Sarah Winchester, a diminutive Victorian woman, moved to California to build a house in hopes of currying the favor of the spirits she believed to have haunted her. These unnamed spooks (victims of the rifle dynasty she was made heir to by marriage) she held responsible for her personal losses — the early deaths of her husband and daughter. She held counsel daily counsel with her ghosts, in a well-guarded seance room, where they instructed the placement of her walls, her chimneys, her staircases to nowhere, her lightless Tiffany windows. Sarah Winchester’s well-tended demons built her a house with hundreds of doors and windows, yet with no point of egress — the true “Hotel California” where one can check out any time they like, but never leave. And, for $26, anyone can take a tour.
The Winchester Mystery House is not a happy place. One enters via the gift shop amidst a crowd, led by a seemingly jolly tour guide, expecting a kooky “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” experience, fed by television specials and hotel pamphlets advertising such. Buffeted by unsuspectingly cheerful urban San Jose (a movie theatre marquee is visible through one of the barricaded landings — “He’s Just Not That Into You”), the house’s true nature is not at all palpable from the outside. Once inside, however, the immediate attic scent of must and the wet chill rising from the stone floors of the carriage house suggest that mirth is, in fact, not the feeling of the hour. The tour guide seems angrily resigned to his post and keeps insisting, through his gravity, that he is funny when he is, in fact, not. Nothing here is funny, or even curious. The more one learns about the house, the why and wherefore of its labyrinthine halls and vault-like inner sanctums, the less one wants to know. Every absurd expense seems grotesque and every quirk wrought by superstition demonic. Finally, at the end, one is deposited, relieved, into the gift shop, where no one wants to buy anything. What one leaves the mansion with, instead, is a sense of immense relief.
Hours later, though, the mind holds fast to the experience. Sarah Winchester has a way of sticking in one’s thoughts into one realizes that the gravest aspect of her entire scenario is that it could be yours or anyone’s. Sarah Winchester built a house for her demons and held their counsel, but perhaps the only things separating her excesses from our own are time, money and the Victorian flair for the dramatic. We all hold counsel with our demons. It is then that one catches on to the fact that this is not a tourist exercise, but a cautionary tale.
As a diminutive modern woman who has recently moved to California for reasons not entirely clear, I consider myself forewarned. I will hold myself responsible for my personal losses, and I will let them go, instead of building chambers in which to hoard them. I will build simply and with care a home for my desires and hopes and not for my fears and sadnesses, a home in which no windows are blocked and where no doors lead to walls. I shall listen to the one true voice and listen to my heart and not to my demons.
And if I do not remember these things — may I find myself back in San Jose for another tour of Sarah Winchester’s house.
