10 Real Life Horror Stories That Will Freak You Out
9. The Winchester House (1884-1922)
The Winchester House was built by the wife of world-famous rifle maker William Winchester. Sarah Winchester began construction in 1884, and was present every day at the construction site with a new set of plans, without interruption until her death on September 5th, 1922. The estimated cost for the building work is around $75 million in today's money.
After the death of William Winchester, Sarah inherited $20.5 Million, a ludicrous sum of money in 1866. Additionally, she inherited almost half of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her $1000 a day (about $30,000 a day in today's money). It was with this huge fund that she paid for the construction of her mansion. The tale goes that a consulting medium informed Sarah Winchester that the spirits of those her husbands rifles had killed would forever haunt her and attempt to kill her, unless she built a house to accommodate the spirits and never cease building it. She purchased an unfinished farmhouse in California and hired carpenters to work day and night until it became a seven-storey mansion (three floors of which were lost in the 1906 earthquake).
She refused to use an architect and would arrive on site every day with new instructions for the workers, often nonsensical, leading to windows that overlook other rooms in the house, staircases and doors which lead nowhere, a staircase built with different size stairs and so on. In the house there are roughly 160 rooms, 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms, 47 fireplaces and over 10,000 panes of glass. There are also 17 chimneys, 2 more chimneys that were built and then removed, two basements and three elevators. Gold and silver chandeliers line the house, and expensive redwood was the only wood allowed in the construction of the house.
Tiffany Company, the world famous jewelers made many of the glass panes throughout the house, along strange designs such as repeating spider webs; incorporating the number 13 repeatedly. Tiffany himself designed a windowpane that would create a rainbow whenever light hit the carefully placed crystals it was built with. This window pane was installed in an interior room, with no windows or natural light, preventing the effect from ever being seen. The number 13 was thought by Winchester to calm or protect her from the ghosts, and so the house is littered with examples. Chandeliers were altered with gold to have 13 candles rather than 12, coat hooks always exist in multiples of 13 and even the sink drain covers have 13 holes.