Winchester Crazy Lady

Storytime: so in the mid-nineteenth century in New Haven there was this girl named Sarah Pardee and she married this rich dude named William Winchester who owned a rifle company. So they had a little girl and then she died. And then William died. And then Sarah went crazy. And to make the crazy worse, some "spiritualist" told her that there's a curse on her place and that all the spirits of the people who were killed by the rifles of her husband's company are about to unleash all their dead people powers on her ass. So she gathered up the crazy-huge inheritance from the rifle company (about $20 million which, by my calculations, is the approximate equivalent of $988 billion today) and pulled a mission down to San Jose where she settle her cursed ass into a comfy, white pickett fence house in the Santa Clara Valley. And then for the next 36 years - this is where the crazy really kicks in - she had 22 carpenters work on the house every single day, 24 hours a day. She made them build all sorts of crazy shit like a staircase that leads up to the ceiling, windows in the floor, doors on the 3rd floor that open up to the outside, rooms within rooms, doors that opened up on to walls, you know, that sort of thing. Basically the crazy lady's goal was to build a fucking huge-ass maze that was constantly changing in order to confuse the bad spirits that were after her. Makes sense to me. So when all was said and done, the Winchester Mystery House was seven stories high with three elevators, 47 fire places and 25 bedrooms. And then she died. So I suppose the moral of the story is if you're gonna go crazy, it helps to be loaded.

I love those kinds of stories.

Now if my version of the story wasn't good enough for you and you want to read something more eloquent (and accurate), go here. And if you want to see pictures - cause really what's the point without a picture? - then go here and here. And here's a satellite view of the mansion from Google Maps. Cool huh? Well I thought so anyway.

Thanks to Danielle for telling me about this.

The bathroom? 17th door on your left.