DREAD: The Unsolved Explores the Enigma of The Winchester House

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Aug 25, 2021

1839. Sarah Lockwood Pardee is born in New Haven, Connecticut. The daughter of Leonard and Sarah Pardee, she is, at the day of her birth, astoundingly wealthy. Leonard Pardee was a carriage manufacturer, and her mother was a popular figure at upper class functions. Sarah was a bright child who knew 4 languages. She would go on to attend the Young Ladies Collegiate Institute at Yale. She will eventually become sole owner of the Winchester firearms dynasty.

When Sarah became old enough to marry, her parents scanned the throngs of upper crust suitors and settled on one William Wirt Winchester. If you didn’t know, William was the only son of firearms magnate Oliver Winchester, who’s mass produced rifles helped settlers as they took root across the west. Some called the winchester repeating rifle the “rifle that won the west,” though many other companies claim that as well.

Sarah and William married in 1862. Things appeared to be going well, and in 1866, Sarah gave birth to a daughter, Annie Winchester. But, this is an episode of Dread: The Unsolved. I unfortunately don’t trade in “happily ever afters.” Just 40 days after her birth, Annie passed away due to marasmus, a condition that causes an inability to metabolize proteins. Essentially, she starved to death in one of the richest households of the 1860s.

William and Sarah stayed married, and continued living their lives, slightly overshadowed by the death of their daughter. In 1880, William’s father Oliver died, leaving him in charge of the entire Winchester Repeating Arms Company. A year passed, and after a short and sudden bout of tuberculosis, William Winchester followed in his father’s footsteps, as it were.

At this point, theories vary. Some say Sarah enlisted the help of a medium in Boston, who told her she needed to atone for the deaths caused by winchester rifles, lest she be tortured until her dying day. How to accomplish this? Move west and build a house for the souls. Other theories say she moved west to be closer to her remaining family.

Whatever the reason, Sarah moved west, to San Jose, California. She purchased an unfinished eight-bedroom farmhouse. Once again, theories differ as to how she went about what she did next. Some say she began expanding, without the help of architects, to build a home fit to house the souls of all the people killed with a winchester rifle. Other theories say that Sarah, being preposterously rich, hired an architect and got to work alleviating her boredom by planning expansions to the house.

Regardless of the theory, the house began to expand. Rooms added, architects hired and fired. Somewhere around 1890, Sarah stopped using architects altogether. With no training, and no experience, Sarah began drawing the plans for expansions herself. This led to a documented case of her accidentally designing in a safety issue. Here is a quote from Sarah in a letter to her sister:

“I am constantly having to make an upheaval for some reason. For instance, my upper hall which leads to the sleeping apartment was rendered so unexpectedly dark by a little addition that after a number of people had missed their footing on the stairs I decided that safety demanded something to be done.”

Some have stated that Sarah continued building, pushed on by spirits. Others believe that Sarah had money, and when you have enough money, you can continually make mistakes, attempt to rectify them, and then make more.

In February of 1895, The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on Sarah. They reported this:

“The sound of the hammer is never hushed. The reason for it is in Mrs. Winchester’s belief that when the house is entirely finished she will die. Whether she had discovered the secret of eternal youth and will live as long as the building material, saws and hammers last, or is doomed to disappointment as great as Ponce de Leon in his search for the fountain of life, is a question for time to solve.”

The house continued construction, with rooms being added, torn down, and re-added in the span of a week. From 1886 to 1922, the house was in a constant state of flux with its dimensions changing by the day. Some claim that Sarah needed the rooms to hide. She reportedly slept in a different room every night, lest the spirits catch up to her. When a room was not available, she’d have builders construct one.

In 1922, at the age of 82, Sarah would die in her bedroom of heart failure.

By the time it was “finished,” the house was 24,000 square feet with 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 160 rooms, 52 skylights, 47 stairways and fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens. It was a far cry from the life it began as an 8 bedroom farm house.

Just over a year later, the house was opened to the public for tours. This continues to this day. Visitors are treated to stairways to nowhere, secret doors, and the general confusing architecture that Sarah was known for. The house may have succeeded in drawing in spirits, as it’s considered by many to be one of the most haunted locations in America.

So what do you think? Was Sarah Winchester bored and rich, or did the restless dead lead to a marvel of modern architecture?

Let me know in the comments. I’m also on Twitter @DreadUnsolved, Instagram @DreadTheUnsolved, and on Facebook. If you have a tip, or just wanna say hi, you can reach out to me at TheUnsolved@DreadCentral.com

Thanks for watching.

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