Winchester Mystery House

The medium who supposedly sent Sarah Winchester west cannot be found in any record, and people have looked hard.

The house in San Jose is real and genuinely extraordinary: a Victorian and Gothic mansion known for its size and its architectural curiosities, open to the public since nine months after its owner's death in 1922. The story attached to it is a great deal shakier than the building.

Start with the woman. Sarah Winchester was born in New Haven in 1839 and married William Wirt Winchester in 1862. Their daughter Annie was diagnosed with marasmus and lived a month. Between the autumn of 1880 and the spring of 1881 she lost her mother, her father-in-law and her husband. Her eldest sister died in 1884, and around then she developed rheumatoid arthritis, for which her doctor suggested a warmer and drier climate. In 1885, aged 46, she moved to California, and her three surviving sisters followed her out. In 1886 Edward Rambo, a San Francisco agent for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, drove her around the Santa Clara valley and showed her a 45-acre ranch with a two-storey, eight-room farmhouse on it. She bought it and named it Llanada Villa, after country in the Basque region it reminded her of.

Now the legend. The version everyone knows, that a Boston medium named Adam Coons told her she was haunted by people killed with Winchester rifles and must never stop building, traces back to a single book: Susy Smith's Prominent American Ghosts, published in 1967. Mary Jo Ignoffo's biography allows that a woman of her standing plausibly might have consulted a medium, but finds no evidence she did. Emily Mace and other scholars went through Banner of Light, the spiritualist periodical, and the Boston city directories that listed spiritualists. There was no Adam Coons.

The money was inflated too. Tourist literature claims an inheritance of up to 20 million dollars. Her husband's estate in 1881 was valued at 362,330, and roughly 300,000 of that was stock she would not actually inherit until 1898.

Even the official record repeated the story. When the house was added to the National Register in 1981, the survey stated she believed she would die if construction stopped, and gave the wrong purchase year.