

It's said that it took the servants hours to find her because she never slept in the same bedroom twice in order to confuse the spirits. The 1906 earthquake destroyed large portions of the house, and trapped Sarah in one of her bedrooms. During her lifetime the house sat on 161 acres of land, and eventually reached 7 stories tall. We may never really now Sarah's motivations, but the house is proof that she wasn't really using her vast inheritance in the traditional manner. For the remaining 38 years of her life, construction on her mansion never once ceased until the day of her death in 1922. So apparently that's exactly what she did. She had to continue construction on the house 24/7 every day of her life in order to keep the spirits appeased. The medium supposedly told her this was true, and that she needed to move west and build a house. Her husband, Father, Father-in-Law, and young daughter all died around the same time, and one story or legend says that Sarah visited a medium for advice because she felt she was being punished by the spirits of all the people who were killed by Winchester Rifles. Very little is known about Sarah Winchester and why she moved to California. The house is massive, so there is a lot of info to take in while you're on the tour, but this book does a good job at relating all of those interesting tidbits you forgot the details of while wandering through the house. I found a book about Sarah Winchester that most people called "dry", and a couple of other books about the house for kids. It's the only book I managed to find in the shop, and after poking around online for a while, I realized that there are very few books about the Winchester Mystery House. This book is a slim volume they sell in the gift shop. Visiting this house has been on my bucket list for a long time. We were exhausted, but I couldn't have been happier. I think we ended up staying at the house for about 4 hours because we took 2 tours, and then we had to drive back through San Francisco during rush hour traffic to get to our hotel. We had to get up at 4:30 am for a ridiculously early 5 hour flight, and then drive an hour from the airport to San Jose. That's how much I wanted to see this house. Recently I was in San Francisco for Thanksgiving, and my husband and I decided to take a detour to San Jose on the day we flew out just to visit the Winchester House.
