it would be like to visit the real home.  Almost fifty years later, I had the opportunity to do that with my daughter.

The United States has many unique roadside attractions throughout the country that focus on the strange and unusual.  Mysterious houses designed and constructed by eccentric owners are featured in almost every state.  Each of these homes is a mixture of history, folklore, and P.T. Barnum.  There is the Lizzie Borden House in Massachusetts, Craig-E-Clair Castle in New York, the Asa Packer Mansion in Pennsylvania, the House on the Rock in Wisconsin, Coral Castle in Florida, and the actual home of P.T. Barnum in Connecticut. 

But, at the top of any list of creepy homes in the United States is always the Winchester Mystery House.  I genuinely enjoy visiting and seeing places that have become a part of American folklore.  I often find that they have an interesting back story and often reveal a great deal of cultural history.

The story of the Winchester House usually focuses on the eccentricities of its builder, Sarah Winchester.   Sarah Lockwood Pardee became Sarah Lockwood Winchester in 1862 when she married William Wirt Winchester, the treasurer of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and the only son of its founder Oliver Winchester. 

In 1866, Sarah and William had one daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, but she died only one month after her birth.  William Wirt Winchester died at the age of 44 of tuberculosis soon after the death of his father and mother.  Sarah’s inheritance was said to be more than 20 million dollars and included a 50 percent stake in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.  In 1881, Sarah was one of the wealthiest women in the world.

A few years after the death of her husband, Sarah left her home in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1885 to relocate to San Jose , California.  Most likely, she moved west to live in a drier and warmer climate due to problems with rheumatoid arthritis, an illness that plagued her all her life.  Here she purchased an eight-room farmhouse and ranch in 1886, which she called Llanada Villa.  This would eventually become the Winchester Mystery House. 

Over her lifetime until she died in 1922, Sarah expanded and renovated her home until it grew in size to 24,000 square feet and featured 160 rooms.  Most of Llanada Villa was built in the Queen Anne Revival style, but some sections featured Victorian, Gothic, and Romanesque features.  Originally, Sarah hired the services of two architects but eventually dismissed them and drew up many plans for her home herself. 

She died on September 5, 1922, of heart failure.  Most of her wealth was donated to charity and her niece, who inherited the contents of her home, which she quickly auctioned off.

Why is the Winchester House so famous?

The legacy of the Winchester Mystery House is embedded in its many unusual architectural and interior design novelties.  Today the home is known for its maze-like labyrinth of rooms, walled-off exterior windows, doors to nowhere, stairways that end in a ceiling, trap doors in the floor, unfinished spaces, a bell tower rebuilt many times, ghostly music, architectural features that appear 13 times, stairways with 3-inch risers, and spider-web motif windows. 

The legend of Sarah Winchester and her unusual mansion was propagated soon after her death.  Whether true or not, the mystique surrounding Sarah Winchester and her home has grown to include supposed hauntings, frequent séances, and claims of obsessive superstitions.  Coincidentally, the period in which Llanada Villa was built coincided with the popularity of spiritualism in the United States.  The mysteriousness of séances, speaking with the dead, and ghostly encounters captivated the fascination of many Americans during the early 1900s.  It is not surprising that the uniqueness of the Winchester House became associated with the legacy of these practices. 

Today, a deeper dive into the current research on the home questions the truthfulness of many of the mysteries and attributes much of the notoriety of the Winchester House to exaggeration, misrepresentation, and overly sensationalized promotion.

Knowing very few details about the history of the Winchester Mystery House, my daughter, Liz, and I booked a weekday noon tour and drove from San Francisco to San Jose . The Winchester Mystery House is just off Highway 280 and across the street from Santana Row .

How much does it cost to go into the Winchester House?

A 1 hour 5 minute guided tour of the Winchester House costs $41.99 for adults, $34.99 for seniors,  and $19.99 for children 5-12.

We joined a group guided tour that included 12 other people.  Our tour guide was entertaining and energetic as she led us on a 65-minute scripted tour of the mansion.  Along the way, we encountered a lot of unusual spaces, strange-looking rooms, quirky construction features, and stories of peculiar behavior by the mansion’s owner.  Our guide also enhanced the strange and unusual parts of the home with corny jokes, intriguing ideas, and spooky suggestions.  Even though it seemed a little too well rehearsed at times, all in all, it was a lot of fun.

In many ways, the house was not what I expected.  The first part of the home took us through the later construction in the back of the house.  The rooms appeared to be an eclectic collection of fully and partially constructed spaces.  The quality of the construction did not seem mansion-like to me in that the rooms did not display wealth or exceptional architectural features. 

On the other hand, the front and older parts of the home had a traditional mansion feel to them and featured some well-furnished rooms for entertainment.  We saw a ballroom, formal dining room, sitting rooms, organ, stained glass windows, chandeliers, and rooms finished to impress visitors.  This part of the mansion displayed wealth and taste.

The most notable date in the construction of Llanada Villa was April 18, 1906, when the great San Francisco earthquake caused tremendous devastation throughout the region, and Sarah Winchester’s home suffered severe damage.  The house was forever changed when chimneys collapsed, a wing was destroyed, and a prominent seven-story tower toppled down.  Damage from the earthquake can still be viewed at the property even today, and the mansion was never restored to its former prominence. 

After the dwelling was returned to a livable condition in 1910, Sarah did very little work on her residence in San Jose until she died in 1922.  Amazingly, the Winchester House became a tourist attraction shortly after Sarah’s death.  With the quarters in much disrepair, a group of investors purchased the home and leased it to John and Mayme Brown.  They immediately turned the structure into a tourist attraction and eventually purchased the property in 1931.  Even Harry Houdini visited the structure in 1924, and it’s remembered that he suggested promoting the dwelling as a mystery house.  Later owners of the dwelling began to insinuate rumors, enhance stories with exaggerations, and propose links to the supernatural to create the mystique of a mysterious haunted house.

My daughter and I agreed that the house undoubtedly felt creepy, but not scary.  Many of the rooms were dark, unremarkable, and surprisingly small.  We did feel like we were walking through a maze as we took a spiraling tour that included various ups and downs, but is also possible the route we followed was intended to create this effect. 

For every claim about the mysteriousness of the home, there has been research to indicate that much of the legacy of the property was the result of exaggeration, conjecture, and over-promotion.  Historical research has revealed there is little evidence that Sarah suffered from guilt from the money she inherited from the gun business. 

The tale that she believed she had to keep building or she would experience death is not backed up by the actual construction record of the building.  There are no records of séances being held in the house and staff members claimed that Sarah had no interest in them.  Sarah’s relatives did not back up the claims of her being superstitious and her reclusiveness may have been due to her many physical ailments.  It is also likely that the labyrinth construction of the home may have been the result of making the home functional after the earthquake.  Furthermore, there are very few actual recorded incidences to back up the claims of the home being haunted by spirits.

If you are in or near San Jose , you should investigate the Winchester Mystery House for yourself.  Today, a private company called Winchester Mystery House, LLC manages the home on behalf of the Brown family that purchased the home back in 1931.  The home is open daily except for Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

On most days, two types of tours are offered, the Guided Mansion Tour and the Walk with Spirits Tour.  The Mansion Tour takes guests around 110 of the 160 rooms and provides visitors with background information on Sarah Winchester and the construction of her home.  The Spirits Tour invites guests to look beyond the ordinary by experiencing a wake in the parlor of the house, taking part in a Victorian-era séance on the third floor, and ending in the dark, spooky basement of the home. 

All tours are 1 hour and 5 minutes in length.  In addition to daily tours, guests are encouraged to stroll around the property by taking the self-guided Sarah’s Garden Tour.  In true roadside attraction fashion, all visitors exit through an extensive gift shop featuring a variety of souvenirs.

Throughout the year, the Winchester Mystery House organization also hosts seminars and special speaker programs that focus on the supernatural.  Of course, Halloween is a big deal at the mansion.  From late September until the end of October, the Mystery House has a special guided night-time haunting experience called “Unhinged: Housewarming” that centers around the story of a Hollywood couple who purchase the house.  The spooky evening begins with a garden party and progresses through a haunted tour of the premises.  Halloween tours are very popular and book up quickly.

So what is the truth about the Winchester Mystery House?  It would be difficult for anyone to give a definitive assessment of the motivations of Sarah Winchester since she was a private person who did not reveal much to the public.  Her home was probably a reflection of her personality.   What I do know is that she left us with a mystery and an unusual home as an artifact. 

The Winchester Mystery House is in many ways the perfect American roadside attraction in that it is a combination of history and folklore built around the eccentricities of a mysterious, private person.   It is everything we love in a great story.

My daughter and I found visiting the Winchester Mystery House to be an entertaining way to spend an afternoon.  Overall, the presentation about Sarah Winchester was informative and intriguing while the home offered a view into the history of the early 1900s in California. 

At the end of the tour, I could not decide whether the legacy of the home was the tale of an eccentric person, over-the-top promotion, or a misrepresented widow trying to find purpose in her life.  I don’t think anyone will ever know, but I suspect that the truth, like most things in life, lies somewhere in the middle.  The Winchester Mystery House is a great piece of American history and folklore, but even more so, it’s a fantastic and captivating story worth experiencing!

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• House Tours

Winchester Mystery House

Most of the tourists who visit the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, come for its spooky associations. Architecture buffs, on the other hand, are in for a jaw-dropping tour of Aesthetic Movement architecture and decoration. Built over and around a modest Victorian farmhouse, the mansion took 38 years to create (1884–1922) and was never really finished. The cost was $5 million, or $71 million in today’s currency. It is spectacular.

Turrets and bays, balconies with fancy railings, irregularly shaped windows, and a “door to nowhere” together create a rich Queen Anne fantasy. From the roof on down, every surface is exuberantly ornamented with fish-scale shingles, ball-and-spindle decorations, turnings, carvings, and board siding at the base.

William Wright

The museum house is privately owned and heavily visited. The story told is that Sarah Winchester, widow of rifle heir William Wirt Winchester, was encouraged, during a séance, to leave Connecticut and head to California, to build an eccentric home for the spirits of all those killed by Winchester firearms. Money was no object: Sarah had inherited $20 million ($520 million today) and also had an income from her shares in the company—the equivalent of $26,000 a day in today’s currency.

Whether Sarah believed in ghosts, or was a mathematics prodigy dabbling in labyrinths and encryption, the house she built is a puzzle. It’s true that staircases spiral—or dead end; that doors open to nowhere; that the prime number 13 and spider webs are favorite motifs.

Beginning her project in 1884, Sarah Winchester (working without an architect or any blueprints) embraced the era’s popular Aesthetic Movement design. A challenge to the rigidity of classical art, the movement that started in England a decade earlier stood for “art for art’s sake,” welcoming beauty and the contemplation of beauty. It is the opposite of utilitarian design. Its architectural equivalent became known as the Queen Anne Revival, which morphed into the even more ornamental American Queen Anne style. Houses are picturesque, asymmetrical, heavily textural, and embellished.

Inside the house, gold and silver chandeliers hang from coffered and decorated ceilings over parquet flooring. Artful windows by Tiffany & Co. illuminate rooms filled with Anglo–Japanese pattern, lustrous Victorian tile, embossed Lincrusta wallcoverings, and carved wood.

Now four storeys, the house had a seven-storey tower before the 1906 earthquake, evident in this archival photo. Today Winchester Mystery House comprises 24,000 square feet in 160 rooms.

Courtesy Winchester Mystery House

The Aesthetic Movement & Queen Anne Style

Inside and out, every surface was ornamented. Color, texture, panelizing, and carving or embossing come together in a beautiful tapestry. Both Stick or Eastlake-style houses and American Queen Anne houses feature a multitude of architectural elements:

Terrell Lozada

• Steep, irregular rooflines may have cross gables, hips, and dormers. Roofs are further embellished with spires and pendants, iron cresting, and perhaps a griffin or dragon perched at the ridge end.

• Towers and turrets , with fancy-shaped roofs, are relatively common.

• Windows are generous in size and variety: find irregular shapes, muntin patterns, bows and bays, oriels, horseshoe windows, and Queen Anne sash with multiple square panes, often with colored glass.

• Surfaces burst with texture and embellishment : fancy-butt shingles, pebble-dash stucco, half-timbering. Shingles on roof and walls may create patterns or be polychromatic.

• Ornamental carving includes motifs from starbursts and sunflowers to more geometric Eastlake designs.

• Besides all the trim, woodwork extends to ball-and spindle spandrels and decorated balustrades on verandahs and balconies .

Embossed Wallcoverings

Metallic paper, wood trim, a Lincrusta dado, and hand-worked lace come together in the dining room.

A sturdy wallcovering made from linseed oil and wood flour, Lincrusta–Walton was invented by the Englishman Frederick Walton in 1877. Similar to linoleum—patented by Walton in 1860—Lincrusta is embossed with steel rollers to create a decorative, three-dimensional surface. (A similar wallcovering made of embossed paper is called Anaglypta.)

Complex patterns are a hallmark of Aesthetic interiors; here, the wood cove has gilded beading and carved sunflowers.

Sarah Winchester fell in love with Lincrusta , and bought dozens of rolls in myriad patterns, more than she could ever use. Around 70 rolls, many still in their original wrapping, are displayed in her storage room. Patterns range from Celtic knots to Anglo–­Japanese waves and moons. Following the Aesthetic mantra of More Is More, Winchester covered ceilings, dadoes, and entire walls in a riot of patterns to create rooms rich in texture and stylized ornament. Lincrusta is sold unfinished and meant to be paint-decorated: to resemble tooled leather or carved wood, or to be polychromed, glazed, or gilded.

The Cult of Japan

Following the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1853, Japanese art and objects were displayed and admired in England and America. Concurrent with the Aesthetic Movement, a derivative style called Anglo–Japanese soon emerged, blending asymmetrical geometry with such oriental motifs as bulrushes, waves, crescent moons, stylized “cracked ice,” owls, dragons and sea serpents, frogs, and spider webs. Flowers are common, too, and carry meaning: chrysanthemums stood for truth and grief, lilies for devotion, and sunflowers for good luck.

Many stained-glass windows were never installed, and today are displayed in Sarah’s storage room.

Stained & Leaded Glass

 A set of three beveled-crystal windows was commissioned in 1890.

Stained and leaded art glass is an important component of Aesthetic Movement design; colors are rich and motifs opulent. Scenes were often painted on the glass: bats in a night sky, owls perched on the crescent moon, swallows diving, along with sunflowers, chrysanthemums, and lilies. Sarah Winchester herself designed a spider-web window. A window by Tiffany has richly beveled and leaded-glass panes, meant to allow sunlight to cast a rainbow across the room; it was, however, installed on an interior wall, negating the effect. Much of the Winchester glass is stockpiled in a storage room. In the past four decades, glass has been expertly repaired, flattened, and reinforced by Mark Walton of Walton Art Glass ( waltonartglass.com ).

A carved, openwork screen creates a secret porch in the South Turret. Ball-and-spindle fretwork is found in spandrels above the screen and in brackets. Dubbed Winchester Gold, the ocher resembles the original body color.

With ornate beveled glass, the front door is a tour de force set within a carved redwood archway. 

Woodwork—in the form of mouldings and trim, mantels, staircases, and carvings—was a critical component of rooms in the Aesthetic taste. Bold and dark, it girds the decorative embellishments on walls, ceilings, and furnishings. While the exterior of Winchester House is largely built of redwood, painted over, interior elements and trim also introduce a mix of hardwoods.

Bradbury’s ‘Herter Ceiling’ is used on the wall fill above the Lincrusta dado.

In the lavish Grand Ballroom, the wood species used for the dominant Eastlake-style wall cladding are probably white ash and chestnut. Mantels in the Front Parlor and Dining Room are most likely cherry with a once-glossy varnish finish.

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SOLD OUT: Experience a historic first as the Winchester Mystery House opens its doors to the public for an exclusive Paranormal Investigation within its darkened halls. With decades of speculation and stories of spirits lingering around every corner and corridor we invite you to explore the world of the unexplained. Adopting a skeptical and data driven methodology to investigating the paranormal join TAPS West Coast, seasoned investigators featured on TV Shows such as “Ghost Hunters” for a 2-hour hands-on ghost hunt for evidence of the paranormal. 

Whether you’re a skeptic seeking proof or a believer eager to communicate with spirits, our small group paranormal investigation offers an unparalleled opportunity to try to connect with the supernatural in an intimate setting. Tickets on sale now!

Experience Includes:

After Hours Investigation

Each Paranormal Investigation ticket grants you exclusive after hours access to the haunted halls of Winchester Mystery House with a 2-hour hands-on ghost hunt with TAPS West Coast, and the opportunity to investigate paranormal hot spots within the mansion, armed with a personal EMF reader.

INvestigation Tools

TAPS West Coast will provide and demonstrate tools for the exploration, which will include EMF readers, REM-PODs, spirit boxes and more. Each group will receive a few of their own EMF readers to use throughout the journey.

SMALL GROUPS with TAPS

This intimate experience is designed for the select few who are brave enough to join us. Our small group experience ensures for personalized encounters with TAPS West Coast, giving you the opportunity to have close connections with them and your fellow ghost hunters.

Investigation Report

Your adventure doesn’t end when the lights come on, as each investigation will be video and audio documented. Following your investigation, we will be providing guests with a complimentary digital report of the footage from the investigation, courtesy of TAPS West Coast. The report will include overall nightly findings and recaps of the investigations.

Investigation Rooms:

– All guests are required to have a ticket to enter the property.

– No outside food or drinks will be allowed.

– Smoking and open flames are prohibited on the estate.

– Guests who show signs of intoxication or who present a safety hazard to themselves, others, and the estate will not be admitted or may be asked to leave.

– Large bags and backpacks will not be allowed.

– Due to the tour going into the basement, hard hats may be required. For safety reasons, in order to enter the basement, all guests must be able to walk on their own.

– Please be aware this experience is dimly lit.

– Ticket holders acknowledge all risks associated with the experience and agree to abide by all rules and instructions.

– We reserve the right to stop the Paranormal Investigation experience at any time. Failure to follow posted rules or staff directions may result in removal from the estate without a refund.

A: To secure your limited release spot for the Paranormal Investigation, simply visit our website and follow the provided “Buy Tickets” link to purchase tickets. Select your preferred date and entry time to ensure availability. 

A: Each Paranormal Investigation ticket grants you exclusive after hours access to roam the halls of Winchester Mystery House for a 2-hour hands-on ghost adventure with TAPS West Coast, and the opportunity to investigate hot spots within the mansion. Additionally, guests will be given their own EMF reader to use during the investigation and a post digital copy of the investigation.

A: Yes, you are allowed to capture your own photos and videos, but please refrain from using flash.

A: Yes, participants must be 13 years or older to join the Paranormal Investigation.

A:  TAPS West Coast will provide and demonstrate all tools for the exploration. Guests are welcome to bring their own small hand held equipment but no Ouija Boards, Pendulums, and Dowsing Rods are allowed. 

A: We recommend comfortable clothing and sturdy, closed-toe shoes for the Paranormal Investigation. 

A: Unfortunately, due to the historical nature of the Winchester Mystery House, certain areas may not be wheelchair accessible. Please contact us in advance to discuss any specific accessibility concerns.

A: Tickets are non-refundable, but we may consider rescheduling requests based on availability. Please reach out to our customer support for assistance.

A: Yes, experienced paranormal investigators from TAPS West Coast will lead each ghost hunting session, providing valuable insights and guidance throughout the adventure.

If you have additional questions or need further assistance, feel free to contact our support team at [email protected]. We look forward to welcoming you to an unforgettable paranormal exploration at Winchester Mystery House!

Winchester Mystery House

Seeming to be a beautiful, if gigantic, Victorian home set within sunny Bay Area, California, the Winchester Mystery House holds a dark and unusual past. Looking at the house from the exterior, you'd think that an entire city could fit within its extensive walls, which was even truer before the devastating earthquake in 1906. The unusual interior, however, strikes an unsettling feeling in even the most stoic of visitors, if only because of the legend.

Winchester Mystery House Pixabay Public Domain

The builder was one Sarah Winchester, heiress, and widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester. Legend claims that after her husband's death in 1881, Sarah became convinced that she was being haunted by spirits of the unfortunate souls killed by her husband's guns. A believer in spiritualism, Sarah consulted a medium and learned that she must move West and begin building a house that would never be finished. To confuse the spirits, Sarah built "mystery" rooms onto the house such as stairs that lead to nowhere, upside down rooms, doors that open to brick walls, and more. Sarah made the workers go around the clock, 24 hours a day for 38 straight years. Before Sarah's death, the Winchester House contained 160 rooms, 40 bedrooms, two ballrooms, two basements, and over 10,000 panes of glass. Some visitors even claim to hear the builders still adding on to the home, as Sarah's work was never finished.

There are a variety of ways to experience the Winchester Mystery House. Daily tours of the grounds and mansion can be self-guided or not depending on your level of courage. Tour the house, the gardens, and even the museums showcasing collected antiques and the Winchester guns that started the paranoia. Special events, like the Flashlight Tour (given every Friday the 13th and in October) and the Spirit of Christmas, offer unique looks into the house's history both paranormal and physical. Sightings and strange occurrences are certainly not uncommon in this maze of a house so the question is, do you believe?

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