It is highly unlikely that Sarah Winchester felt responsible or guilty for the manufacture of firearms-and she did not hesitate to invest and spend the money she earned from them."ģ. "A sense of pride was more likely than one of guilt. "People associated with the company and those who wrote about it most often looked at it as an American success story," she says. Ignoffo suggests we are viewing those stories with 21st century eyes, and that, at that time in history, shame would have been far from Sarah's mind. Tour guides say that Sarah felt consuming guilt over deaths caused by the firearms. This photo shows a small Winchester gun museum contained within the house. Sarah Winchester was ashamed of the Winchester Rifle legacy. "Winchester's own letters explain that she sent workers away for months at a time." Requests for an interview with officials at the Winchester Mystery House have not been answered at this time.Ģ. According to the website, construction lasted day and night for 38 years. The legend as reported on the Winchester Mystery House website: A medium told Sarah that she was being haunted by spirits of people killed by the famous gun, and she would die unless she started building a house and never ceased. They did not start the rumors-many began while Sarah was alive-but according to Ignoffo, they embellished the stories wildly and made up new ones in order to sell tickets. Five months after she died the Brown family, long-time carnival workers who rented the house, held a public tour and kept on going, eventually buying the property and making it one of the state's top tourist attractions. Here's the history in a nutshell: Sarah Winchester, the wife of William Wirt Winchester and heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune, moved to San Jose in 1886 and began building a house-a very large house whose rooms numbered 160 at the time of her death (although before the 1906 earthquake, it was much larger). The house was under construction for 38 years. In her tell–all book, Captive of the Labyrinth, Mary Jo Ignoffo lays out her research and findings, and today she shares the biggest deceptions surrounding one of California's top tourist attractions.ġ. To learn more about Sarah Winchester’s impact on Los Altos, visit the Los Altos History Museum, conveniently located within steps of Enchanté Boutique Hotel.Winchester Mystery House in San Jose is everyone's favorite haunted house, where candlelit tours and all the lore suggest that you might run into ghosts.īut here's the rub: According to a book by a local historian, the “mysteries" that attract thousands of people each year were manufactured by a family of 1920s-era carnies who first leased and then later purchased the property. Is it a coincidence or another Sarah Winchester Mystery? We’ll let you decide. So, thanks to Sarah Winchester, more than one hundred years later, another passionate female developer, Abby Ahrens, was able to build her own “Daydream,” Enchanté Boutique Hotel, on the exact location where Sarah’s property came to a point. They parceled off the land to developers, who then created what is now beautiful downtown Los Altos. Southern Pacific was forced to purchase the entire property. She ultimately lost that battle, but not without making her point. She was not going to allow them to put the horses at risk or devalue her land, and fought long and hard to stop them. In the early 1900’s, Sarah learned that the Southern Pacific Railroad had plans to run tracks through her property, making it difficult for the horses to travel to their watering hole. The sisters referred to the house as “El Sueño” – or “The Daydream.” Isabelle and her husband, Louis Merriman, lived in the home and Sarah lovingly made many additions to it for them. The property included what is now the oldest inhabited home in Los Altos, the Winchester-Merriman House. In 1888, she purchased 140 acres of land with the intention of raising carriage horses. Sarah was only 46 years old at the time, and was far from a pushover. After her husband William passed away, Sarah and her sister, Isabelle, moved to California from New Haven, Connecticut. While it is true that Sarah suffered from rheumatoid arthritis in later years, she was far from the meek woman she is often made out to be. She is typically portrayed as a reclusive, feeble woman who spent her life trying to keep a curse on her family at bay by continuously adding to her San Jose home, the famed Winchester Mystery House. Much has been written about Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune.
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