Winchester Mystery House

Monday 30th January 2006, 7:03pm BCT

Melanies Aunty Doris and Uncle Tim came and picked me up on the weekend and we went to the Winchester Mystery House

It was awesome!

In a nut shell its the mansion of the late Sarah L. Winchester, heiress of the Winchester Rifle company that she started building back in 1884. She was an eccentric lady who hired builders to live on site and build 24/7 until she died. Its a pretty amazing story, she received $1000 a day from the Winchester Rifle company back in the day when $1.50 was the standard days pay rate. She paid her employees and servants $3 which was very good.

The house has all sorts of cool and weird things. Stairs that lead to the roof and go nowhere, doors that open onto walls, doors that open to sheer steep drops, windows that look onto walls, a switchback staircase that has seven flights of stairs but only rise about nine feet and include 44 steps only 2″ high, $3000 front doors that were never used, a cabinet that is only 1/2″ deep, etc, etc, etc.

Its a very cool place, and a lot of fun to walk around. The guild took us though a lot of the story and was pretty good, even though she talked really fast

Mrs Winchester only stood some 4ft tall, and a lot of the doors were made for her size. Melanies aunty towers over this one

Most of the stuff in the house was imported from overseas. The wallpaper in some rooms was actually pretty rough but didnt look too bad.

One of the most expensive windows in the house, cost around $1500 i think.

She had an intercom system throughout the house, if at anytime she needed something she just had to press the button in the room and it would ring in the servants quarters. With the 160 odd rooms, the servants would have had a hard time finding her if they didnt have this little box that automatically popped up the room number that the button was pressed in.
You can see the box on the wall with a white number.

One of the most expensive rooms was the ballroom, it was all that big, but it has some awesome wood carved furniture and walls/floors.

The tour took us around 65mins, it went really fast and i can help but feel we didnt even see half of the place. Theres other tours that take you to the basement and stuff, theres even flashlight tours at night!

After finishing up there, we walked around the pricey shopping district and checked out the bookshop. Then went back to Doris and Tims house and had tea. We had chicken and it was great

It was a good day