The real Sarah Winchester was aware how her building project looked to outsiders. They were a useful tool, something that people needed for survival.” If the real Sarah Winchester did have a problem with where her money came from, she certainly would have a problem with the jaunty shooting gallery that tourists can use when they visit the house. But Winchester house historian Janan Boehme dismisses this theory: “People back then didn’t have a massive guilt complex over guns. Some say Winchester’s personal grief was compounded by her guilt over the lives taken by the rifles that built her family’s fortune-that she believed herself to be cursed. Left, by C Flanigan/WireImage Right, by Ben King/CBS Films/Lionsgate. Left, Winchester Mansion, photographed in 2017 Right, a still from Winchester. “But I think, in fact, she was someone with great empathy.” “This legend grew up around her of her being crazy,” Mirren told me, sitting inside the very parlor of the misunderstood woman she plays. But as it turns out, the most curious object inside the mansion was actually Sarah Winchester herself.
But there are certainly enough unsettling sights within-a stairway the leads to nowhere, a repeating motif of the number 13 baked into the elaborate decorations, a second-story door that opens out to nothing-to convince Houdini, the friendly Winchester tour guides, and scores of Bay Area residents who visited the house as children (this writer included) that something is awry here.
Your mileage may vary when it comes to believing there are, in fact, spirits lurking in the corridors of the Winchester Mystery House. Believe it or not, this ghost-packed film could be the closest mainstream audiences come to understanding that Winchester was far from just a “crazy” lady who built a crazy house. Part historical preserve, part spooky theme park oddity, the Winchester Mystery House has now inspired a new horror movie, Winchester, starring Helen Mirren as the titular, reclusive heir to a massive rifle fortune. There have been over 12 million visitors to the house since its mysterious architect died in 1922. Picking up on some popular nicknames of the day, Houdini dubbed the building “Winchester Mystery House” after the late Sarah Winchester, the secretive woman who built and lived in it. The massive estate, partially demolished by the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, had a reputation for being haunted-and not even Houdini himself could shake the sense that something inside those walls was wrong. Though a magician by trade, Houdini was devoted, at this time in his life, to debunking what he considered a scourge of fake spiritualists and mediums. In 1924, Harry Houdini visited a rambling architectural oddity in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley.
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