Are you looking for something a little different to do
this holiday season?
If so … Well, given that one of the more popular tales to
tell this time of year (i.e., Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol")
is just loaded with ghosts, maybe you'd be up for a visit to one of America's
most haunted homes?
To be specific, the Winchester
Mystery House in San Jose, California.
Which — earlier this month — kicked off a brand-new "Spirit of
Christmas" event that allows people to tour its infamous 160-room
Victorian mansion and gives them a glimpse of what the holidays would have been
like back in the Gilded Age.
For those of you who don't know the sad story behind of the
Winchester Mystery House, it all basically swirls around one Sarah Lockwood
Pardee. Born in 1840, Sarah was the daughter of a wealthy carriage manufacturer
from New Haven, CT.
As they used to say, Ms. Pardee married well. In 1862, Sarah became the bride
of William Wirt Winchester. Who was the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, the
Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut
and manufacturer of the Winchester
repeating rifle. Which was this hugely popular firearm that — according to
legend (as well as the slogan that Winchester
used in all of its advertising) was "The Gun That Won the West."
So you'd think — with the melding of these two wealthy
families — Sarah & William would then go on to live long happy lives. But
that wasn't the case. Following the death of their infant daughter Annie in
1866, Mrs. Winchester fell into a deep depression that she never fully
recovered from. Then — when Sarah lost William to tuberculosis in March of
1881 — she decided to find out why exactly her should-have-been-charmed life
was instead filled with woe.
So — following the popular custom of that time — Mrs.
Winchester reached out to a spiritualist. Who then told her this fantastic tale
about how all of the bad things that had ever befallen her family could be
traced back to the Winchester
repeating rifle. To be specific: It was all of the Native Americans & Civil
War soldiers that had been killed by this easy-to-use firearm that were now
targeting the Winchester family from the spirit realm. According to this
Boston-based medium, it was these thousands of vengeful ghosts that had caused
Annie & Williams' untimely deaths. More to the point, this spiritualist
supposedly suggested that all these restless spirits had now set their sights
on Sarah.
So what could be done to prevent Mrs. Winchester from
sharing Annie & Williams' fate? This medium from Boston
had a bizarre suggestion. Sarah was to first move west and then attempt to
appease these vengeful spirits by building a great house for them. According to
this spiritualist, as long as construction continued, the ghosts who wandered
the halls of Mrs. Winchester's home wouldn't then go after her.
Fearing that her eternal soul was stake, Sarah followed this
Boston medium's advice to the
letter. She first moved from Connecticut
to California. And then — in
1884 — Mrs. Winchester purchased an unfinished farmhouse just three miles
outside of San Jose. And over the
next 38 years, with the help of hundreds of workmen & artisans, Sarah
transformed this eight-room home into a seven-story mansion.
At the time of Mrs. Winchester's death in September of 1922,
this structure sprawled across six acres. And among its 160 rooms were 13
bathrooms & six kitchens that were then connected by 47 stairways.
And ever since this house first opened to the public back in
1923, fans of the occult have flocked to this place. Eager to hear the tales
that Mrs. Winchester's neighbors would tell about the bells that would first
toll at midnight (i.e., the witching
hour) and then 2 a.m. (i.e., the time
when spirits must traditionally depart from the mortal realm).
Of course, with a back-story like this, it's easy to
understand why this Victorian mansion has become a super-popular Halloween
take-in with visitors to the San Jose
area. But Walter Magnuson — the recently installed General Manager of
Winchester Mystery House LLC — wondered if it might also be possible to make
this paranormal showplace a must-see during another holiday season. Like — say
— Christmas.
"I came to this position earlier this year after having
spent the past five years at the Disneyland Resort. Which is actually kind of
fitting, given that the Happiest Place
on Earth has some very strong ties to the Winchester Mystery House,"
Magnuson explained during a recent phone interview. "Most people don't
know this. But when Walt Disney was first considering adding a haunted house to
Disneyland back in the mid-1950s, he sent Ken Anderson,
one of his key Imagineers, up to San Jose
to take a look at the Winchester Mystery House. Ken came up here for a long
weekend, wandered through the mansion, observed a number of tour groups and
then filed his report in 1958."
Ken Anderson submitted to Walt Disney two pages of notes on
the Winchester House, from the size of the tour group (maximum of 20), the mix
of adults and children (roughly four times the number of adults to children),
the maximum/minimum entrance and exit time in each area (25 seconds to 60
seconds), the maximum/minimum time the guide spoke in each area (32 seconds to
three and a half minutes), as well as a variety of notes like "average
group well behaved" and "rooms are all empty-nothing to touch."
Concept art from the walk-thru version of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
Copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved
Mind you, this was back when Walt thought that Disneyland's
Haunted Mansion
was going to be a walk-thru attraction. Which is why the Winchester Mystery
House — given its paranormal legacy as well as this building's ability to
accommodate multiple tour groups at the exact same time — seemed like the
ideal template for this theme park's proposed spook house attraction.
"And Anderson didn't just wind-up borrowing the
way that the Winchester Mystery House pulses tour groups through the building
and its grounds," adds Magnuson. "If you were to compare the grand ballroom at Disneyland's
Haunted Mansion
with the grand ballroom that we've got here at the house, you'd see that these
two spaces have pretty similar design," Walter continued."
What the inside of the Grand Ballroom looks like for Haunted Mansion Holiday 2015.
Copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved
And given that Disneyland's Haunted
Mansion has proven to be a pretty
flexible structure (EX: This attraction's annual transformation into
"Haunted Mansion Holiday." Which is when the characters from Tim
Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas" take up residence in Disneyland's
haunted house from the first week of September through the first week of
January), Magnuson wondered what might happen if the Winchester Mystery House
experienced the same sort of seasonal overlay.
So Walter rallied the troops at the mansion, many of who
have worked at this fabled San Jose
area attraction for decades now. And in just a few short weeks, they were able
to cover the Winchester Mystery House with over a 100,000 twinkling lights and
thousands of feet of festive garland. Inside the house itself, over 20 designer
Christmas trees featuring nearly a thousand ornaments have been set up in
various rooms. And as people tour through the building, they'll then encounter
joyous carolers, holiday revelers from the Victorian era, even St. Nicholas
himself.
Of course, given that the Winchester Mystery House has 47
different fireplaces, one has to wonder how St. Nick chooses the chimney that
he's then going to go down. But that's probably a question that should be
answered in a future HuffPost piece.
"We even predict hourly snowfall during our 'Spirit of
Christmas' evening events," added Tim O'Day, Director of Marketing &
Communications at Winchester. "This
beautiful snowfall occurrence in our Central
Gardens replicates actual rare
snowfalls that fell on the Winchester
estate and the fruit orchards of the Santa Clara
Valley back in the late 1880s and
mid-1890s."
The inaugural presentation of "The Spirit of
Christmas" continues at the Winchester Mystery House on December 20, 26
& 27.
This article was originally posted on the Huffington Post's Entertainment page on Sunday, December 20, 2015