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Midst the chips and modems of Silicon Valley, At the vineyard's edge, 'twixt mountain and sea, In San Jose, like a compressed city, - The Winchester House of Mystery. Well, apologies to Swinburne, but the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, prompts the Victorian gothic in me. Sprawling like an architectural dog's breakfast over 2.4 hectares (six acres), the Winchester Mystery House was the project of Sarah L. Winchester, the heiress to the fortune made by the Winchester Repeating Rifle - the gun that won the west. Inevitably, in winning the west, it was responsible for dispatching a number of folks to the great beyond. After the premature death of Sarah's husband and only child, she became convinced that the spirits of the gun’s victims cursed her. Her 20 million dollar inheritance allowed her to assuage her remorse in a unique way. One could call it gilt by association. A medium in New York persuaded Mrs. Winchester that she could pacify the vindictive spirits and attain immortality by moving west, buying a house, and continually building on to it, 24?hours a day. She moved to San Jose, purchased an old farmhouse, and proceeded to comply with the medium's direction. The result is a testimony to the folly of building under the influence of spirits. The hammering and sawing of the carpenters continued unabated from 1884, when the house was purchased, until 1922 when Sarah L. Winchester died, the promise of immortality notwithstanding. Revealing a distressing lack of faith in the ability of ghosts to provide life eternal, Mrs. Winchester did have a will, which she signed 13 times in accordance with her occultist beliefs. The number 13 figures prominently throughout the house; stairways with 13 steps, ceilings with 13 panels, 13 holes in sink drains, 13 palms in the front driveway, etc., etc. The house now contains 160 rooms. There are chimneys that don't reach the roof, stairways that end in blank walls, closets as big as rooms, rooms just millimeters in depth, and doors that open to a six-meter (20 feet) drop. Defenders of Mrs. Winchester's eccentricities maintain that this was all designed to confuse the spirits. Cynics, who point out that a confused ghost is likely to be an unappeased one, to say nothing of ghosts' putative ability to walk through walls, insist that Mrs. Winchester's lack of architectural training is responsible. Ghost hunters who have spent the night in the Winchester Mystery House claim they have seen "exploding balls of red light" and diaphanous apparitions, felt blasts of icy winds, heard and recorded chains rattling and an organ playing. Mrs. Winchester was an accomplished musician and kept an organ in her bedroom to play during the night when suffering from her arthritis-induced insomnia. One morning recently the caretaker found a medium who had spent the night in the house laughing hysterically. The caretaker was forced to slap the medium to calm her down - his mother had told him to always strike a happy medium - and she relayed a tale of a terror filled night. The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, is about a one-hour drive south of San Francisco.
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