The Eastridge shopping mall is not as unique as it used to be and isn’t the only ice rink for a 100 miles in any direction as it was when I was a kid. Frontier village, my favorite of those, has been gone for many years. I grew up just over an hour south of San Jose and just outside my hometown Salinas there has been  a billboard for the Winchester mystery House for many years. It was, as I recall, one of only three things worth going to San Jose for when I was a kid. The Winchester mystery House is in San Jose California conveniently located next to the I280 freeway at the Winchester exit. The mansion she left behind has come to be known as the Winchester Mystery House. She started work on an unfinished farm house 3 miles from San Jose (at the time) in 1884 and continued contraction for 38 years. Whether she believed she was protected from vengeful spirits, wouldn’t die, or just would never have to hold a housewarming party is a subject of speculation. Combine those riches that superstition the advice of a medium, who apparently had a brother-in-law who was a contractor, and Sarah Winchester was led to believe that she would be protected if there was a constant sound of hammers building on her house. She was a superstitious woman who is haunted by the fact that her husband’s invention, while it made her rich, killed a great many people. Take Caltrain to Santa Clara and then the VTA bus 60 to the Winchester Transit Center.Sarah Winchester was the widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle. Special events, from wine walks to October “Fright Nights” are often offered (check the website for details and schedules. The Winchester Mystery House is open daily and offers an array of guided tours, ranging from 25 minutes to two hours (from $5 per person). And visitors are treated to the oddities as well as the spooks (there are reports of frequent ghost sightings). The house is painstakingly maintained and constantly restored, with lavish furnishings like those Mrs. Today, the legend and the legacy live on in Sarah’s bizarre Victorian beauty. When Sarah passed away in 1922, the still-incomplete (after 38 years of construction) house sprawled out over six acres and held 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 47 stairways, six kitchens… (you get the picture). The result is a maze of twisting hallways, secret passageways, stairways going nowhere, and even doors in the floor. Built to confuse the malicious spirits pursuing the widow, the house has no overarching rhyme or reason in its plans-except to make it impossible to navigate without knowing where you’re going. Winchester purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began her life’s work on a “house of spirits,” constructed with the assistance of friendly ghosts she contacted through her seance room. Rumored to be the most haunted mansion in the Bay Area, San Jose’s infamous Winchester Mystery House is both home to ghouls galore and an architectural road map to the psyche of its disturbed and eccentric creator, Sarah Winchester. After the 1881 death of her gun-magnate husband (whose family manufactured the famous Winchester repeating rifle), the distressed New England society wife was advised by a medium that she must move west to flee the ghosts of those who had fallen victim to rifle’s fire.
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