Unruly Women and Their Crazy Houses

Abstract

Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, began building what would become a six-acre mansion in 1886 in San Jose, California. Almost from the very beginning of the house’s expansion, neighbors and journalists speculated about the motivations for its construction, especially as it incorporated unusual architectural features and continued to grow well past conventional expectations. By the time of Winchester’s death in 1922, a mythology about the house and its architect had blossomed and included the notion that the house was haunted by the ghosts of all the people killed by Winchester rifles and that Winchester believed that as long as she continued building she would not die. Since 1923, the house has been a popular haunted house tourist destination, attracting millions of visitors from around the world. This article analyzes the cultural mythology surrounding the Winchester Mystery House to determine what these myths reveal about American culture more widely and about the way Americans view the relationship between home-space and the subject more specifically. Sarah Winchester’s house represents an important cultural site that reveals a great deal about the anxieties and preoccupations regarding class, gender and domesticity, and westward expansion. Ultimately the haunted mythology of the Winchester mansion obscures the more interesting aspects of this architectural project.