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Jeanelyn Zozobrado | profile | all galleries >> Winchester Mystery House, San Jose, CA 9/24/05 tree view | thumbnails | slideshow

Winchester Mystery House, San Jose, CA 9/24/05

Winchester Mystery House Facts
What: The Winchester Mystery House is a rambling, 160-room unfinished and unfurnished house built by Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune. Curiosities include staircases leading to nowhere and doors in the floor.
Where:San Jose, California. Exit I-280 southbound at Winchester Blvd.

When:Open for tours daily, except Christmas day. Special flashlight tours on Halloween and every Friday the Thirteenth. The standard tour lasts 65 minutes and costs much more than a full-price movie, but for the curious, the Winchester Mystery House can be quite an adventure.

The Winchester Mystery House Facts:
-Sarah Lockwood Pardee married William Winchester of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in 1862. Their only child, a six-month-old daughter died in 1866, and William died of tuberculosis a few years later.
-Sarah Winchester visited a Boston psychic who told her the deaths were revenge from the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles, and that Sarah could escape the spirits' wrath by moving west and building a house that would never be finished.
-Sarah Winchester took her $20 million cash inheritance and $1,000 a day income and moved west to California in 1884. She bought an unfinished eight-room farm house near San Jose that is now known as the Winchester Mystery House.
-She soon started building on the house maniacally, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and she never stopped! For the next 38 years, the house grew like kudzu along a Virginia highway, swallowing up everything around it including the barn and water tower.
-In the end, she created a sprawling structure covering 6 acres with 160 rooms, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, 40 staircases, 47 fireplaces, 2,000 doors and 10,000 windows.
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The Door to Nowhere The Greenhouse The Greenhouse v3%2f74%2f436774%2f4%2f49780944.sept17002.jpg v3%2f74%2f436774%2f4%2f49780903.sept17010.jpg
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