The Mistress of the Spirit Mansion | Sarah Winchester's Story

2/6/2018

Was Sarah Winchester a grieving widow haunted by rifle victims, or a brilliant heiress who encoded her beliefs in a labyrinthine mansion? Explore the history, the myths, and the puzzle behind the Winchester Mystery House.

Sarah Winchester as a young woman

Sarah Winchester and the House That Was Never Finished
Stairs climb into ceilings. Doors open onto sheer drops. Hallways loop back on themselves in the dark. The legend says a grieving widow built this maze to confuse the vengeful spirits of everyone killed by the Winchester rifle. The records tell a quieter and stranger story. Sarah Lockwood Pardee Winchester was a gifted, secretive woman, and the history around her contradicts the folklore at almost every turn. Some argue she left behind something more deliberate than a haunted house: a puzzle written in numbers and architecture. Here is what is known, what is told, and what remains hidden.

Oliver Winchester, the inventor of the Winchester Repeating Rifle

California

In 1884, Sarah settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and soon moved inland to the Santa Clara Valley, now San Jose. There she bought an unfinished farmhouse called Llanada Villa from Dr. Robert Caldwell, along with 161 acres of farmland. Sources disagree on the size of the original house, giving it as either eight or eighteen rooms.

Her apparent motive was to live near her many Pardee relatives, most of whom had come west during the 1849 Gold Rush. One of them, Dr. Enoch H. Pardee, was a respected physician and politician in Oakland. His son George C. Pardee became Governor of California (1903–1907). Both men were reportedly Freemasons and members of the Bohemian Club.

In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt came to California and reportedly asked Governor Pardee to be his running mate in 1904. Pardee declined. Roosevelt also tried to visit Sarah during that trip, and she, too, turned him away.

The House That Never Stopped Growing

Sarah hired a crew of about twenty carpenters and began a building project that would last thirty-eight years. By her own design, with no architect but herself, work never ceased. Shifts rotated around the clock, every day of the year. The house climbed to seven stories in places and swelled to some 500 to 600 rooms.

Contrary to popular belief, the carpenters were not locals. They were brought from the East on one-year contracts.

Then came April 1906. The great earthquake reduced the house to four stories, and Sarah refrained from building any higher. It is believed she suffered a nervous breakdown and lived with anxiety for the rest of her life. Afterward, she ordered rooms with doors and windows that were easy to escape through, and doors that would open under the slightest pressure. She also bought a houseboat. On the shores of San Francisco Bay she had a lake dredged and an island placed in its middle. A relative lived there with the houseboat so that Sarah could flee to the ocean if another quake struck.

She was a woman of means and habit. She dined on plates of gold and silver, which were locked into a safe each night, one of thirteen she had installed throughout the house.

A Labyrinth of Oddities

The house is undeniably a labyrinth, with miles of twisting corridors, dead ends that force travelers to turn back, and hidden shortcuts that leap from one side of the house to the other. Its oddities are legendary:

A staircase that halts at the ceiling.
A door that opens into a solid wall.
A second-story door that opens onto a sheer drop.
Skylights covered by roofs, skylights covered by other skylights, and one skylight set into a floor.
Tiny doors that lead into vast spaces, and grand doors that lead into tiny ones.
Rooms within rooms, and upside-down pillars.
Forty-seven chimneys, some with ceilings above them.

The numbers 7, 11, and 13 recur everywhere: in windows, stairs, railing posts, floor panels, and chandelier lights, with 13 most prominent.

She was also well ahead of her time. She is believed to have been the first builder to use wool insulation. The house was lit by carbide gas from its own gas plant, with electric button panels triggering sparks to ignite the lamps. It had showers and three elevators, two hydraulic and one electric. The estate was nearly self-sufficient, with its own carpenter and plumbing workshops, water and electrical supply, and sewage drainage.

After Sarah Winchester’s death, her will directed that the property be sold, as none of her relatives could afford to maintain or repair the costly mansion. With little interest in the house, investors began dividing up the 160-acre estate. Photo c.1922

The Belle of New Haven

Sarah Lockwood Pardee was the fifth of seven children born to Leonard Pardee and Sarah Burns. No record survives of her date of birth, not even the year. The scant evidence places it somewhere between 1835 and 1845.

The Pardees were a respectable, upper-middle-class New Haven family. Leonard, a joiner by trade, rose to become a successful carriage manufacturer. During the Civil War, he made a fortune supplying ambulances to the Union Army.

By all accounts, Sarah was no ordinary child. She was considered beautiful and was said to be fluent in Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian by the age of twelve. She was also known for her knowledge of the classics, especially Homer and Shakespeare, and for a remarkable musical talent. New Haven society dubbed her “The Belle of New Haven.”

Her upbringing, one researcher argues, was steeped in unusual influences. New Haven was a hub of progressive, Freemasonic-Rosicrucian thought, and several of her uncles and cousins were Freemasons. As a girl, she attended the Young Ladies Collegiate Institute, Yale’s only female scholastic institution. Surrounded by Baconian philosophy and a love of Shakespeare, she would have absorbed its fascination with secret ciphers and numbered codes, along with Masonic-Rosicrucian ritual, symbolism, and Theosophy.

William and Annie

William Wirt Winchester was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 22, 1837. He was the only son of Oliver Fisher Winchester and Jane Ellen Hope. Oliver, with his partner John Davies, built a successful clothing manufacturing company and a considerable fortune. He then turned to firearms, and his venture evolved in 1866 into the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

The Winchesters and Pardees were well acquainted through New Haven’s First Baptist Church. Sarah and William’s sister Annie were classmates at the Young Ladies Collegiate Institute. Sarah and William married on September 30, 1862.

In the summer of 1866, the couple had a daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester. She lived only about six weeks before dying of marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition, in July 1866.

In 1880, Oliver Winchester died, leaving the company to William, who served as its treasurer. Barely a year later, on March 7, 1881, William died of tuberculosis in New Haven at the age of 43. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery.

Contrary to a common assumption, the two deaths were not close together. Annie died fifteen years before William, so the story that Sarah fled to California in the immediate wake of both is false.

William left his widow about $20 million and nearly half of the company’s stock, which earned her roughly $1,000 a day in royalties for the rest of her life. It made her one of the wealthiest women in the world. In his memory, Sarah established the William Wirt Winchester Hospital in West Haven, Connecticut, for the treatment of tuberculosis, and she supported it throughout her life. The hospital later became a Veterans Administration hospital, and the Private Pavilion at Yale New Haven Hospital was renamed in his honor.

Lost Years Abroad

Sarah then vanishes into near-silence. A New Haven Register notice from 1886 lists her as “removed to Europe.” Beyond that, nothing survives to say where she went or what she did during those years.

It is possible, given her languages, her status, and her Masonic leanings, that she was welcomed into the permissive lodges of France. She may have visited esoteric landmarks such as Chartres Cathedral, with its eleven-circuit labyrinth, or Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel, with its staircase that leads nowhere. This is speculation, but it is suggestive.

Winchester House workers c. turn of the 20th century

A Quiet Philanthropist

Sarah’s life was not all hammering and secrecy. In 1909, she worked with her sister Isabell Merriman, a millionaire in her own right and a member of the Santa Clara Juvenile Probation Commission, to establish a summer home for poor girls from San Francisco.

In 1911, she sold a home at Fair Oaks, near San Francisco, for $200,000. By 1915, a local newspaper was calling her the “Spirit Savior of the Carpenter’s Union.”

In 1912, her sister Isabell Merriman, who was 69 years old, was reported by the local newspapers as having converted to the faith of Abdul Baha, the Persian prophet, and that she had been commanded to go to Palestine to teach the children of the temple in the English language and ways of the Far West

In 1916, Sarah’s niece Margaret, who served as her secretary, fought a custody battle over her adopted 14-year-old daughter Marian Marriott, the supposed heir to Sarah’s millions. Marian's father was Fred Marriott, the owner of the San Francisco Weekly.

September 1922: The Hammers Fall Silent

Sarah Winchester died on September 5, 1922. When the news reached the house, the workers stopped where they stood, leaving nails half-driven into the walls.

Her twelve-page, thirteen-part will was signed thirteen times. It divided her estate among a number of charities and the people who had served her faithfully, with her fortune split among eight nieces and nephews and several charities. By then, building and giving had shrunk her fortune from $20 million to about $4 million. Her niece and secretary Marian Marriott oversaw the sale of her furnishings and belongings, and her attorney, Roy Lieb, executor of the estate, arranged for the sale of the house.

Accounts of the sale conflict. One says the house sold for $135,000 by December 1922, and another that it went at auction for $5,000 in January 1923. By July 1, 1923, it was open to the public as the “Mystery House,” advertised as having 240 rooms laid out in suites of eight, joined by secret panels. The museum that exists today was established in 1933. It is California Historical Landmark #868.

The Legend Takes Hold

Almost everything the public believes about Sarah comes from folklore. Its details vary, but its heart is always the same.

After William’s death, the story goes, a distraught Sarah consulted a famous Boston medium named Adam Coons. In a séance, she was told she was cursed by the many people killed by Winchester rifles, and that the spirits demanded she move west and build them a house. In California, she supposedly held séances every midnight in a “Séance Room,” using a Ouija board and planchette and wearing one of thirteen colored robes, to receive the next day’s building instructions. She rang a bell at midnight to summon the spirits and at 2:00 a.m. to dismiss them. Construction never stopped, for fear that she would die if it did. She slept in a different room each night to throw the spirits off her trail. The strange architecture was meant to confuse them, the number 13 to ward off evil, and 7 and 11 for luck.

The story endures because it is thrilling and because it sells. Today’s attraction, with its flashlight tours, souvenir mugs, and the tagline “The Mansion Designed By Spirits,” profits from the legend, though its managers make an effort to present Sarah in a positive light. Early tour guides were reportedly encouraged to embellish the story for flavor.

Some of the ghost stories have a traceable beginning. In 1937, John Brown and his wife, who lived as custodians in the turret room, spoke of strange footsteps, unlatching doors, and phantom conversations, and they said they had turned down requests to hold séances. Stories like these helped draw the crowds. Other claims were circulating even earlier, including reports that her servants were Hindu and that she followed some religious cult rather than spiritualism.

Dismantling the Myth

The case against the folklore is strong. There is no evidence she ever met Adam Coons or that he existed at all. The origin of the name “Adam Coons” can be traced back to a book written by Susy Smith in 1967 called Prominent American Ghosts. No evidence exists that Sarah Winchester was a spiritualist. Her closest companion and nurse of many years, Henrietta Severs, firmly denied it.

There is no evidence that a "Séance Room" existed and that it was used for that purpose.

The curse makes no sense. If she truly believed the Winchester fortune was cursed, why keep vast holdings in the company for life and later acquire still greater controlling shares?

The “spirit-confusing” logic is thin. There is no reason odd architectural features would baffle spirits, or that spirits would need a bell to keep time.

Sarah's reclusive behavior fueled local gossip about her odd behavior. She most likely kept to herself because of disfigurements from arthritis, missing teeth, and neuritis.

If the folklore is fiction, the question remains: why did Sarah build the house this way?

Winchester House damaged after the 1906 Earthquake

Sarah’s Puzzle: A Theory in Numbers

One researcher offers a bold answer. Sarah was a devotee of Francis Bacon, and the house is a message written not in words but in numbers and architecture, a puzzle that rewards those who follow the path of the initiate.

Bacon’s philosophy maintained the tenets of the ancient mystery schools, such as architecture as art, higher dimensional unification, and the theme of "concealment." Bacon’s concept of concealment originated with his view of Proverbs 25 (in the Old Testament): "It is the Glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter.” This is the principle that evolved into the modern scientific method and the Masonic Hiramic legend. Moreover, Bacon applied the theme of concealment to everything he touched—including his own life— and Sarah followed in his footsteps.

Francis Bacon employed several methods to conceal his ideas, primarily through deliberate secrecy and cryptographic techniques. He believed in hiding his works to ensure they were not disturbed and could be recovered by posterity, often leaving clues in ciphers or emblematic devices within his published texts.

The Names and the Numbers

The theory holds that Sarah found destiny in William’s name. By the author’s reckoning, in the Pythagorean cipher “William Wirt Winchester” totals 111, and its parts (William = 34, Wirt = 25, Winchester = 52) reduce to 777, a number cherished by Kabbalists, Rosicrucians, and Freemasons. His full name has 21 letters, or three sevens, and his initials W.W.W. equate to 555.

The supposed evidence is that Sarah treated 52 as the code number for “Winchester.” The house has 52 skylights, and the family plot in Evergreen Cemetery is number 52. The three headstones are inscribed “BABY ANNE,” “SLW,” and “WWW,” which also add up to 52. For a decade after William’s death, she held exactly 777 shares of company stock. Her own number, the author says, was 13, with the “master number” 11 drawn from the letters of Sarah (5) and Pardee (6). Annie’s name, printed in her obituary as “Winchester, ANNIE PARDEE,” matches that eleven-letter pattern and totals 56.

The Path of the Initiate

In this reading the estate is a Masonic temple in disguise, and every visitor is a prospective initiate:

The Gates: The wrought-iron gates bear sun symbols with daisies at their centers. The sun is the insignia of a lodge’s Senior Deacon, who guides initiates, and the daisy stands for innocence and fidelity.
The Approach: Two palm trees frame the house like the temple pillars Boaz and Jachin. The front faces true east, toward the source of “Light.”
The Entrance: Visitors enter from the rear, near the northwest corner, as Masonic candidates enter a lodge. The “Switchback Staircase” has 44 shallow steps and seven turns, blending the “Winding Staircase” of the second degree with Jacob’s Ladder.
The Ballroom: Built almost without nails, as Solomon’s Temple was, it has a checkered parquet floor like a lodge’s mosaic pavement. Two mirror-image stained glass windows flank the fireplace, carrying Bacon’s designs and, the author claims, coded numerical messages and quotations from Shakespeare. By this reading, Sarah saw herself as a survivor like Cressida, and like Richard II, who vowed to “hammer it out.”
The Bedroom: Her ceiling is a grid of 49 squares (7 squared). Outside, a crescent-shaped hedge honors Bacon’s coat of arms and the lunar number 13. The walls bore Triquetra wallpaper, symbolizing the moon’s three phases.
The “Séance Room”: Rosicrucians call such a room the Sanctum and Freemasons the Chamber of Reflection. It sits at the center of the house, an 11-foot cube originally painted blue like the “Heavenly Arch” of a lodge, with thirteen pegs for robes of different colors, one for each lunar month.
The 7/11 Staircase: Two staircases, one of 7 steps and one of 11, form a Y, a fork in the road. The right-hand path leads west to east, toward the light.

(Top) Daisy stained-glass windows (bottom) spider web windows

Daisies, Fibonacci, and the Fourth Dimension

Architecture as art legacy was first passed down by the Roman architect and philosopher Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. It was Vitruvius who first expounded the virtue of the mathematical value of Phi (the Divine Proportion, Golden Ratio, etc.). Later, in the thirteenth century, the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci translated Phi into real numbers. This rational system of numbers is known as the Fibonacci sequence. The arcane knowledge of Phi, and its relationship to architecture, was adopted and guarded by the Knights Templar, only to go underground after their downfall in 1307, remerging as the “ Invisible College” of the Rosicrucian movement.

The daisy is a key. Many species have 13 petals, and their florets spiral in 34 and 21 arcs, a difference of 13. Sarah’s paired, eight-petaled daisies, which do not occur in nature, point to the Fibonacci relationship of 8 and 13 and to Phi, the Golden Ratio. The thirteenth bathroom, reached by 13 steps, holds six spider-web windows. The author reads them as a calculating device and a model of the universe’s symmetry, which explains the claimed “Theory of Everything.”

The house’s disorientation echoes the age’s fascination with the fourth dimension. This was the era of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, where large and small blur, and of Cubism. Sarah’s large doors opening into tiny spaces and small doors opening into vast ones borrow from the same world.

The Unfinished Work

A comparison could be made between the house and the reverse of the U.S. one-dollar bill, with its unfinished pyramid, a symbol of work still to be completed. The house, preserved as Sarah left it, awaits an “inheritor,” an enlightened initiate who can finish the puzzle.

Whether you find this brilliant or fanciful is up to you to decide.

Ghosts, All the Same

Whatever the truth of Sarah’s intentions, visitors and staff swear the house is not empty. These are some of the reported hauntings:

The Ghostly Handyman: A black-haired figure, thought to be a former workman, has been seen repairing the ballroom fireplace and pushing a spectral wheelbarrow down a dark hallway.

The Invisible Hand: A restoration worker on a ladder in the Hall of Fires, working alone in the early-morning quiet, felt a tap on his back, then a push. No one was there. He left for another project.

The Heavy Sigh: A tour guide named Samantha was about to begin her talk in the Daisy Bedroom, where Sarah was trapped during the 1906 quake, when a deep sigh drifted from the hallway. A small, dark form glided around the corner, and when she followed, there was nothing but another sigh. She believed it was Sarah herself, annoyed to find strangers in her favorite room.

Sarah Winchester remains one of America’s great unsolved portraits. The records show a brilliant, intensely private woman who lost her daughter and her husband, inherited a fortune, and spent nearly four decades building a house that never allowed itself to be finished. The séances, the curse, and the spirits arrived later, shaped by tour guides, souvenir shops, and the human appetite for a good ghost story. Whether she was a grieving widow seeking refuge in endless construction, a philanthropist with a private passion for architecture, or a devoted student of Bacon who hid her beliefs in numbers and stone, Sarah took her reasons to the grave in 1922. What she left behind is a labyrinth that still tests everyone who walks through it: staircases that stop at ceilings, doors that open onto nothing, and a silence where the hammering once was. The house keeps its secrets, and perhaps that is exactly what she intended.

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