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It may sound like the stuff of folklore or a ghost story and in fact the story is so intriguing Stephen King wrote a television mini-series about it. Stephen King?s Rose Red was released in the United States on ABC in 2002. Of course because it was a Stephen King project it has a supernatural horror tone but it may surprise you to know how much of the true life story was used.
Instead of Ellen Rimbauer, the real life lady of the every growing house was Sarah Winchester. By most accounts, Sarah Winchester was perfectly normal in 1862 when she married William Winchester. Hubby Will was the marketer of the Winchester repeating rifle used widely on the western frontier. And he was fabulously wealthy. But after the death of her infant child in 1866 and her husband's death in 1881, Sarah realized that money wasn't everything.
THE MEDIUM GIVES THE MESSAGE
Despite the shares of Winchester stock and cash she'd inherited-a windfall that gave her an income of roughly $1,000 (823 euros) a day-Sarah was so depressed and miserable that she went to a Boston spiritualist for help.
The Boston medium announced that Sarah's family died because of, essentially, bad karma. Ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles were the culprits. Maybe because Sarah already felt guilty about those death-dealing rifles, she believed the ghost story. She didn't even argue when the spiritualist told her how to appease the angry spirits: The Winchester widow must move out West and build a mansion that would never be finished. As long as she kept on building, Sarah would stay alive.
WACKY HOME IMPROVEMENTS
Sarah fled New Haven, Connecticut, for the farming community of San Jose, California, in 1884. She settled into a small farmhouse, set up a s?ance room, and each night communicated with the spirits who told her what to build next.
The clatter of hammer and saws filled the house 24 hours a day. Sarah employed a legion of builders who worked in shifts for almost four continuous decades fulfilling Sarah's odd demands. The result was quite a piece of work: a rambling maze with staircases that led nowhere, more than 2,000 cupboards (some only one inch deep), doorways that opened onto nothing, and balconies with no way to get to them. Sarah installed five separate central heating systems despite California's sunny, warm weather-and strung miles of wire connecting strange communication systems that no one knew how to work. She developed a fixation with the number 13: she built rooms with 13 windows each, 13 fireplaces in one suite, 13 gaslights on her chandelier, 13 holes in her kitchen drain, and so on.
At the end, her house boasted 160 rooms, 3 elevators, 6 kitchens, 40 bedrooms, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 10,000 windows, and 467 doors-but just 1 shower!
GOING TO THE MANSION IN THE SKY
Sarah Winchester died at age 83 in 1922, having lived the long life that her spirits had supposedly promised her if she kept building. For the next 16 years the house remained empty. But it was eventually converted into a popular museum, which draws thousands of visitors to San Jose. Ghost tours and nighttime flashlight tours titillate the tourists.
Some say the house is still inhabited. Staff and visitors have reported lights going on and off, and cold spots in certain rooms. Maybe it's vengeful spirits, angry that the building has ceased. Or maybe it's Sarah herself, trying to find that shower.
http://www.informativepost.com/2008/02/ ... se-327.htm
