Happy Haunts: Winchester Mystery House

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With Halloween literally right around the corner, I figured it would be a good time to talk about some "haunted" places. I may keep this series going after Halloween, or I may shelve it until next Halloween. Only time will tell. So without further Ado here is the first Happy Haunt. I'm sure most of you, at least in the states have heard about the Winchester House. There have been a few movies made about it. If you haven't heard about it, here's just a quick rundown. It was the house of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms maker William Winchester. Sarah lived a life of both good and bad. She inherited a large portion of the Winchester fortune when her husband died, but shortly before her husbands death she lost her infant daughter. Surely those tragedies plagued her among the guilt she felt that her husbands company had been responsible for deaths of countless people. When William died, Sarah moved from New Haven, CT to California where she purchased what would become the Winchester Mystery House. It was an eight bedroom farm style house and she would soon become what historians describe as the longest home renovation project. It started a few months after William's death in 1883 and continued until Sarah's death on September 5th, 1922. During that decades long Renovation project she had ten thousand windows put in, two thousand doors, staircases that went no where. There were 160 rooms when construction finished at the time of her death. 13 bathrooms. She lived alone. There was no need for all of this. There have been multiple stories about this mystery house. Why she did what she did. Possibly the most popular one is that she spoke to a medium, or psychic that told her something that made her believe that if she stopped the construction she would be tortured by the soles of all the people her husbands companies guns had killed. After her death, Harry Houdini who is probably known as the best illusionist maybe ever, visited the mansion. His goal was to prove that all the mediums and psychics that had been saying the house was haunted after Sarah's death were just full of it. But after spending the night in the seance room he said it was a house of mystery. Which is where the nickname came from. Since then there have been many reports of tour guides and visitors getting their clothes tugged on. Reports of lights being turned off after people have turned them off, or them flickering. Footsteps have been heard where clearly no one is walking. There is also a ghost that has appeared so often it has a nickname. The wheelbarrow ghost is that of a man pushing a wheelbarrow of coal around the basement. Perhaps someone who died in the basement while trying to keep it warm. Another worker name Clyde's ghost is said to have been seen around the property. There is also an unnamed ghost that has been seen multiple times over the years by multiple different people. All that's ever seen is a shadow peering out the windows. You see it, then blink and it or she is gone. Could that be Sarah, checking on her passion project decades later? Or is she just trying to keep some secrets hidden still in her house? In 2016 a team discovered a room that they didn't know existed until then. It had been sealed off after an earthquake in 1906. The earthquake destroyed a portion of the home and even left Sarah trapped for a period of time. The room was perfectly perserved after all this time. Victorian era furniture that looked as if it had never been touched as well as clothing, paintings and at least one porcelain doll were also found in the room. Since that Discovery, people are left wondering what other hidden rooms, or passageways could the mystery house be hiding? The only thing that is certain about the Winchester Mystery House is that whatever secrets and answers the house may hold more than likely died with it's owner all those years ago.