Category Archives: Places

The Winchester Mystery House

Posted by clavicarius on September 10, 2012 4 comments

24,000 square feet, 160 rooms, 38 years of construction, and who knows how many restless spirits — it’s the Winchester Mystery House!  I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to write about this place.  The House is located in San Jose, CA and it’s truly bizarre.  Two of my dearest friends told me about the Winchester House back in 2008, and when my husband and I spent our honeymoon in San Francisco we decided we had to try and go check it out.

There are many different versions, but the basic story goes that in after the death of her husband and child, Sarah Winchester visited a medium who told her that the Winchester family was cursed by the spirits of the people who had been killed by the weapons produced by her late husband’s rifle company.  Supposedly, the only way to appease the spirits was to go West, build a new home, and never let it be finished.  If construction ever ceased, Mrs. Winchester would surely die at the hands of the angry spirits.

So, in 1886, Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose and spent her husband’s fortune keeping workers building around the clock for the next 38 years.  But the result of her labor isn’t just a great big house, it’s something much more peculiar.  Architectural anomalies abound in the Winchester House.  A staircase that leads straight up to the ceiling and stops.  An exterior door on the second floor of the house that opens up to a 12-foot drop.  Windowed corridors that allowed Mrs. Winchester to keep a careful watch on her employees.   A cleverly-designed greenhouse with removable floor panels.  A switchback staircase with short steps to accommodate Mrs. Winchester’s arthritis.  Big rooms, tiny closets, secret passageways, and embellishments everywhere.

During the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, Mrs. Winchester found herself trapped in the Daisy Room (named for the daisy motif on its stained glass windows).  Frightened after the event, she chose not to repair or rebuild any areas of the house damaged in the earthquake, but continued on with brand new construction.  (I think I remember the tour guide saying that she immediately sealed off the Daisy Room and it remained so until her death).

We saw a lot of cool things on our Winchester House tour, including Mrs. Winchester’s massive collection of Tiffany stained glass windows (there were several throughout the house in addition to a storage room full of them, nicknamed the “$25k Storage Room,” appropriately) which she would often have custom-made with certain imagery and symbolism.  The tour guide had a lot of interesting stories to tell about the construction of the home, certain visitors, and the lonely life of Mrs. Winchester.

The tour doesn’t take you through every room, though you can opt for a basement tour or behind-the-scenes tour to see more.  According to this site, about 1/3 of the mansion is off-limits to guests, some of it being used as office space and some of it being unsafe for guests.  That site also mentions that employees get a special tour of certain locked-off rooms when they’ve been working at the House for thirteen months.

If you’re ever in the area, I definitely recommend checking out the Winchester Mystery House.  It certainly has that tourist trap feeling, but it’s still an authentic, unusual, nearly 130-year-old mansion worth touring.

 

The Time I Stumbled Upon Britannia Manor Part II

Posted by clavicarius on February 20, 2012 None comments

This is Part II of the story, catch up with Part I here!

We turned down the road that passes right by the construction site for Mark III, though it was hard to see much in the dark.  When we reached the intersection where I had turned around and left during my previous visit, we now found a man in a neon security vest with a flashlight.  We rolled down our window and he asked us what event we were there for.  That seemed like a weird question at the time (what else would we be there for?), so we assumed maybe it was part of the act or something.  We said “Scare for a Cure,” and he told us to head down the road and park.

We parked in a long row of other cars along the side of the mountain road, by a guardrail, and walked down to a registration table where we signed up and signed some safety and liability forms.  We basically had to acknowledge that the actors might physically interact with us, and that the haunted house itself was physically demanding, and it wasn’t their fault if we got hurt.  We were put with a group according to the time we bought tickets for and waited for the next step:  a big yellow school bus ride to take us much further down the mountain.

At the end of the ride, we were finally at our destination and joined a line right outside of the actual haunted house area itself, waiting to get verified and get our red-level armbands (these let the actors know that we had signed up for the extreme version).  Keep in mind that pretty much everything from here on out is outdoors in the forest and in open-air.  This waiting area was already pretty heavily decorated, the zombie apocalypse theme strongly represented.  Creepy actors weaved their way through our line, already spooking (and I use that term lightly) some of the jumpier guests, nearly running them out of the line all together.  We could see beyond the line was some sort of holding area and we could hear lots of unusual sounds, including live music.  At one point, a nearby car literally caught on fire.

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The Time I Stumbled Upon Britannia Manor Part I

Posted by clavicarius on February 17, 2012 None comments

Sometimes the most interesting discoveries are waiting for you, right under your nose.  All you have to do is look for them.  This is the story of one of those discoveries.

When I was living in Austin in 2010, my daily commute to work took me down a busy highway deemed “one of the most scenic urban drives in central Texas.”  The road winds through massive hills where the rock has been dramatically cut back to accommodate the highway, passes over Lake Austin and through Barton Springs, and provides such breathtaking views that the drive to and from work was often one of my favorite parts of the day.  Most days, I was blessed with even more time to admire the view as the route was frequently clogged up with rush-hour traffic.  It was during one of these stop-and-go afternoons that I was able to notice something in the scenery that piqued my interest.

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Valentine Scrabble Gram @ Oh Happy Day

Posted by clavicarius on February 8, 2012 None comments

Are you planning a Valentine’s Day Treasure Hunt for your beloved next week?  Jordan over at lifestyle/design blog Oh Happy Day has an adorable free printable “Scrabble Gram” that would make a great component for a hunt, or just a fun puzzle-themed Valentine!  Your sweetheart opens the envelope to find a handful of colorful Scrabble-esque letters, and uses the numbers in the corners to arrange them in the right order, revealing a sweet message from you!


To include this in a treasure hunt, you could write a clue on the back of the letters that only makes sense when they’re arranged properly.

Head on over to Oh Happy Day to download and print the free PDF file that comes with 7 different messages!  So easy, so cute, and so fun!

Room for Rent in Historical Clarke Mansion

Posted by clavicarius on February 3, 2012 None comments

As a mystery fan, I have a strong affinity for old buildings and houses (and the secrets they might keep), so imagine my delight when I stumbled upon an amazing Craigslist ad the other day for an apartment in the historical Clarke Mansion in The Castro in San Francisco.  I wasn’t familiar with the mansion when I read the listing, so what caught my eye instead was the following line in the ad’s description:  ”The most unique part of the apartment is the circular bedroom, which is actually in a turret and is reached by a spiral staircase.”  A bedroom inside a turret?!  It’s kind of a dream of mine to live in a house with a turret, so I had to know more about this unusual apartment offer!

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