Winchester Mystery House: Peculiar Places Of Residencies
Peculiar Places of Residency If one were to go to the address 525 S Winchester Blvd in San Jose, California, there would be a beautifully large house called the Winchester Mystery House. This house is toured and pondered upon by many, and this is because of its story. It was once owned by a woman named Sarah Winchester who many say was crazy because of her constant around-the-clock building of her large home and the way she built it. Because of how weird the house is, it has been all over the media. It is visited in the show Ghost Adventures more than once and has many movies based off of the house. The story is so odd that Stephen King even based his book Rose Red off of the house, and his book became a four hour and 14 minute miniseries
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that aired on ABC in 2002. The film is filled with creepy twists and turns in the plot and the house. Stephen King is an author notorious for his creepy books that usually involve the paranormal. There are many similarities between the film and the real house which include the story, interiors, and mysteries of the buildings.
The story of the real house is that in 1884, a woman by the name of Sarah Winchester arrived in San Jose and bought a home that was still under construction in a desperate attempt to keep from dying. Her family was said to be haunted by the spirits that had died using the gun her husband’s family had manufactured. Annie, her first child, died as an infant not long before William, her husband. Because Sarah was so distraught, she went to a spiritual medium to ease her grief. The woman told her that she had to start building a house for her and the spirits that were killed by the gun her husband had manufactured. As long as she continued to build on the house, she would never die like her husband and child. Sarah hired twenty construction workers who rotated shifts because she had them working all day, everyday (THE WINCHESTER HOUSE). In Rose Red, this theme of constant building is also evident, but the film changes the story. In the movie, the woman’s name is Ellen Rimbauer. She is married to a man named John Rimbauer, who owned a large oil company. Unlike Sarah who happened upon the house while it was being built, the Rimbauer mansion was a wedding gift from John to Ellen. The mansion was not finished when they got married, so they went on a long honeymoon to Africa where Ellen became deathly ill. When Ellen got better, she and her husband and Sukeena, the woman who looked after Ellen and grew close to, went back to the mansion that was finally done in 1906. Sukeena became the maid of the house. John and Ellen had two children named Adam and April. April was born with a withered arm because of the sickness Ellen had come down with in Africa. April even disappeared at a young age in the house and was never found. Because of many strange events in the house, Sukeena and Ellen did a seance. During the seance she was told by the spirits that if she were to continue building on the house, she would be immortal, so Sukeena and Ellen went to work on the house (Baxley). Each story involves a widowed woman that builds a home in a desperate attempt to survive with different ways of getting the job done and with different reasons.
The interior of a home is what makes a house a home. It makes it unique to whoever designed and decorated it. Most people decorate the interior to reflect on their sense of style. Some decorate with a theme while others design things that are out of the ordinary like Mrs. Winchester and Mrs. Rimbauer. Sarah Winchester was said to be infatuated with the number 13. There are 13 bathrooms in the house with 13 windows in the 13th bathroom. There are 13 panes on many of the windows as well as 13 panels on many of the ceilings. Sarah even divided her will into 13 parts and signed each part. There are 13 stairs on many of the staircases. Then there is the mysterious 7-11 staircase. It was built in the shape of a Y. This allowed the workers to get to three floors of the home efficiently. Two of the sections have 11 stairs while the other section has seven. She also built staircases that lead to walls and the ceiling as well as doors that lead to nowhere. The house really is a mystery. There are small doors that lead to big rooms and rooms inside of rooms. The disorientation goes to the point that even the halls are maze-like. By 1906, the Winchester home was seven stories high, but later because of a massive earthquake in California, the home was reduced to four stories. There is a seance room that is said to be where she talked to the spirits who told her what to build every night (Winchester Mystery House). In the film, Sukeena and Ellen construct the rooms themselves although there was a seance room. Each room, hall, and staircase was built with the intent of capturing men because when Ellen was sick in Africa, John basically enjoyed his honeymoon with other women. This caused her to loathe men as a whole for their pig-like behavior. The staircases in the house were said to change the amount of stairs every time a person were to walk on them. The people in the film even used a long rope to track where they had been, and, eventually, the group turned back to see that their rope was in a wall that led to nowhere. Upon arrival, the group went into many odd rooms and halls including a library with a mirror as the floor. One of the halls went from being normal proportions to super small. This included small doors that led to normal size rooms. The room they went into was confusing because everything that would normally be on the ceiling was upright on the floor. There was even a couch on the ceiling. While The Winchester Mystery House was built from the ground up, Rose Red was built outward. Both homes have the sense of disorientation even though they are for different reasons.
There are many mysteries to the two homes.
The word mystery is even in the name of the Winchester Mystery House. One of the main mysteries of the house is the paranormal activity that goes on. Many people that journey into the home often feel a presence of someone or something as they enter. There have been many captured pictures of mysterious orbs and body outlines by those who go into the house. Although many of the design plans are said to have come from the spirits that Sarah spoke to each night, some were actually done by her. This includes a spider web design found in many places in the house. Many of the spider webs are found in the design of the windows. Most of these windows are in the 13th bathroom. The same design is also found in various fireplace grates within the house (We Welcome). Another attraction of the house is what is called The Doorway to Nowhere. It is at the front of the house on the second floor in the “Daisy Bedroom,” the room where Sarah was said to have stayed during the earthquake. The door opens to the outside of the home to a two-story drop (Winchester Mystery). No one knows why the door is there. It is very easy to get lost in the home. Workers are not certain of the amount of rooms in the home, but as of 2016, thanks to the discovery of a boarded up room in the attic, there are 121 rooms in the house; there were various items found in the room such as a pump organ, Victorian couch, dress form, sewing machine, and paintings. …show more content…
The Winchester Mystery House has 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 47 fireplaces, 40 staircases, 13 bathrooms, and nine kitchens (Hickman). Rose Red, on the other hand, was a different kind of mysterious place. It was built on an indian burial ground. At the time, this was a reoccurring theme in many of Stephen King’s stories. During construction, some of the workers died from bizarre causes including being decapitated by a falling sheet of glass. Another worker died from choking on his sandwich during his lunch break. Even after the home was complete, the mysterious deaths and disappearances did not stop. Many of the servants would disappear. One of John’s friends died in the solarium from a bee sting. John’s business partner that got cheated out of his part of the profit from the oil hanged himself in front of Adam and April. John even threw himself out of a window of the house. One of the two main mysteries of this house is that many of the deaths and disappearances were of men (Baxley). In the film, the reasoning behind this is believed to be because Ellen wanted the house to hurt people. This is shown when one of the men on the trip tries to talk to the leader of the expedition. He explains to her that she will never get what she wants from the house because it was designed to break hearts just as Ellen’s heart had been broken. Ellen continued to build the home to hurt as she had been hurt. The second mystery is how the home grew. After servants stopped going to the house, it was left alone and abandoned for many years, but the house was still grew. It had more rooms, and its total area and perimeter had enlarged. The house is described by Dr. Joyce Reardon, the leader of the expedition into the home, as a dead cell that she desperately wanted to wake up because it would secure her job for years to come if she found proof of paranormal occurrences in the house. The expedition was done by a group of unique individuals who each had a different ability that helped wake the house and the spirits that lived in it (Baxley). Throughout the film, the group members get lost in the massive, mischievous house with its changing rooms. The paranormal plays a big part in both houses as well as the ability to get lost with ease.
Although both Sarah and Ellen’s stories have ended, their bizarre homes still continue to stand in similar yet different ways regarding the stories of the buildings, crazy inner decor, and mysteries.
In the film, one of the first things you hear is the voice of Ellen Rimbauer reading from her diary. She says, “Houses are alive. This is something we know. News from our nerve endings. If we’re quiet, if we listen, we can hear houses breathe. Sometimes, in the depth of the night, you can even hear them groan. It’s as if they were having bad dreams. A good house cradles and comforts; a bad one fills us with instinctive unease. Bad houses hate our warmth and our human-ness. That blind hate of our humanity is what we mean when we use the word ‘haunted’.” I believe that those who reside in a home make the personality of the home clear. Both the Winchester Mystery House and Rose Red reflect on the widowed owners and their odd tactics of building a thriving home to live
in. Works Cited Page
Baxley, Craig R., director. Rose Red. Trimark Video, 2002.
Hickman, Matt. “With New Discovery, Winchester Mystery House Now Has 161 Rooms.” MNN - Mother Nature Network, Mother Nature Network, 31 May 2017, www.mnn.com/your-home/remodeling-design/blogs/new-discovery-winchester-mystery-house-now-has-161-rooms. King, Stephen. Rose Red. Rank, 2001.
THE WINCHESTER HOUSE!, www.prairieghosts.com/winchester.html.
“The Winchester Mystery House: A Bizarre History.” Historic Mysteries, 5 Oct. 2016, www.historicmysteries.com/the-winchester-mystery-house/.
“Winchester Mystery House.” Winchester Mystery House, www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/.
“We Welcome You to the Winchester Mystery House.” Ripley's Believe It or Not!, 2 May 2017, www.ripleys.com/weird-news/winchester-mystery-house/.
that aired on ABC in 2002. The film is filled with creepy twists and turns in the plot and the house. Stephen King is an author notorious for his creepy books that usually involve the paranormal. There are many similarities between the film and the real house which include the story, interiors, and mysteries of the buildings.
The story of the real house is that in 1884, a woman by the name of Sarah Winchester arrived in San Jose and bought a home that was still under construction in a desperate attempt to keep from dying. Her family was said to be haunted by the spirits that had died using the gun her husband’s family had manufactured. Annie, her first child, died as an infant not long before William, her husband. Because Sarah was so distraught, she went to a spiritual medium to ease her grief. The woman told her that she had to start building a house for her and the spirits that were killed by the gun her husband had manufactured. As long as she continued to build on the house, she would never die like her husband and child. Sarah hired twenty construction workers who rotated shifts because she had them working all day, everyday (THE WINCHESTER HOUSE). In Rose Red, this theme of constant building is also evident, but the film changes the story. In the movie, the woman’s name is Ellen Rimbauer. She is married to a man named John Rimbauer, who owned a large oil company. Unlike Sarah who happened upon the house while it was being built, the Rimbauer mansion was a wedding gift from John to Ellen. The mansion was not finished when they got married, so they went on a long honeymoon to Africa where Ellen became deathly ill. When Ellen got better, she and her husband and Sukeena, the woman who looked after Ellen and grew close to, went back to the mansion that was finally done in 1906. Sukeena became the maid of the house. John and Ellen had two children named Adam and April. April was born with a withered arm because of the sickness Ellen had come down with in Africa. April even disappeared at a young age in the house and was never found. Because of many strange events in the house, Sukeena and Ellen did a seance. During the seance she was told by the spirits that if she were to continue building on the house, she would be immortal, so Sukeena and Ellen went to work on the house (Baxley). Each story involves a widowed woman that builds a home in a desperate attempt to survive with different ways of getting the job done and with different reasons.
The interior of a home is what makes a house a home. It makes it unique to whoever designed and decorated it. Most people decorate the interior to reflect on their sense of style. Some decorate with a theme while others design things that are out of the ordinary like Mrs. Winchester and Mrs. Rimbauer. Sarah Winchester was said to be infatuated with the number 13. There are 13 bathrooms in the house with 13 windows in the 13th bathroom. There are 13 panes on many of the windows as well as 13 panels on many of the ceilings. Sarah even divided her will into 13 parts and signed each part. There are 13 stairs on many of the staircases. Then there is the mysterious 7-11 staircase. It was built in the shape of a Y. This allowed the workers to get to three floors of the home efficiently. Two of the sections have 11 stairs while the other section has seven. She also built staircases that lead to walls and the ceiling as well as doors that lead to nowhere. The house really is a mystery. There are small doors that lead to big rooms and rooms inside of rooms. The disorientation goes to the point that even the halls are maze-like. By 1906, the Winchester home was seven stories high, but later because of a massive earthquake in California, the home was reduced to four stories. There is a seance room that is said to be where she talked to the spirits who told her what to build every night (Winchester Mystery House). In the film, Sukeena and Ellen construct the rooms themselves although there was a seance room. Each room, hall, and staircase was built with the intent of capturing men because when Ellen was sick in Africa, John basically enjoyed his honeymoon with other women. This caused her to loathe men as a whole for their pig-like behavior. The staircases in the house were said to change the amount of stairs every time a person were to walk on them. The people in the film even used a long rope to track where they had been, and, eventually, the group turned back to see that their rope was in a wall that led to nowhere. Upon arrival, the group went into many odd rooms and halls including a library with a mirror as the floor. One of the halls went from being normal proportions to super small. This included small doors that led to normal size rooms. The room they went into was confusing because everything that would normally be on the ceiling was upright on the floor. There was even a couch on the ceiling. While The Winchester Mystery House was built from the ground up, Rose Red was built outward. Both homes have the sense of disorientation even though they are for different reasons.
There are many mysteries to the two homes.
The word mystery is even in the name of the Winchester Mystery House. One of the main mysteries of the house is the paranormal activity that goes on. Many people that journey into the home often feel a presence of someone or something as they enter. There have been many captured pictures of mysterious orbs and body outlines by those who go into the house. Although many of the design plans are said to have come from the spirits that Sarah spoke to each night, some were actually done by her. This includes a spider web design found in many places in the house. Many of the spider webs are found in the design of the windows. Most of these windows are in the 13th bathroom. The same design is also found in various fireplace grates within the house (We Welcome). Another attraction of the house is what is called The Doorway to Nowhere. It is at the front of the house on the second floor in the “Daisy Bedroom,” the room where Sarah was said to have stayed during the earthquake. The door opens to the outside of the home to a two-story drop (Winchester Mystery). No one knows why the door is there. It is very easy to get lost in the home. Workers are not certain of the amount of rooms in the home, but as of 2016, thanks to the discovery of a boarded up room in the attic, there are 121 rooms in the house; there were various items found in the room such as a pump organ, Victorian couch, dress form, sewing machine, and paintings. …show more content…
The Winchester Mystery House has 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 47 fireplaces, 40 staircases, 13 bathrooms, and nine kitchens (Hickman). Rose Red, on the other hand, was a different kind of mysterious place. It was built on an indian burial ground. At the time, this was a reoccurring theme in many of Stephen King’s stories. During construction, some of the workers died from bizarre causes including being decapitated by a falling sheet of glass. Another worker died from choking on his sandwich during his lunch break. Even after the home was complete, the mysterious deaths and disappearances did not stop. Many of the servants would disappear. One of John’s friends died in the solarium from a bee sting. John’s business partner that got cheated out of his part of the profit from the oil hanged himself in front of Adam and April. John even threw himself out of a window of the house. One of the two main mysteries of this house is that many of the deaths and disappearances were of men (Baxley). In the film, the reasoning behind this is believed to be because Ellen wanted the house to hurt people. This is shown when one of the men on the trip tries to talk to the leader of the expedition. He explains to her that she will never get what she wants from the house because it was designed to break hearts just as Ellen’s heart had been broken. Ellen continued to build the home to hurt as she had been hurt. The second mystery is how the home grew. After servants stopped going to the house, it was left alone and abandoned for many years, but the house was still grew. It had more rooms, and its total area and perimeter had enlarged. The house is described by Dr. Joyce Reardon, the leader of the expedition into the home, as a dead cell that she desperately wanted to wake up because it would secure her job for years to come if she found proof of paranormal occurrences in the house. The expedition was done by a group of unique individuals who each had a different ability that helped wake the house and the spirits that lived in it (Baxley). Throughout the film, the group members get lost in the massive, mischievous house with its changing rooms. The paranormal plays a big part in both houses as well as the ability to get lost with ease.
Although both Sarah and Ellen’s stories have ended, their bizarre homes still continue to stand in similar yet different ways regarding the stories of the buildings, crazy inner decor, and mysteries.
In the film, one of the first things you hear is the voice of Ellen Rimbauer reading from her diary. She says, “Houses are alive. This is something we know. News from our nerve endings. If we’re quiet, if we listen, we can hear houses breathe. Sometimes, in the depth of the night, you can even hear them groan. It’s as if they were having bad dreams. A good house cradles and comforts; a bad one fills us with instinctive unease. Bad houses hate our warmth and our human-ness. That blind hate of our humanity is what we mean when we use the word ‘haunted’.” I believe that those who reside in a home make the personality of the home clear. Both the Winchester Mystery House and Rose Red reflect on the widowed owners and their odd tactics of building a thriving home to live
in. Works Cited Page
Baxley, Craig R., director. Rose Red. Trimark Video, 2002.
Hickman, Matt. “With New Discovery, Winchester Mystery House Now Has 161 Rooms.” MNN - Mother Nature Network, Mother Nature Network, 31 May 2017, www.mnn.com/your-home/remodeling-design/blogs/new-discovery-winchester-mystery-house-now-has-161-rooms. King, Stephen. Rose Red. Rank, 2001.
THE WINCHESTER HOUSE!, www.prairieghosts.com/winchester.html.
“The Winchester Mystery House: A Bizarre History.” Historic Mysteries, 5 Oct. 2016, www.historicmysteries.com/the-winchester-mystery-house/.
“Winchester Mystery House.” Winchester Mystery House, www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/.
“We Welcome You to the Winchester Mystery House.” Ripley's Believe It or Not!, 2 May 2017, www.ripleys.com/weird-news/winchester-mystery-house/.