March 27, 2023 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Sarah Winchester was a woman of independence, drive, and courage who lives on in legend. And the mansion she built is world renowned as much for the many design curiosities and innovations as it is for the reported paranormal activity. Here to separate fact from fiction is Ashley Hlebinsky.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Sarah Winchester was
a woman of independence, drive and courage who lives on
in legend, and the mansion she built is world renowned
as much for the many design curiosities and innovation as
it is for the reported paranormal activity. Here to separate
(00:31):
fact from fiction is Ashley Lebinsky. Ashley is the former
co host of the Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, the
former Curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum, and
President of the Gun Code LLLC. Here's Ashley today. I
want to talk about a brilliant, charitable woman, but most
(00:56):
people don't know her actual history because her name is
Sarah Winchester. If you're not familiar with that name, it
is kind of an ominous history because a lot of
people associate her with her house out of San Jose, California,
and it's been featured in pretty much every ghost show
that's ever happened. And it was also in a movie
(01:17):
that Helen Mirren did by the Winchester name, which is
a loosely based, not historically accurate horror movie. Although I
did like the horror movie Missus Winchester from Wild and Construction.
The spirit killed by the rifle. We lock them away.
(01:39):
This spirit is a pow we've not seen before, but
it's not It doesn't do justice to who Sarah Winchester was,
So I'm not going to focus on that right now.
Let's just talk about who she was and where she
came from and how she got to have this crazy
rumor about her life. Sarah was born in new Haven, Connecticut,
(02:01):
and she actually came from a family of engineers and designers.
Her father was a carriage maker and she kind of
took that knowledge that she learned and developed those types
of interest herself. She was considered a savant. She was
very well educated. She spoke several languages. I think she
spoke French and Turkish. She was a composer. So she's
(02:23):
this brilliant woman. She's known as the Belle of new Haven.
And she of course meets another very famous family out
of New Haven in the eighteen hundreds, the latter half
of the eighteen hundreds, and that family is the Winchester family.
If you're not familiar with the Winchester family, they are
known for the quote unquote gun that won the West,
(02:45):
although that was their own marketing slogan that they did,
but they're most well known for their lever action repeating rifle,
and that was developed based on several other designs, but
the first one that was really called a Winchester was
eighteen sixty six, and that kind of idea, that image
of the company really took off, and it plays a
very important role in Sarah's life, especially later on. Sarah
(03:08):
meets the family, and you know, as a socialite family
and a socialite family. She meets Oliver Winchester's son, William Winchester,
and they fall in love and they get married, although
the beginning of their marriage and the length of their
marriage is really marred by tragedy. Their first daughter, and Party,
which was also Sarah's maiden name, she passed away a
few weeks after she was born. Then the husband and
(03:30):
wife they decided, you know what, we're not going to
have any more children. The tragedy hit them so hard
that they didn't have any more kids. And the original
plan for the Winchester family was that when Oliver stepped down,
his son would take over the company, and he did
very briefly after his father died, but William Worrett Winchester
actually passed away fifteen years after their daughter died, and
(03:52):
he died from tuberculosis. They didn't know what it was originally,
but they were able to pinpoint that it was tuberculosis
that killed him. So Sarah is left alone in New Haven, Connecticut,
and she's got a great reputation, I mean, everybody loves
her there, but she's lonely. And he passes away and
she basically inherits a major fortune immediately. She inherited seven
(04:16):
hundred and seventy seven shares of Winchester essentially overnight, and
that basically paid out an annual salary of forty three,
three hundred and thirty five dollars, which may not sound
like a lot of money, but when we're talking the
eighteen eighties, that is a lot of money, and so
she has instant wealth. She also inherits a lot of
shares from like four or five other companies that the
(04:36):
Winchester family were involved in that weren't related to firearms,
and she was set to inherit two thousand, seven hundred
and seventy seven more shares after her mother in law
would pass away. So a lot of people speculate that
during this time she was worth twenty million dollars. So
she's a very, very wealthy woman, and she is trying
to figure out what she's going to do with her life.
(04:56):
She doesn't really want to stay in New Haven. There's
just too many ghosts there, and she decides that it's
time to move on. She suffers from rheumatism and our threat.
It's really bad. There's a belief that she was recommended
by her doctor to go out to California where the
climate was a lot more amenable to her medical problems.
So she decides that she's going to move and she
moves there in eighteen eighty five, and she already has
(05:18):
family out there, and she buys a two story farmhouse
in San Jose, California, and she basically this is the story.
This is the start of how her legend becomes this rumor.
She buys this farmhouse, she actually calls it Lanata Villa,
and the intention for her is to build this manner
(05:39):
that she hopes her family will come and live in.
But what happens here is she moves to California. She's
a widow, so she is a single, wealthy woman and
she is now in a new world of wealthy people
and socialites and she's kind of at this point, she's
moved away from that kind of being out in the
(06:02):
public sphere because she is still very much, you know,
sad over what happened to her life. She is looking
forward and she's hoping that she can develop this new
life with her family out in California. So she starts
building and the house gets very, very large, and if
you've ever seen it, it is quite peculiar looking. And
it turns into a seven story Victorian mansion between eighteen
(06:25):
ninety and nineteen hundred, and the house constantly changes, and
she constantly changes the house, and she hires all kinds
of people. She actually pays them more than the going
rate of the time. She's got construction workers, she's got
people that are cleaning the house, she's got designers, and
she's working to develop this house all on her own.
She's not an architect, she admits she's not an architect,
(06:47):
but you know what, she's brilliant, so why not. And
so she starts building this house. She employs all of
these people. And what's really neat about this part of
the history is that in eighteen ninety three, the nation
is struck by a major depression. So the Great Depression
of eighteen ninety three hits, but she continued to employ
all of these people during the Great Depression, and so
(07:08):
there's some speculation that perhaps she was doing a lot
of that and constantly changing because she was trying to
help out families that would be unemployed or very much
suffering during that time. I've got a great quote that
she wrote no letter. She was constantly in contact with
Jenny Bennett, who was the daughter of Oliver Winchester, and
so she was constantly writing, and she wrote for one
(07:29):
reason and another. Since I started in to make alterations
in my house, I have not been able to get
anything like settled in the first place. It is infinitely
more difficult to get work done than it would be
in New Haven. And I am constantly trying to make
an upheaval for some reason. So she was constantly trying
to change things. Now during this time period, there's also
(07:50):
this kind of belief that she was very lonely. But
in eighteen eighty eight, her niece Mary and Daisy Merriman
actually moves in with her and she lives there for
fifteen years, and so she has people there, and she's
communicating with people and she's talking to her family and
she's visiting her family. And the other thing that's neat
about the house and the historic site that's there. Now
they brag about this all the time, and everybody wants
(08:12):
to brag about this is the house was insanely advanced
for its time. So she had early gas lights in
the house in the eighteen eighties and not as incredibly
in advanced for its time. She had indoor plumbing, she
had fauceted showers. She had this contraption in the house
called an enunciator, so it's basically like a communication system
(08:34):
where she could talk through this system and talk to
her staff at a different part of the house. So
you think about, you know, all the ways that we
communicate with people today, it's pretty interesting that she had
a nineteenth century version of that. There's also some belief
that it might have been one of the first homes
to have wool is insulation. And one story that I
(08:55):
love is that there's this belief because a lot of
these things were also her inventions. It possibly Sarah Winchester
invented laundry tubs with the soap trees and the washboards attached.
They were in the house and the reason why people
speculate that maybe she was one of the first ones
was that later in the twentieth century, there was someone
that took out a patent for this type of tub,
(09:16):
and there was a legal challenge, and in the courtroom
they actually used the designs from Sarah Winchester to prove
that she had already been doing this. So there's a
good little anecdote of just kind of how ahead of
the time she was and how ahead of the time
the house was. And you've been listening to Ashley Lebinski
tell the story of Sarah Winchester and Sarah Winchester's home,
(09:39):
which again is featured in almost any paranormal show or
ghost show you've ever seen, and more when we come back,
more of the story of Sarah Winchester and her house.
Here an our American story and we continue with our
(10:10):
American stories and the story of firearms heiress Sarah Winchester
and her home. She was a widow from Connecticut who
arrived in San Jose in eighteen eighty six and heiress
to the Winchester fortune. She began building her mansion, which
was fifty years at least ahead of its time. Let's
(10:31):
pick up or we last left off with Ashley Lipinski.
The other thing that happens with the house is that
she starts changing things, and there's lots of reasons why
she starts changing things. One of the biggest impacts is
the San Francisco earthquake that happens at the turn of
the twentieth century, and the seven floor mansion all of
a sudden loses several floors. But by nineteen ten, she
(10:55):
actually starts to spend a lot of time outside of
the house. She's already traveling and seeing her family and
everything during this time. But in nineteen ten, she actually
buys a house in Atherton, and she also owns a
houseboat in San Francisco, and so she is spending a
lot of her time during this So this idea that
she was constantly there and alone in her villa isn't true.
(11:16):
There are stories of kids in the community garden that
she had, you know, people having picnics. There was a
lot of life in the house. She had events in
the house, she had plays in the house. You know,
she just wasn't necessarily interested in getting involved in a
lot of the social strata of the community. And so
early on you've got a rich woman, a brilliant woman
in the nineteenth century who moves out to a place
(11:38):
where people don't realize she's got family. And so this
story starts to be constructed that Sarah is haunted by
the ghosts killed by Winchester rifles. The story starts to
take off in the local community, and the entire story
goes that she visited a Boston medium, a well known
(11:59):
Boston medium, and he told her that she was being haunted,
that her family was cursed, and that she had to
go out to California and continuously build this house, and
not just build a house, but that the house was,
you know, informed, the house was changed because she was
getting information to build a house by the spirits. You know.
(12:20):
There was a lot of speculation that she was a spiritualist,
which was popular during that time, a lot more popular
during that time than in other time periods, and that
she had these seance rooms where she would communicate with
the dead or believe she communicated with the dead, and
obviously that's it's quite the story, right. So it takes off,
and the rumors continue, and Sarah largely ignores the rumors,
(12:43):
but it starts to become really overbearing when the newspapers
start publishing the stories. So you know, now it's not
just speculation, it's not just this, it's not just that.
You know, now there is you know, hard writing that
is saying that this story is true. And I want
to qualify that with the fact that there has been
primary source research that's been done and there hasn't been
(13:04):
evidence that she went to see this medium. And also
at the time of all of this happening, Winchester, Yes,
they've got this image of being a Western firearm but
they're not really engaged in a lot of military contracts.
You know, they really take off as a military company
in World War One, but it's not to the extent
that a lot of people kind of the presidism of it.
You look back and you see it as a specific company.
(13:27):
And so this story takes off, and it follows her
her whole life, and there is evidence that people were
trying to debunk it, that her family was trying to
debunk it, that her workers were trying to debunk it.
And I did find an article that was published a
few years before she died that tried to kind of
dispel a lot of these rumors, and in it part
of the quote says, perhaps not more than a dozen
(13:50):
people in California know that Missus Winchester is a musician
with a genius for composition, that she is a remarkable businesswoman,
that she is a French scholar, that her philanthropies alone
would make her a national figure if they were known.
This quote goes on and on and on to sing
her praises, and so this person is saying she is
a national treasure and that the people of California do
(14:12):
not recognize what she has done. And one of the
things that she has done at this point is she's
become very charitable. And one of her the charities that
she kind of takes on is back in New Haven.
So she was again very struck by the death of
her husband, the death of her daughter, and so she
actually donated one million, three hundred and twenty five thousand
(14:33):
dollars to a New Haven hospital to build a tuberculosis
center in honor of her husband. And that actually still exists.
It's changed over the years, but it does still exist
as a chess clinic that bears the Winchester name. So
you have this really interesting spectrum of how people perceive Sarah.
(14:54):
You've got New Haven, which sees her as you know,
the bell of the down still and you know, she's
charitable and she's giving, and she's you know, still a
part of the Winchester you know, legacy and name. Although
she was not actively involved, you know, with the company,
she was still involved and engaged. She wasn't she just
wasn't an engineer for the company. She wasn't running the business,
(15:15):
but she was the major shareholder. But then you've got
California where she, at her death has this house that, yes,
is rather eccentric. At the time of her death, it
has one hundred and sixty rooms, two thousand doors, ten
thousand windows, forty seven stairways, forty seven fireplaces, thirteen bathrooms,
and six kitchens. Now, not only is that incredibly large,
(15:40):
the other thing is that it's a lap of luxury
when you look at like she spared no expense for
the things that she put in the house. And one
of the things that people always mention is the tiffany
stained glass that was in her house, which is gorgeous.
And so she passes away in nineteen twenty two and
the story kind of really takes off. The house is
(16:02):
bought out of the estate sale and it is bought
by John and Mamie Brown, who have a background in
amusement parks, and they actually want to initially install a
roller coaster on the property, but that gets ultimately pooh pooed,
so they opened a house for public tours really quickly
after she passes away, and there's a lot of mystical
(16:24):
things that are centered around the house. After that. Harry
Houdini visits the house and claims that Sarah came to
him during that time. There's also stories that Walt Disney
was inspired by the house. Although it doesn't look like
and wasn't the actual model for the Haunted Mansion, there's
belief that there was some connection there and inspiration that
he visited the house, and so this really just continues
(16:47):
and grows, and people are fascinated by the macab It's
really an interesting story, and not a lot of primary
source research is done on it right away, and so
it took out a life of its own, and now
literally every ghost show, like growing up, I believe the
story completely because every ghost show I've ever seen has
(17:08):
gone to the house, and rightly so it's definitely an
interesting house. And if the story of Sarah being haunted
isn't true. You know, they're not saying there aren't some
spirits up in there, right. The Winchester House is perhaps
the most bizarre and mysterious mansion in the United States.
It's a warren of hidden passageways, stairways that lead nowhere,
(17:29):
indoors that open into midair. But it's also reputed to
be a haunted hotbed of paranormal phenomena. And so the
house just kind of took on a life of its own.
And now what's disappointing to me is that that story
is more important than a brilliant, inventive businesswoman way ahead
(17:50):
of her time in the nineteenth century, And that, to me,
is the real tragedy of her story. And you know what,
sometimes I think maybe if she was a man and
that ghost story was opening, it wouldn't be as interesting.
You know, it becomes eccentric and fascinating when a wealthy
man has this perspectives. And I hope when people go
and visit it they get to see all of her
(18:10):
great inventions, because the house really does tell about her inventions,
because they're quite proud of them. So when you go
to the house, definitely think about a woman who had
quite the life and had a lot to say, and
we should continue to talk about her accomplishments instead of
telling a ghost story. And a terrific job on the
production by Greg Hengler, and a special thanks as always
(18:34):
to Ashley Lebinski for her excellent storytelling and what a
story she told about not only a remarkable woman, but
one in the end whose story got co opted by
well the paranormal crowd, and whether you're a part of
it or not, that's what happened. And all of her innovation,
all of her intuitive genius, especially in the area of
(18:54):
home innovation, was all lost, including her being a great
investor in philanthropy. The story of Sarah Winchester and her
home here on our American Story
And we continue with our American stories. Sarah Winchester was
a woman of independence, drive and courage who lives on
in legend, and the mansion she built is world renowned
as much for the many design curiosities and innovation as
it is for the reported paranormal activity. Here to separate
(00:31):
fact from fiction is Ashley Lebinsky. Ashley is the former
co host of the Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, the
former Curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum, and
President of the Gun Code LLLC. Here's Ashley today. I
want to talk about a brilliant, charitable woman, but most
(00:56):
people don't know her actual history because her name is
Sarah Winchester. If you're not familiar with that name, it
is kind of an ominous history because a lot of
people associate her with her house out of San Jose, California,
and it's been featured in pretty much every ghost show
that's ever happened. And it was also in a movie
(01:17):
that Helen Mirren did by the Winchester name, which is
a loosely based, not historically accurate horror movie. Although I
did like the horror movie Missus Winchester from Wild and Construction.
The spirit killed by the rifle. We lock them away.
(01:39):
This spirit is a pow we've not seen before, but
it's not It doesn't do justice to who Sarah Winchester was,
So I'm not going to focus on that right now.
Let's just talk about who she was and where she
came from and how she got to have this crazy
rumor about her life. Sarah was born in new Haven, Connecticut,
(02:01):
and she actually came from a family of engineers and designers.
Her father was a carriage maker and she kind of
took that knowledge that she learned and developed those types
of interest herself. She was considered a savant. She was
very well educated. She spoke several languages. I think she
spoke French and Turkish. She was a composer. So she's
(02:23):
this brilliant woman. She's known as the Belle of new Haven.
And she of course meets another very famous family out
of New Haven in the eighteen hundreds, the latter half
of the eighteen hundreds, and that family is the Winchester family.
If you're not familiar with the Winchester family, they are
known for the quote unquote gun that won the West,
(02:45):
although that was their own marketing slogan that they did,
but they're most well known for their lever action repeating rifle,
and that was developed based on several other designs, but
the first one that was really called a Winchester was
eighteen sixty six, and that kind of idea, that image
of the company really took off, and it plays a
very important role in Sarah's life, especially later on. Sarah
(03:08):
meets the family, and you know, as a socialite family
and a socialite family. She meets Oliver Winchester's son, William Winchester,
and they fall in love and they get married, although
the beginning of their marriage and the length of their
marriage is really marred by tragedy. Their first daughter, and Party,
which was also Sarah's maiden name, she passed away a
few weeks after she was born. Then the husband and
(03:30):
wife they decided, you know what, we're not going to
have any more children. The tragedy hit them so hard
that they didn't have any more kids. And the original
plan for the Winchester family was that when Oliver stepped down,
his son would take over the company, and he did
very briefly after his father died, but William Worrett Winchester
actually passed away fifteen years after their daughter died, and
(03:52):
he died from tuberculosis. They didn't know what it was originally,
but they were able to pinpoint that it was tuberculosis
that killed him. So Sarah is left alone in New Haven, Connecticut,
and she's got a great reputation, I mean, everybody loves
her there, but she's lonely. And he passes away and
she basically inherits a major fortune immediately. She inherited seven
(04:16):
hundred and seventy seven shares of Winchester essentially overnight, and
that basically paid out an annual salary of forty three,
three hundred and thirty five dollars, which may not sound
like a lot of money, but when we're talking the
eighteen eighties, that is a lot of money, and so
she has instant wealth. She also inherits a lot of
shares from like four or five other companies that the
(04:36):
Winchester family were involved in that weren't related to firearms,
and she was set to inherit two thousand, seven hundred
and seventy seven more shares after her mother in law
would pass away. So a lot of people speculate that
during this time she was worth twenty million dollars. So
she's a very, very wealthy woman, and she is trying
to figure out what she's going to do with her life.
(04:56):
She doesn't really want to stay in New Haven. There's
just too many ghosts there, and she decides that it's
time to move on. She suffers from rheumatism and our threat.
It's really bad. There's a belief that she was recommended
by her doctor to go out to California where the
climate was a lot more amenable to her medical problems.
So she decides that she's going to move and she
moves there in eighteen eighty five, and she already has
(05:18):
family out there, and she buys a two story farmhouse
in San Jose, California, and she basically this is the story.
This is the start of how her legend becomes this rumor.
She buys this farmhouse, she actually calls it Lanata Villa,
and the intention for her is to build this manner
(05:39):
that she hopes her family will come and live in.
But what happens here is she moves to California. She's
a widow, so she is a single, wealthy woman and
she is now in a new world of wealthy people
and socialites and she's kind of at this point, she's
moved away from that kind of being out in the
(06:02):
public sphere because she is still very much, you know,
sad over what happened to her life. She is looking
forward and she's hoping that she can develop this new
life with her family out in California. So she starts
building and the house gets very, very large, and if
you've ever seen it, it is quite peculiar looking. And
it turns into a seven story Victorian mansion between eighteen
(06:25):
ninety and nineteen hundred, and the house constantly changes, and
she constantly changes the house, and she hires all kinds
of people. She actually pays them more than the going
rate of the time. She's got construction workers, she's got
people that are cleaning the house, she's got designers, and
she's working to develop this house all on her own.
She's not an architect, she admits she's not an architect,
(06:47):
but you know what, she's brilliant, so why not. And
so she starts building this house. She employs all of
these people. And what's really neat about this part of
the history is that in eighteen ninety three, the nation
is struck by a major depression. So the Great Depression
of eighteen ninety three hits, but she continued to employ
all of these people during the Great Depression, and so
(07:08):
there's some speculation that perhaps she was doing a lot
of that and constantly changing because she was trying to
help out families that would be unemployed or very much
suffering during that time. I've got a great quote that
she wrote no letter. She was constantly in contact with
Jenny Bennett, who was the daughter of Oliver Winchester, and
so she was constantly writing, and she wrote for one
(07:29):
reason and another. Since I started in to make alterations
in my house, I have not been able to get
anything like settled in the first place. It is infinitely
more difficult to get work done than it would be
in New Haven. And I am constantly trying to make
an upheaval for some reason. So she was constantly trying
to change things. Now during this time period, there's also
(07:50):
this kind of belief that she was very lonely. But
in eighteen eighty eight, her niece Mary and Daisy Merriman
actually moves in with her and she lives there for
fifteen years, and so she has people there, and she's
communicating with people and she's talking to her family and
she's visiting her family. And the other thing that's neat
about the house and the historic site that's there. Now
they brag about this all the time, and everybody wants
(08:12):
to brag about this is the house was insanely advanced
for its time. So she had early gas lights in
the house in the eighteen eighties and not as incredibly
in advanced for its time. She had indoor plumbing, she
had fauceted showers. She had this contraption in the house
called an enunciator, so it's basically like a communication system
(08:34):
where she could talk through this system and talk to
her staff at a different part of the house. So
you think about, you know, all the ways that we
communicate with people today, it's pretty interesting that she had
a nineteenth century version of that. There's also some belief
that it might have been one of the first homes
to have wool is insulation. And one story that I
(08:55):
love is that there's this belief because a lot of
these things were also her inventions. It possibly Sarah Winchester
invented laundry tubs with the soap trees and the washboards attached.
They were in the house and the reason why people
speculate that maybe she was one of the first ones
was that later in the twentieth century, there was someone
that took out a patent for this type of tub,
(09:16):
and there was a legal challenge, and in the courtroom
they actually used the designs from Sarah Winchester to prove
that she had already been doing this. So there's a
good little anecdote of just kind of how ahead of
the time she was and how ahead of the time
the house was. And you've been listening to Ashley Lebinski
tell the story of Sarah Winchester and Sarah Winchester's home,
(09:39):
which again is featured in almost any paranormal show or
ghost show you've ever seen, and more when we come back,
more of the story of Sarah Winchester and her house.
Here an our American story and we continue with our
(10:10):
American stories and the story of firearms heiress Sarah Winchester
and her home. She was a widow from Connecticut who
arrived in San Jose in eighteen eighty six and heiress
to the Winchester fortune. She began building her mansion, which
was fifty years at least ahead of its time. Let's
(10:31):
pick up or we last left off with Ashley Lipinski.
The other thing that happens with the house is that
she starts changing things, and there's lots of reasons why
she starts changing things. One of the biggest impacts is
the San Francisco earthquake that happens at the turn of
the twentieth century, and the seven floor mansion all of
a sudden loses several floors. But by nineteen ten, she
(10:55):
actually starts to spend a lot of time outside of
the house. She's already traveling and seeing her family and
everything during this time. But in nineteen ten, she actually
buys a house in Atherton, and she also owns a
houseboat in San Francisco, and so she is spending a
lot of her time during this So this idea that
she was constantly there and alone in her villa isn't true.
(11:16):
There are stories of kids in the community garden that
she had, you know, people having picnics. There was a
lot of life in the house. She had events in
the house, she had plays in the house. You know,
she just wasn't necessarily interested in getting involved in a
lot of the social strata of the community. And so
early on you've got a rich woman, a brilliant woman
in the nineteenth century who moves out to a place
(11:38):
where people don't realize she's got family. And so this
story starts to be constructed that Sarah is haunted by
the ghosts killed by Winchester rifles. The story starts to
take off in the local community, and the entire story
goes that she visited a Boston medium, a well known
(11:59):
Boston medium, and he told her that she was being haunted,
that her family was cursed, and that she had to
go out to California and continuously build this house, and
not just build a house, but that the house was,
you know, informed, the house was changed because she was
getting information to build a house by the spirits. You know.
(12:20):
There was a lot of speculation that she was a spiritualist,
which was popular during that time, a lot more popular
during that time than in other time periods, and that
she had these seance rooms where she would communicate with
the dead or believe she communicated with the dead, and
obviously that's it's quite the story, right. So it takes off,
and the rumors continue, and Sarah largely ignores the rumors,
(12:43):
but it starts to become really overbearing when the newspapers
start publishing the stories. So you know, now it's not
just speculation, it's not just this, it's not just that.
You know, now there is you know, hard writing that
is saying that this story is true. And I want
to qualify that with the fact that there has been
primary source research that's been done and there hasn't been
(13:04):
evidence that she went to see this medium. And also
at the time of all of this happening, Winchester, Yes,
they've got this image of being a Western firearm but
they're not really engaged in a lot of military contracts.
You know, they really take off as a military company
in World War One, but it's not to the extent
that a lot of people kind of the presidism of it.
You look back and you see it as a specific company.
(13:27):
And so this story takes off, and it follows her
her whole life, and there is evidence that people were
trying to debunk it, that her family was trying to
debunk it, that her workers were trying to debunk it.
And I did find an article that was published a
few years before she died that tried to kind of
dispel a lot of these rumors, and in it part
of the quote says, perhaps not more than a dozen
(13:50):
people in California know that Missus Winchester is a musician
with a genius for composition, that she is a remarkable businesswoman,
that she is a French scholar, that her philanthropies alone
would make her a national figure if they were known.
This quote goes on and on and on to sing
her praises, and so this person is saying she is
a national treasure and that the people of California do
(14:12):
not recognize what she has done. And one of the
things that she has done at this point is she's
become very charitable. And one of her the charities that
she kind of takes on is back in New Haven.
So she was again very struck by the death of
her husband, the death of her daughter, and so she
actually donated one million, three hundred and twenty five thousand
(14:33):
dollars to a New Haven hospital to build a tuberculosis
center in honor of her husband. And that actually still exists.
It's changed over the years, but it does still exist
as a chess clinic that bears the Winchester name. So
you have this really interesting spectrum of how people perceive Sarah.
(14:54):
You've got New Haven, which sees her as you know,
the bell of the down still and you know, she's
charitable and she's giving, and she's you know, still a
part of the Winchester you know, legacy and name. Although
she was not actively involved, you know, with the company,
she was still involved and engaged. She wasn't she just
wasn't an engineer for the company. She wasn't running the business,
(15:15):
but she was the major shareholder. But then you've got
California where she, at her death has this house that, yes,
is rather eccentric. At the time of her death, it
has one hundred and sixty rooms, two thousand doors, ten
thousand windows, forty seven stairways, forty seven fireplaces, thirteen bathrooms,
and six kitchens. Now, not only is that incredibly large,
(15:40):
the other thing is that it's a lap of luxury
when you look at like she spared no expense for
the things that she put in the house. And one
of the things that people always mention is the tiffany
stained glass that was in her house, which is gorgeous.
And so she passes away in nineteen twenty two and
the story kind of really takes off. The house is
(16:02):
bought out of the estate sale and it is bought
by John and Mamie Brown, who have a background in
amusement parks, and they actually want to initially install a
roller coaster on the property, but that gets ultimately pooh pooed,
so they opened a house for public tours really quickly
after she passes away, and there's a lot of mystical
(16:24):
things that are centered around the house. After that. Harry
Houdini visits the house and claims that Sarah came to
him during that time. There's also stories that Walt Disney
was inspired by the house. Although it doesn't look like
and wasn't the actual model for the Haunted Mansion, there's
belief that there was some connection there and inspiration that
he visited the house, and so this really just continues
(16:47):
and grows, and people are fascinated by the macab It's
really an interesting story, and not a lot of primary
source research is done on it right away, and so
it took out a life of its own, and now
literally every ghost show, like growing up, I believe the
story completely because every ghost show I've ever seen has
(17:08):
gone to the house, and rightly so it's definitely an
interesting house. And if the story of Sarah being haunted
isn't true. You know, they're not saying there aren't some
spirits up in there, right. The Winchester House is perhaps
the most bizarre and mysterious mansion in the United States.
It's a warren of hidden passageways, stairways that lead nowhere,
(17:29):
indoors that open into midair. But it's also reputed to
be a haunted hotbed of paranormal phenomena. And so the
house just kind of took on a life of its own.
And now what's disappointing to me is that that story
is more important than a brilliant, inventive businesswoman way ahead
(17:50):
of her time in the nineteenth century, And that, to me,
is the real tragedy of her story. And you know what,
sometimes I think maybe if she was a man and
that ghost story was opening, it wouldn't be as interesting.
You know, it becomes eccentric and fascinating when a wealthy
man has this perspectives. And I hope when people go
and visit it they get to see all of her
(18:10):
great inventions, because the house really does tell about her inventions,
because they're quite proud of them. So when you go
to the house, definitely think about a woman who had
quite the life and had a lot to say, and
we should continue to talk about her accomplishments instead of
telling a ghost story. And a terrific job on the
production by Greg Hengler, and a special thanks as always
(18:34):
to Ashley Lebinski for her excellent storytelling and what a
story she told about not only a remarkable woman, but
one in the end whose story got co opted by
well the paranormal crowd, and whether you're a part of
it or not, that's what happened. And all of her innovation,
all of her intuitive genius, especially in the area of
(18:54):
home innovation, was all lost, including her being a great
investor in philanthropy. The story of Sarah Winchester and her
home here on our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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