15 June 2014 ~ Winchester House

Listening to: Gina Sicilia ~ Addicted

For Friday the 13th I sojourned down to San Jose to go on a Flashlight Mystery Tour at the Winchester House.

The house was built by Sarah Winchester, wife of the son of the manufacturer of the famous Winchester repeating rifle. Her child and husband died, and she moved to California.

It's a house of oddities. The miles of twisting hallways are made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. Mrs. Winchester traveled through her house in a roundabout fashion, supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might be following her.

Whether or not one believes in Mrs. Winchester’s superstitions about spirits, it’s harder to dismiss occurrences of the number 13 throughout the house. Many windows have 13 panes and there are 13 bathrooms, with 13 windows in the 13th Bathroom. There are also 13 wall panels in the room prior to the 13th Bathroom, and 13 steps leading to that bathroom. The Carriage Entrance Hall floor is divided into 13 cement sections. There are even 13 hooks in the Séance Room, which supposedly held the different colored robes Mrs. Winchester wore while communing with the spirits.   
Here are even more thirteens: 13 rails by the floor-level skylight in the South Conservatory, 13 steps on many of the stairways, 13 squares on each side of the Otis electric elevator, 13 glass cupolas on the Greenhouse, 13 holes in the sink drain covers, 13 ceiling panels in some of the rooms, and 13 gas jets on the Ballroom chandelier. (Mrs. Winchester had the thirteenth one added!)

The Winchester Historic Firearms Museums has one of the largest collections of Winchester rifles on the west coast.

B. Tyler Henry developed the famous Henry Repeating Rifle in 1860. In 1866, improvements were made to the Henry Rifle. The redesigned model then became the first Winchester Repeating Rifle. The year 1873 brought more improvements – including a steel mechanism and heavier center fire cartridges – and the model released that year is popularly known as “The Gun That Won The West.”

All these historic rifles, and many other firearms from around the world, are on display in the Winchester Firearms Museum. The museum’s collection includes firearms that are hundreds of years old, as well as the famous Limited Edition Winchester commemorative rifles – among them the Centennial ’66, the Theodore Roosevelt, and the renowned John Wayne.