8 Strangest Stories About The Winchester Mansion

Another 20 years after the loss of their only daughter, William Winchester died from tuberculosis in 1881. Sarah was grief-stricken but she wasn't poverty-stricken, inheriting her husband’s share of the arms company, worth around $20 million. Following the death of her daughter and now husband, Sarah Winchester consulted a medium in Boston about her bad luck. Spirituality had been a booming business since the American Civil War had ended and survivors looked to pacify their grief. For a wealthy widow like Sarah, finding a medium would have been very, very easy.

First, the medium told her to move west. There she was to find a house and begin continuous building and expansion, in order to provide a resting place for the spirits of the people who had died at the hands of the Winchester rifles. If the building were to stop at any time, Sarah was told that she would join her family in meeting an untimely death. With that in mind (and with pesky rheumatoid arthritis that would benefit from warm weather), Sarah Winchester moved across the country to San Jose, California.