The story about Winchester House began with baby girl named Sarah born to Leonard and Sarah Pardee of New Haven, Connecticut in September 1839. Why she is important to this story, you will soon find out.
In the early 1860s, she met a man named William Wirth Winchester, who was the son of Oliver Winchester; the famed gun manufactured, and hired millions of dollars.

The gun which made this fortune is the famous Henry Rifle- the rifle that won the West which was a total revolution in gun design. With the beginning of the Civil War on the horizon, his company, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company began to produce thousands of rifles and obtained a fortune from government contracts. At the beginning of Civil War 1862, Sarah and William got married in New Haven and she became the belle of New Haven, and was on top of the city’s social scene.
Four years later, on July 15th, 1866, Sarah gave a birth to a daughter called Anne Perdee Winchester. Just a short time later, her daughter contracted an illness known as “marasmus”, a children’s disease in which the body wastes away. This began what Sarah believed was a curse on her family, and so traumatized was she over her daughter’s death, she nearly slipped into madness, and shunned society. William and Sarah had no other children. Not long after Sarah returned to her family and home, another tragedy struck. William, now heir to the Winchester Empire, was struck down with pulmonary tuberculosis. He died on March 7, 1881. As a result of his death, Sarah inherited over $20 million dollars, an incredible sum, especially in those days. She also received 48.9 percent of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and an income of about $1000 per day, which was not taxable until 1913.
Sarah was more convinced that some kind of curse is ruining trough the family. She was convinced that all those guns which were sold, took someone’s life and that all those spirits are now hunting her family and trying to destroy it. There is a saying “Who plays with the gun dies from one”, and if this is true what would you say about people who manufactured guns?
To provide her falling into the madness a friend of her recommended to her to go and see the spiritualist. “Your husband is here,” the medium told her and then went on to provide a description of William Winchester. “He says for me to tell you that there is a curse on your family, which took the life of him and your child. It will soon take you too. It is a curse that has resulted from the terrible weapon created by the Winchester family. Thousands of persons have died because of it and their spirits are now seeking vengeance. Sarah was then told that she must sell her property in New Haven and head towards the setting sun. She would be guided by her husband and when she found her new home in the west, she would recognize it. “You must start a new life,” said the medium, “and build a home for yourself and for the spirits who have fallen from this terrible weapon too. You can never stop building the house. If you continue building, you will live. Stop and you will die.”

Sarah was not a good designer, but she managed to construct a gigantic house which was built without stopping for 36 years. The sounds of hammers and saws sounded throughout the day and night. As the days, weeks and months passed, the house continued to grow. Rooms were added to rooms and then turned into entire wings, doors were joined to windows, levels turned into towers and peaks and the place eventually grew to a height of seven stories. There were countless staircases which led nowhere; a blind chimney that stops short of the ceiling; closets that opened to blank walls; trap doors; double-back hallways; skylights that were located one above another; doors that opened to steep drops to the lawn below; and dozens of other oddities.

Even all of the stair posts were installed upside-down and many of the bathrooms had glass doors on them.
When the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 struck, the top three floors of the house had collapsed into the gardens and would never be rebuilt.

On September 4, 1922, after a conference session with the spirits in the séance room, Sarah went to her bedroom for the night. At some point in the early morning hours, she died in her sleep at the age of 83.

. The place was so puzzling that it was said that the workmen took more than six weeks just to get the furniture out of it. The moving men became so lost because it was a “labyrinth”, they told the magazine, American Weekly, in 1928. It was a house “where downstairs leads neither to the cellar nor upstairs to the roof.” The rooms of the house were counted over and over again and five years later, it was estimated that 160 rooms existed….. Although no one is really sure if even that is correct.

Today, the house has been declared a California Historical Landmark and is registered with the National Park Service as “a large, odd dwelling with an unknown number of rooms.”