The Woman Who Built a Maze

Sarah Winchester was a French scholar, a musician with what one acquaintance called "a genius for composition," and an architect so accomplished that contemporaries said she was "familiar with the building peculiarities of all countries." After her husband and infant daughter both died of tuberculosis, she used her share of the Winchester rifle fortune to endow a hospital for tuberculosis patients. It still operates today, at Yale.

Then she started building a house.

She bought an eight-room farmhouse near San Jose in 1885 and renovated it for the next thirty-six years. By the time she died, her home had 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, and 47 stairways. One staircase zigzagged through seven flights and forty-four steps to climb a total of nine feet. Doors opened onto eight-foot drops. She designed most of her stairs just two inches tall, because her arthritis made normal steps unbearable — a house built not to appease ghosts, as the legend insists, but to fit her own body.

The ghost story was largely invented after her death. The tourist company later admitted adding many of the famous oddities — the thirteen coat hooks, the rooms that went nowhere — to sell tickets.

But in 1957, Walt Disney sent an Imagineer to the house to study how it moved crowds through its corridors. The research became the Haunted Mansion.

Every child who has ever ridden it passed through her grief and never knew.