It was never supposed to be about the house.
When Winchester Park opened to the public 100 years ago today, it promised dancing and bands on acres of pastoral land that were meant to become an amusement park. But what everyone really wanted to do was walk through Sarah Winchester’s house on the grounds, a sprawling Victorian mansion that many in San Jose had heard about but had never seen up close.
As the Winchester Mystery House celebrates its centennial, San Jose’s most enduring and famous landmark continues to draw the curious not only from the Bay Area but from around the world.
“We’re just so honored that 100 years on, this story still resonates,” said Walter Magnuson, executive director of the Winchester Mystery House since 2015. “It’s a little different for us celebrating this milestone, because typically we’re celebrating Sarah Winchester and we’re telling the stories and legends and lore associated with her, but for the centennial we’re really celebrating Winchester Mystery House, the historic home and attraction.”
San Jose city officials plan to declare today “Winchester Mystery House Day” at a ceremony featuring the entombment of a time capsule filled with current memorabilia and a performance by Symphony San Jose musicians in the front garden. There will be 13 hours of tours Friday, followed by weekend performances by the magician Aiden Sinclair and a Centennial Brunch on Sunday morning that is open to the public. A new exhibit, “100 Years of History and Mystery,” also will be unveiled. Tickets and more details are available at www.winchestermysteryhouse.com.
The Winchester Mystery House doesn’t share attendance figures, but it’s likely seen millions of visitors over the years (including Harry Houdini in 1924). About 20% of the Winchester Mystery House’s annual visitors come from the Bay Area outside of Santa Clara County, and more than a quarter come from outside the state. Interestingly, but maybe not surprisingly, more people visit from Southern California (13.6%) than San Jose (10.7%).
San Jose residents have had a love-hate relationship over the decades with the house, designated a California state historic landmark in 1974 and a city landmark in 1996. Stories about Winchester’s alleged obsession with the number 13, her interest in spiritualism and the notion that she kept building the house to quell the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle made it seem like a kitschy and somewhat embarrassing claim to fame for a city trying to carve out its own identity outside of the shadow of San Francisco.
Red billboards with the house in black silhouette emblazoned with a white skull were scattered along California highways in the 1970s and ’80s and likely scared the wits out of kids on family vacations who couldn’t read the words “Guided Tours Daily” next to the image. No, to them, the sign said “This house is Death.” Of course, that was overselling it a bit, but that was part of the idea.
Just months after Sarah Winchester died in 1922, John and Mayme Brown secured a 10-year lease on the property at what is now Stevens Creek and Winchester boulevards. Their intent was to create an amusement park with one of John Brown’s “backety-back railways” — an early wooden rollercoaster — as its centerpiece. The June 30, 1923 opening featured a jazz orchestra, a big band and vaudeville acts; a July 4 celebration included a 54-foot high seaplane that provided a “delightful series of safe thrills,” a newspaper article reported.
But the public had different ideas. Even though it was falling apart and stripped of furnishings, the house proved more interesting than any act at Winchester Park. A May 1923 article by Ruth Amet in the Mercury Herald conveyed her sense of dread about touring the interior of the empty house and probably whetted the public’s appetite. Very quickly, the house became the headliner.
“It was clear that people just wanted to see this incredible home and see it with their own eyes and hopefully walk away with a better understanding of why she built it,” Magnuson said.
After the deaths of John Brown in 1945 and Mayme Brown in 1951, their daughters Edna and Mildred took over. The publicity machine really revved up with the hiring of Keith Kittle, a former employee at Disneyland and San Jose’s Frontier Village, as general manager in 1973. Kittle, who died in 1997, oversaw a huge renovation of the mansion, including the addition of period furniture and its surrounding gardens.
Work on the house still continues today, from general maintenance to the restoration of a dining room in early 2020. New attractions also have been added, including axe-throwing at the stables and a shooting gallery called “Sarah’s Attic.” Sarah Winchester’s reputation also has undergone rehabilitation in the past 10 to 15 years. Thanks in part to books such as Mary Jo Ignoffo’s “Captive of the Labyrinth,” Winchester is no longer seen as a crazy woman who was afraid of ghosts but as a savvy — though eccentric — businesswoman who owned a lot of land around the Bay Area and gave generously to causes both here and at her home of New Haven, Conn.
The Winchester Mystery House has made a concerted effort to separate the historical Sarah Winchester from its more theatrical attractions such as the Friday the 13th flashlight tours, last year’s “Unhinged” Halloween experience or even the 2018 horror movie “Winchester,” starring Helen Mirren. The centennial year kicked off with a celebration of life for Winchester on Sept. 5, 2022, 100 years after her death. And the beautiful architecture of the house, which included then-futuristic conveniences such as indoor plumbing, elevators and electricity, now gets as much notice as the doors that open to drops and stairways that lead nowhere.
“I think that this place continues to elicit curiosity because it is so unique,” said Cassie Kifer, who featured the Winchester Mystery House in her books, “Secret San Jose” and “San Jose Scavenger Hunt.” “I think that people crave that, especially today in a world when we are surrounded by manufactured products and modern development, and we are losing quirky old places and historic buildings all the time.”
Janan Boehme started working at the Winchester Mystery House as a tour guide when she was a teenager in 1977 and — after a successful Silicon Valley career — now serves as the house historian. She recently wrapped up the Centennial Speaker Series, where she talked about the history of the house and also curated the new exhibit.
Among her recent discoveries is that the mansion’s stained glass — long thought to have been made by Tiffany & Co. — was manufactured by a firm in San Francisco. Proof of that was discovered in 2019 when an envelope addressed to Winchester from the company was found in a plaster wall during the dining room renovation. The discovery happened just after a Canadian architecture historian called to inquire about the possibility. Weird, but some would say that’s par for the course for the Winchester Mystery House.
Boehme said that she never experienced anything strange in the house while giving tours but concedes to hearing some things she can’t explain when she was alone. “I have a real open mind about that kind of thing,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything, but some people say they have.”
However, she does think Winchester, who was famously reclusive, still would be happy about this weekend’s celebrations.
“We love sharing Sarah’s story with everyone and keeping her story alive,” Boehme said. “I think honestly that she — who cared about families and supplying good jobs for people — would love the fact that to this very day, 100 years later, what she built is providing jobs for families and supporting people’s livelihoods.”
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