Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester House is a mystical landmark in the USA. This is house No. 525 on Winchester Boulevard in California, which is a tourist attraction. The house can only be called a "builder's nightmare".
And the background of building a house is as follows... In 1855, Oliver Winchester bought the Smith & Wesson company, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, and began manufacturing hunting weapons. Soon the American Civil War broke out, and Winchester became rich in supplying weapons to the government. In 1865, the war ended, and the demand for weapons fell, but it was necessary to explore the wild West, where the Indians held the defense. And the enthusiasts went west with Winchester rifles at the ready. The path was not easy, they were met by Indians defending their territory, but the forces were unequal. The Indians could only counter the guns with bows and tomahawks, and accordingly almost all the Indians fell in unequal battles.
In 1862, William married Sarah Purdy at the height of the Civil War. Soon they had a daughter, but the joy quickly turned to grief - their daughter Annie died a couple of months later. Sarah became depressed and began to avoid society. In 1880, Oliver Winchester died, and his entire vast fortune passed to his son William. William himself survived his father for a short time and died of tuberculosis the following year. But Sarah was not satisfied with the version of death from a banal disease at that time, and she resorted to the services of mediums. The medium from Boston immediately realized everything and began to communicate with the spirit of William Winchester. The "spirit of the husband" informed the medium that the Winchester family was being hunted by the evil spirits of those who had been killed with the Winchester rifle, and advised Sarah to build a special house in which the spirits would not be able to harm her.
Guided entirely by the advice of the medium, Sarah purchased an unfinished house in San Jose, California. Since her husband left her about $ 20 million, which by those standards was simply a colossal fortune, Sarah began to rebuild the house. After all, there was no protection from ghosts in the old house! Having previously set up a room for communicating with spirits, Sarah, who was distraught by that time, began to rebuild the building.
In 1884, the construction of the Winchester House began, and for this Sarah resorted to the services of non-professional workers working 24 hours a day. The house was built so that the spirits chasing her would get lost among the rooms, so there are about 160 or maybe 200 rooms in the house, because of the very complex structure of the house, it is difficult to count the number of rooms. Well, if you need to quickly evacuate the house, then many doors on the upper floors open outward. But that wasn't enough for Sarah! She ordered windows to be built on the floor and hidden windows in the walls. Well, if the spirits want to climb to the upper floors, then climbing most of the stairs, they will stick into the ceiling. In order to notice the approaching spirits without looking up from bathing in the bathroom, the doors were made of glass. Some rooms were rebuilt several times, and so that the spirits could quickly mix in the rooms, very narrow corridors were built, along which little Sarah could easily move. Following the advice of the spirits, the workers built 6 floors, their inexperience was reflected in 1906, when 3 floors of this huge maze collapsed during an earthquake and were no longer under construction. This was to be expected, given that the house was built in an earthquake-prone region by inexperienced workers, but for some reason the good spirits forgot to mention it.
The construction was carried out until Sarah's death in 1922 at the age of 82. After her death, nothing was found in her safe except the hair of her daughter and her husband. Well, and some general information about the Winchester house. There are 13 numbers everywhere in the house: stairs consist of 13 steps, rooms have 13 windows, 13 panes, 13 bathrooms. The house has about 160 rooms with 6 kitchens, 40 staircases are scattered throughout the house, some of which rest on the ceiling, 2 dance halls, 950 doorways, about 10,000 windows, 47 fireplaces, some exhaust pipes do not go outside.
