The Winchester Mystery House: The Widow Who Built for Thirty-Eight Years and Never Let the Hammering Stop
In San Jose, California, hemmed in now by a shopping center and a freeway, there is a sprawling Victorian mansion that makes no sense. It has one hundred and sixty rooms. It has forty bedrooms, two ballrooms, forty-seven fireplaces, and forty staircases. It also has a staircase that climbs seven steps and stops at the ceiling. It has doors on upper floors that open onto a two-story drop. It has a cabinet that opens into half an inch of space, and another that opens into thirty rooms. It has chimneys that rise four floors and stop short of the roof, and windows set into interior floors, and a room with no way in but a window from another room. Sarah Winchester built it, and she never stopped building it for thirty-eight years, and the story everyone tells about why is one of the great American ghost stories. It is also, almost certainly, wrong. And the truth — which took a librarian and a few stubborn historians a very long time to dig out — is stranger and sadder than the legend, an...