The house has 13 bathrooms and spooky enough our tour including the guide contained 13 people. Winchester had a lot of superstitions one of which was with the number 13, it was her favorite number. Our guide was a lovely lady who kept commenting on her height, which coincidentally was the same as Mrs.

I was able to snap a photo before a was told, and I did sneak a photo from the roof. Note that there are no pictures or video allowed on the tour. The first is the Halloween candlelight tour, which runs on select dates in September and October, talk about creepy! Want to dial the creep factor up another notch, visit the museum on a Friday the 13th Flashlight tour, the next one will be held on April 13, 2018. After that, there are two specialty tours depending on the time of year. The Mansion tour will take you about an hour and it’s the one I took. This is a behind the scenes tour where you get to explore areas like the basement and the unfinished ballroom. You could take the Grand Estate tour, which will run 2.5 hours and cost you around $44 dollars. Stay in the courtyard area because they will announce when your tour will occur. Here you will also find an entrance to the gardens. You can start your tour in a cute courtyard that contains a museum of firearms, a shooting gallery, a gift shop, and cafe. As you approach the front gate and purchase your tickets, ($36 for adults, $26 for children but check Groupon because I found a half off ticket there), you are assigned a tour time. Now that you have a bit of the history now on to the fun. So Sarah Winchester hired a crew and they worked around the clock, 7 days a week for 38 years until her death in 1922 at the age of 82. Winchester was heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and therefore the responsibility to assuage the spirits went to her. This construction could never cease otherwise Mrs.

The medium said that in order to appease all the spirits who have been killed by the Winchester firearms she would have to build a great house for the spirits. Winchester thought that she was being haunted. The original, unfinished farmhouse, the area at the time was all farmland, was purchased by Sarah Winchester in 1884, as a reaction to a reading she received from a medium in Boston. Some of the surrounding buildings reminded me of old pictures from the 60’s that I used to look at through my uncle’s old viewfinder of historic California. Located off the I-280 in San Jose California, you feel as if you step back in time from the minute you park your car. So when I was planning my road trip, what do you think was the first thing on my list to plan? That’s right a stop at the Winchester Mystery House. I don’t remember exactly what happened but needless to say, we did not go. When I was 12 we went cross-country in an RV and in California I tried to convince my parents to stop at the house. Who doesn’t like a good mystery? Am I right? The Winchester Mystery House has been on my “bucket” list since I was a kid. We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

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