Almaden Resident
Cover Story
Photograph by Vicki Thompson
Endless Greetings: A statue of Hebe, the goddess of youth, stands in front of the Winchester Mystery House, where thousands of visitors from around the world flock to see doors that lead nowhere and other bizarre features.
Bizarre Attraction
Almaden man keeps Winchester's appeal alive
By Eli Segall
The story of the Winchester Mystery House is as bizarre as it is well known. Eccentric widow Sarah Winchester did construction on the home every day for 38 years, claiming to be on a mission to appease restless spirits.
Winchester died in 1922, and her house, a California Historical Landmark across the street from Santana Row, has been a tourist attraction ever since. Thanks to Almaden Valley resident Warren Weitzel, Winchester's own spirit lives on.
Weitzel, 62, is director of operations for the house. He oversees the day-to-day comings and goings at the facility, which includes everything from maintenance and group tours to re-enactments of the reclusive Winchester.
He joined the house after working at Frontier Village Amusement Park in south San Jose for nearly 20 years.
The house, for its part, draws in people well aware of its haunted reputation.
"A lot of people come with a certain preconception about the house and the lady, and they pretty much all leave with a different idea of who she was," said Laurel Johnson, a house tour guide.
"Their impressions are split 50-50 between bizarre and beautiful," she added.
Johnson, 67, has been a tour guide at the house for the past 15 years. She has also played the role of Sarah Winchester, the woman who built the massive 160-room house, for various television segments.
The Victorian-style mega-mansion was originally a farmhouse on the all-dirt Los Gatos-Santa Clara Road. The property was part of Campbell back in the 1880s. The property had more than 160 acres of apricot, cherry and almond trees. The road has since been renamed Winchester Boulevard, but the 24,000-square-foot castle of a house still sits on 4 acres surrounded by movie theaters and interstate 280.
Winchester moved to the house in 1884 from New Haven, Conn. She arrived grief-stricken, lonely and wealthy. Her husband, gun maker William Winchester, whose father invented the Winchester rifle, had died three years earlier, and the couple's only child had long been dead, having succumbed to a rare disease as an infant.
As folklore has it, a psychic in Boston told her to buy a house out West and to do construction on it at all times. The psychic said the spirits of people killed by Winchester rifles caused her misfortune, and construction might somehow appease them.
Fortunately, Winchester had the cash to do such construction. She inherited more than $20 million from her husband--an unthinkable amount for that time period--and received roughly $1,000 a day from Winchester company stock royalties.
"The income she had coming in was certainly, in her day, an amazing amount of money," says Jeanette Watson, a Campbell historian.
She began adding on to the modest farmhouse immediately after moving in. She sank a staggering $5.5 million into the home, which was under construction every day up until her death.
Winchester never had any specific blueprints or plans, only a fixation to keep building. The result was a mishmash of 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 40 bedrooms, six kitchens, three elevators and two basements. She was the home's chief designer and often claimed architectural inspiration from the spirits themselves. Consequently, stairs lead straight into the ceiling, windows were built into the ground, and doors open directly into walls.
The house always piqued the interests of its neighbors and was opened to visitors shortly after Winchester's death. To this day throngs of people come to marvel at the dwelling's odd layout. During the summer, its peak season, more than 100 people are employed to accommodate the tourists. Many leave claiming they captured something not of this earth as souvenirs.
"We have people who contact us after they visit who say they have mysterious images in their pictures," says Shozo Kagoshima, general manager of The Winchester Mystery House. "Sometimes it's just a bad flash, but people are convinced they've captured something."
Most visitors come while on a visit to San Francisco. For some it's an impulsive side-trip, while for others it's planned.
According to Kagoshima, 60 percent of visitors come from the West Coast, 35 percent from other states, and 5 percent hail from other countries. All coming to gawk at a true wonder, considering the era in which it was constructed.
"It was truly fascinating," says Cathy Lubart of Austin, Texas, a recent visitor to the home. "I've heard so much about it, but it's just one of those things you've got to experience in person."
Weitzel, who moved to Almaden in 1985, landed his job because of his experience at the amusement park, where he worked from 1962 to 1981. His only interruption while working there was to serve in his combat infantry unit in Vietnam.
He has been at the Winchester Mystery House for the past 25 years, 22 of them in his current post.
"They contacted me because they needed someone with knowledge of operations," Weitzel says.
Sound operations management is integral to the house, which is located on 4 acres of land and offers 110 of its 160 rooms to the viewing public. Guided tours are available every day of the year except Christmas; there is a café and gift shop, and countless parties are held at the house.
According to Kagoshima, 60 percent of visitors come from the West Coast, 35 percent arrive from other states, and 5 percent hail from other countries. The house employs more than 100 people in the peak summer tourist season.
The house has indeed had its fair share of noteworthy guests. The wife of a former Russian ambassador to the United States once came--with a police escort. Three sumo wrestlers in San Jose for a wrestling tournament also took a side trip.
However, this past year the house has seen fewer visitors than usual. Cross-country trips and family vacations, a key source of domestic revenue, have declined as gas prices shot up.
"We've had cars from every single state in our parking lot, but it's all gone down because of gas prices," Kagoshima says.
Still, the house continues to gain notoriety. Several television networks have done segments that showcased Johnson as Winchester, including A&E, Discovery Channel and Travel Channel. Advertisements are placed in visitor publications at San Francisco hotels and tourist spots. Billboards dot highways approaching the Bay from the northern and southern state borders. The ads invite people to come see a strange yet unmistakably storied slice of San Jose history. And visitors don't have to wait for the Friday the 13th flashlight tours or Halloween to do so, since the home is open all year.
Winchester Mystery House is located at 525 S. Winchester Blvd., San Jose. For more information, call 408.247.2000.
