We're staying spooky with one of the most Haunted Houses in America, San Jose's Winchester Mystery House! Taylor tries her best to spin a scary story -- but, of course, she totally doesn't believe in ghosts and also would never do a seance, probably. It's complicated. We also talk about the history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and Sarah Winchester herself. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: doomedtofailpod@gmail.com
We're staying spooky with one of the most Haunted Houses in America, San Jose's Winchester Mystery House! Taylor tries her best to spin a scary story -- but, of course, she totally doesn't believe in ghosts and also would never do a seance, probably. It's complicated. We also talk about the history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and Sarah Winchester herself.
Pics via the Creative Commons & AI
Sources
Sarah Winchester: Beyond the Mystery Beyond the Mystery
https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod
Email: doomedtofailpod@gmail.com
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
we are recording and we
are live hello Taylor with a mouthful of soup so I'm going to go ahead and kick us off because Taylor just made some
amazing soup that looks I don't know I can't see the soup but just the facial
expression she's making is put it to the side there we go you don't have to for long I
think I'm going first today right I don't are you what what was last week
gohost ships I think I go first I think I go first oh you do go first yeah yeah you're right you're right okay well then
then put your well we can we can record either way because they're
separated okay um well I I said that so in case you want to have your suit whatever doesn't matter okay so welcome
to doe to fail I'm fars joined here by Taylor uh we're Tri a week podcast about
relationships or historical events that we're doomed to fail we're going to kick things off today on the historical site
on the Taylor side on this lovely Monday morning I hope so Taylor how are you
doing perfect no notes um I'm good I eating soup but that I feel like that's
a weird thing to start with because I feel like I'm not really a soup person but I just like have the soup it's mostly noodles anyway I said that to
someone recently and they mentioned that many of their friends have soup of the month club memberships and I was
like that's weird it's weird to like be so so into soup unless you're like in a nursing home or hospice care I feel like
we're not of the AG in demographic that would be passion about soup I know I agree and I also um like I feel like I
eat soup for like the bread and the noodles like I don't eat it because of like the soup
you know oh yeah yeah for sure or or or in my case I like to have my soup in a
bowl like a bread bowl so I can eat the bread as I'm eating it so oh my God I
saw a Instagram thing that was like this mac and cheese and a bread bowl and I was like so many carbs so many
carbs I am going to go grab my drink to prepare myself for this session so one
second while I do that all right I'm opening another Cay fancy too classy to have waterl like guess normal people I
don't even know where I would get water I don't think they have that at Walmart I think it's a COS
no sorry I'm classing us so my dream today Taylor is going to be Shipyard
pumpkin ale no [ __ ] Shipyard pumpkin head which is a pumpkin spiced ale
because it is October and I just saw saw 10 last night and I'm in a Halloween
mood and I'm hoping you don't scare the [ __ ] out of me like you did last week because that was really bad that was so
fun I loved it um I will I think I'll switch to pumpkin when you when it's your turn cuz I did
finally get it because I did talk about it a couple weeks ago and say that I put it on my grocery list and then my husband did not buy it and he realized
after he came home after he was listening to it and that he did not buy it are you okay you just
choked I tried breathing the pumpkin ale instead of drinking it and um just a
little uh warning to listeners don't try to breathe your beer good call um well
for me my theme drink is Pedialite for two reasons one because I just got my
both my arms are are shot I got my coid booster and my flu shot today so a
little sore on both sides I'm just doing this this like Wing thing with my arms and I drink some Pedialite so I don't
get sick and then also there's some infant nutrition problems in this story so I think that that also applies okay
fair enough yeah I'm into it all right okay you ready I'm
ready and I so I asked asked you to watch a movie yes but that you said
you've already seen for this week's scary story because I'm going historical creepy because it's Halloween time so I
asked you to watch the movie with Helen Miran oh [ __ ] sorry okay you're right fine fine okay there's gonna be a break
here and it's not make any sense but I cut something out that I wasn't allowed to say so moving on okay I did watch win
for this week I asked you to there we go I watched wi seen before I've seen it many times actually I've seen it many
many times um I love the fact that it was just a known thing in the 1800s to
just take opiates and L LOM like just casually which that guy was constantly on Helen Mir was amazing in it and there
was a lot of jump scares which I'm usually not a fan of but the setting of the house itself was really cool so made
up for it yeah it's such oh my gosh the the house itself is so beautiful obviously we're talking the Winchester
Mystery House in Sarah Winchester today but the oh the house was so beautiful in the movie and I'm I'm like where' those
sets go like can I have those cabinets all the cabinets like they're so beautiful and I want more cabinets um
and then also Sarah snook is in it from succession so that and then also who is
this guy who's like the has like the scariest face what is
his name Emon faren EA m o n faren he's a guy who was like the brother
mean guy he's also in he's in um he was in Twin Peaks he's in The Witcher he
just a scary ass face so I don't know if you know who I'm talking about no I'm
trying to remember I'm looking him up e a m o n f a r i yeah yeah I know
you're talking about yep yeah he's just scary he's got a scary face so um he's in it I think he I
think he knows he has a scary face and he's pretty cool is it he is a mood as
the kids are saying these days he is um so yeah so if you haven't
watched Winchester Super recommend it it's really good and today I'm going to talk about the Winchester Mystery House
and the story of Sarah Winchester sweet so PS the Winchester Mystery House has
been a tourist attraction for a hundred years it opened in 1923 to the public so
that's pretty cool been for that long so picture this it's
1881 and a widow in New Haven Connecticut loses her husband her
father-in-law and her mother all in the same year she's left with a $20 million fortune in an uncertain
future for Comfort she seeks the help of a spiritualist like at a seance kind of
thing which was very popular in this time the spiritualist tells her to move west and to never stop building or she
will die because the bad luck that she's had is due to the spirits of the people who've been killed by the weapon that
made her Fortune the Winchester repeating rifle can I 1886 can I pause
real quick just so everybody's aware win the Winchester House is on a documentary it is it is it is like a
horror movie so correct yeah no not this is true this is go yeah yeah okay
because we talking about a real thing and there's a real thing there and it's
whatever anyways Point made it's on purpose it's a ghost story yeah so in 1886 she moves to San Jose California
where she buys a home in a valley for the next 36 years she adds and subtracts to her home construction never stops
entire wings are created and broken down staircases lead to Nowhere doors open to several story drops out into the
yard the Widow wears morning clothes clothes and a dark Veil over her face the whole time when she dies in
1922 the house has 160 rooms 2,000 doors 10,000 Windows 47 stairways 47
fireplaces 13 bathrooms and six kitchens house it's
huge so who haunts this house visitors have heard laughing and singing in the
ballroom they've reported having their their skirts and their dresses
tugged on when they're walking through through the corridors the most popular ghost is a wheelbarrow ghost it's a man
who is seen in the basement with a wheelbarrow full of Ash that would have been like his job to like move the ash
from like the furnaces to wherever and they see him in the basement and also like leaving the house with the ash so
visitors have said like that actor is amazing and they've been like there is no actor who is the ash mover guy like
what are you talking about um it's like in The Haunting of Hill House when they had that clock fixer you know that old
timey clock fixer and the dad's like I would never have hired an old timey clock fixer what are you talking about the truth is a bunch of things part of
the truth is that houses are scary at night especially big houses you know I'm scared I I kind of scared myself other
day because I like watched a scary movie and then was reading about this and like in my house at night I was like it's dark in here basements are scary at
night um big Victorian houses are really [ __ ] scary at night and that's because that's the kind of house that we
decided as a culture is the most haunted a haunted house is a big Victorian house and it's never like your Builder grade
House Ohio you know what I mean it's like a big Victorian haunted house and I
think we mentioned this before when we were talking about the Warren is that Ed Warren was like yeah of course the
ghosts that you're going to see are going to be Victorian women because these are the houses that still stand
that women died in because women die constantly from like child birth and such you know what I mean sense yeah
yeah it's uh it's not it's not correlation wait no it's not causation
it's correlation basically yes exactly science so a scary V
Victorian ghost and a scary Victorian house is something that like we love as a culture I [ __ ] love it so um
another part of this truth of the story is that women who are rich and have a lot of money are able to pursue their
Hobbies um now and then um and in the past women couldn't go to school so they
could just you know they would like you know paint and write poetry and [ __ ] and Sarah Winchester loved
architecture I read a couple books about yes okay it wasn't just like I'm
trying to save off the dead corpses of the people my husband's Gun Company
killed no that's not true at all okay I tried to start with like a little bit of
the ghost stuff but like I feel like ghosts aren't real in like a ghost aren't real but also in like a I would
never sleep there yeah [ __ ] have you been to the website
recently because this thing the unhinged warm it's scary yeah well it's Halloween freaky and it's been a hundred years but
I'm going to talk about that later too like the marketing around it is top-notch I also you know I bought the the like uh you can buy a 3D tour of it
online for like $8 a lifetime thing and and I was in that recently it's real fun you it like you kind of go along dots on
the floor and you can like kind of walk through the whole thing it's great it's a really fun story so I read some books
one called captive of the Labrinth and one called beyond the mystery and um beyond the mystery I was reading that
one first it's like a very short book I think it's for kids it's like a you know a kids research book but um it's it was
pretty um I don't know it was pretty much a killjoy about all of the fun Parts about it so I was like I don't know I kind of
want something more fun than this cuz like the story itself it was like again there are no ghosts but also maybe there
are ghosts I don't know makes sense but you know what I mean yeah totally um so starting at the beginning um Sarah
lockward parie was born in 1839 in New Haven Connecticut she didn't have a
higher education because she was a woman but she probably would have if she would have been able to um she had three sisters and a brother her family had
been in the United States for many generations by the 1800s and they were wood workers she lived near the
Winchester family the Winchesters were tailor and had cre a way to make shirts
fit cuz shirts didn't always fit people till like very recently um so you would
just like buy a shirt and like tuck it in and make it fit you in a weird way because you know how like old timey bartenders have those like ribbons
around their arms you know what I mean like the Cuffs that's because shirts didn't fit you couldn't pull your shirt
up because like shirts were just like kind of a sack that you like tie around you in a weird way to make it fit you
but um Oliver Winchester um the one of the Patriarchs of the Winchester family found a way to make shirts fit people
better by like curving the arm and like things that we make sense now like we take for granted that shirts fit but
shirts didn't fit for a very long time it was just like this is the shirt make it fit you so at one point um the
Winchesters employed about 5,000 women who all got to work from home sewing
Winchester shirts which is kind of fun and another fun bit is um he was one of
the first factories to use sewing machines but tailor around the country they protested because they thought
sewing machines were job Stealers which like kind of were yeah you know always
happens it's happen forever one consistent thing throughout time in Memorial Something's Gonna Come Take My
Job yeah exactly exactly so she's upper class but they worked hard to get there
um they're near Yale so like it's a time when like they're starting to create these really big um institutions of
Higher Learning she lives near Yale in Connecticut um her family's also abolitionist Civil War time um they're
on the union side her brother is in the Battle of Bull Run so like they're they're like really involved in in in in
that as it happens um on September 30th 1962 in the middle of the war Sarah
marries William wart Winchester who's one of the Winchester Sons um I think he's the only Winchester son he's he's
20 um she's 23 he's 25 um also another cute thing about them is that she's 49
and he's 5'9 a that's cute no is that sweet they were so small were so small
back then um so they're cute um they would have
probably eventually made their own home in New Haven but things were crazy with the war and um his parents really wanted
everyone to be together so in a lot of the story people want to like live by their families but it's not like staying
at your in-law's house it's like you live in this wing of my Mansion you know right so they live together but like
kind of and um so she lived with uh the Winchesters and on June 15th 1866 they
had their first and only child Annie party Winchester um Annie died six weeks
later of marasmus which means her body didn't absorb nutrients and she starved to death which is terrible that's crazy
so so the baby the baby didn't live and they did not have any more children um
it's also worth noting that Sarah was a devout Baptist until about this time and
it's probably because Baptists were starting to do that thing where they're very much like babies will go to hell if
they're not baptized and women were like wait a minute what [ __ ] you you know
because like that's dumb and babies die and like that's super unfair and like real shitty so wait so she was a devout
Baptist until this happened yeah I think around this time I think it was like not just her it was
Other Women of like Victorian time were like we still want to be religious but maybe not as conservatively religious
yeah okay you know because of the because of the baby hell thing so 1866 the year that Annie was
born and died is also the year that the first Winchester repeating rifle hit the market it was called the yellow boy um
and that was the first the very first one there's other gun manufacturers that that you know of there's um the Colts
Smith and Wesson like those real people at this time who are making guns like for the for the first time like Mass
producing them for people the Winchester is the first successful repeating rifle and also due to new ways
to work in the factory that can make the parts faster as well what what does repeating
mean I'm gonna tell you okay so we're going to pause and talk about
guns I Googled the Second Amendment and it is not advised I got some like weird
ads don't love it um it's like it it immediately leads from that to like 911
an inside job was basically how all not great but the second amendment is a
well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state the right of the people to keep and bear
arms shall not be infringed because yes for a long time guns were super necessary in America especially as we
talk about westward expansion in a little bit um I mean when you got here there were already people here and you
need guns to protect yourself and continue to move west um to
kill is what saying 100% got it yes so we're clear also if you if you were part
of this militia you'd be called to fight all the time that's what well regulated means like you were you were some people
in like the 1600s every household was required to have weapons just in case like I don't know the British came or
the French came or Indians came or whatever like there's plenty of times that they're having like these people come in like attack your town and
everybody has to stand up and like be prepared to fight do you remember the Bonnie and Clyde episode of of last
podcast where they talked about how every like town in America in like the
late 1800s 1900s had an Armory Armory for their citizens to access in case they had to
like literally just everybody had to run out and start fighting it's crazy yeah kind of fun
yeah it's crazy kind of crazy um and in early America guns are
important you don't know what you're going into um you guns kept you fed and
they kept you safe so would like you know use a gun to kill a deer and eat it use a gun to kill Native Americans as
you are stealing their land like that was a huge part that's a huge part of American history as we know um you also
brought your own gun to war for like most of History you brought your own stuff to war so if they were like you have to come fight with us you'd be like
cool I have this helmet and this sword and this gun that is like my fames and this is what I'm bringing so you weren't
like clothed by by the army so two things are happening kind of at
the same time that involves the Winchesters and and their guns there is the Civil
War and there's Westward Expansion so in the Civil War the guns were like a
single loading rifles so you load it once you put the gunpowder in you Pat it
down blah blah blah you shoot then you run to the back of the line and you do it again you know wow does that make
sense yeah so if you're in like a line you know you just keep running to the back you shoot once and they're doing the same thing to you it's like one shot
back it happens really fast but it's happening you have to continue to reload um there's this great Co bear video that
I watched again today it's so [ __ ] funny cuz in like I don't know whenever 10 years ago Sarah Palin was talking about like how Paul rier was like riding
his horse and ringing his Bell and shooting his gun to tell people that the British were coming to take their guns away it's like so funny and like
unbelievably not not what happened and Stephen coar is a thing where he rides this like like a like a kids horse you
like put a quarter in and he's holding a bell and he's trying to put um gun powder into a gun and it's so funny and
I'll I'll share it it's hilarious he's just like laughing so hard everybody's laughing so hard um so it's it's hilarious so um but that was the thing
so a a gun you had to reload it every single time that you wanted to shoot it
so Oliver Winchester William um Winchester's dad the guy who invented the shirts he buys a part of a gun
Factory because now he's starting to get rich so he's making these Investments so he invested in a gun Factory but it went under so he bought everything inside the
gun Factory for $40,000 and started to make his own gun his business partner Benjamin Tyler Henry invents the
repeater the repeater can shoot 15 times in 10 seconds that's the thing that's what it means okay so the guy Taylor
friend invented the gun sort of Oliver Winchester is William
Winchester's dad he's the one who had the clothing manufacture where he had like 5,000 women working for him he
invented shirts so partner yeah yeah he's he's the money guy and then this
other guy invented the thing and was like hey I'm just an inventor I don't know how to do anything else and he's like I'll buy the equipment out of this
gun Factory and we'll build your gun we'll call it my name so it's actually the first well not yet it's
actually called the Henry first it's called the Henry Repeater um because his name is Benjamin Tyler Henry and they call it they named it after him so
Oliver he's the money guy he tries to sell it to the government and they say no they don't want to use it for the
Civil War um some of it is like some people are like well it's about Valor and battle it' be
super unfair if we had this gun which is stupid and then Al some people are like um they just don't really get it it's
actually it's not perfect like it does explode sometimes you know it's not like they they they work on it it gets better
but the first version I wouldn't like try one you know it's gonna explod on you um so um one only about 1% of the
guns in the silver war where Winchesters like from from them Oliver goes to Europe in 1865 to try to sell there so
he ends up getting contracts with like England Russia like countries over there um there are other guns like the colt
and and Smith and Wesson are the ones that were used in the Civil War um Winchester buys a factory from Eli
Whitney's son who's used to be like a cotton gin Factory and now it's a a gun
Factory and um while he's in Europe Henry tries to take over the company so
he tries to like take over the the um like everything cuz he was like cuz
Winchester had signed over control of the company to Henry while he was in Europe Henry tried to to like do some
sneaky stuff to get him out Winchester gets back ends up kicking Henry out and taking the designs altering them a
little bit but he has all the machines so it becomes a Winchester and Henry leaves the picture Okay so he didn't
like screw him over he was like like he was protecting his interest in the
business basically well yeah because Henry tried to screw him over first exactly exactly and he was like [ __ ] you
so now now now it's the Winchester and so the so he's selling the Winchester to foreign governments for um for like
their own Wars and the US government kind of slowly starts to use it as well
um and then the second thing is we go west with the gun and the West is bananas
um it's completely Lawless like saying like the wild west is like it's like
Lawless people die constantly um and I'm sure you've seen Deadwood right
no um so there's like Deadwood and Hell on Wheels are like two shows of this time it's like post Civil War Westward
Expansion and it's just like how [ __ ] dangerous it is how Lawless it is how like really you go to like an old west
town and it really is like whatever the sheriff who has no authority over anything says goes you know like
everyone has a gun very scary IUN and it's all yeah I mean it does until
you're like well it's super dangerous everybody had terrible diseases obviously like in Hell on Wheels which
is about like train expansion Westward um post Civil War they all get like trench foot because like they're in like
these tents and like muds everywhere and it's like gross um it's also a very very
very very very bad time to be an Indian they're starving and they're being and
it's almost it's like it's terrible um the um Indians actually they some of the
tribes and some of the people really liked the repeater the Winchester so they had Winchesters in the Battle of
big of Big Horn the Indians had the repeater and kuster did not which is part of the reason that kuster failed um
the government would just give guns to settlers you know they're like hey take this land out west hear some guns good
luck you know so like a huge part of it um there tons of people died um Buffalo Bill used a Winchester and so did Annie
Oakley so that really was like the myth of like the wild west like they were really using Winchester guns um Teddy
Roosevelt of course loved it and wrote about how much he loved it as well nice um the book that I did not read that I
would like to read someday is called Winchester the gun that won the west by haral F Williamson but that's like the
main idea like the Winchester had a big part in Westward Expansion and like killing people as we went West you know
so there lot of money it's from the guns and there's a lot of blood in that money technically you know if thinking about
it um which is part of Sarah's kind of her mystery as well and like part of her story is like the guilt that like she
may or may not have felt because of this so in 1886 William Winchester dies from
tuberculosis he was always sickly um he was always sick he wasn't going to like
live to be old he was like 43 or so when he died Sarah's left with a lot of money
a lot of shares in Winchester and nothing to do so she may or may not have seen that
spiritualist told her to go west probably not in real life it's probably just she wanted like more space and to
do something different but spiritualism is obviously like super popular in this time like I've already talked about and
it's not really seen as like not religious it's kind of seen as like the next step in religion you know right
because like if technology is doing all these things like connecting the world via those cables that we talk about and
you know making vaccines and helping people do to you know helping people live longer then why wouldn't technology
also be able to move us to the next level of religion which would be be talking to the dead right I I get it I
mean look it feels it feels like one of those things where when you are rich enough and bored enough it's like every
yoga instructor in LA that is also works at the house of intuition and has like
17 different Crystal business it's like you just got too much free time yeah exactly
um and it sounds really fun you know and of course you want to talk to dead people that you love you know all the things like it totally makes sense that
you would want to think about it would you do that so I honestly think I would be so
[ __ ] scared during a seance I don't know yeah we talked about this but like I don't I don't know if I could do a S I
feel like so yeah it's like they're dead like do you really want
to let's leave let's leave them in the past I'm such like no that's not even
why I just be scared I'm like and this whole time I'm like I know ghosts aren't real and like this story is just a ghost
story and it's fun but also I'm like we talk about different types of ghosts I know the ghost I see in my house and I
wouldn't go to Sans I'd be so scared so I'm like I know I'm saying two different things in the same sentence but I don't know but that's the way I feel there was
one thing I was listening to a podcast recently and one of the things they said about like hauntings was that it might
not have anything to do with religion or spirituality it could literally have something to do with like the universe
and how the structure of the universe is where like timelines could overlap in a way you know well dou I mean religion
isn't real so like yes but that's because no you said it so flippantly
like of course ghosts aren't real I'm like it's not of course ghost you're saying that because you're doing a
religious interpretation of what a ghost is but I'm saying like there's another alternatives to
it GH I love alternate timelines I think
that's super fun you know like we talked about like that time skip of a mar an tette where like they think they might
have like see thing like I love that like what if like time overlap for a second and you acent saw something else
they weren't supposed to see that's totally totally I way yeah I hope that's true I way more believe that yeah if I
die before you Taylor I'll come back and like try to talk to you oh my God you better but I won't do anything scary
I'll be like I'll be like I just heated up your soup for you like you know it just something nice I'll do something
nice well but I think I think that's the problem I think no matter what you do it will be scary you know like if you wrote
me a letter if I like got got to my desk and there's letter and it was like Hey Taylor miss you love fars I'd be like
[ __ ] oh my God I'd be so scared I'd be like I need to nice to say I need to
leave Taylor a nice note but like I'm a ghost so I don't really have ink so I just go kill some animal outside and use
this Blood to like write hi Taylor miss you on on like a mirror or something you find a way to like leave
me money yeah I feel that be great I'll tell you who the lottery what the lottery numbers are for next next
week okay Taylor that's exactly what I need to go to do for me I L so I I haven't I have this I'm showing this to
Taylor I have this notebook next to me that I found I I haven't unpacked this
house yet like a year later anyways I pulled this out and then in the middle
of it was this lottery ticket from like like 2021 I don't even know how to check yet
I don't know how to check yet you can check it online you check it online I'm not going to throw it away then cuz I might have I might have won Millions
that'd be awesome anyways sorry I'm ging your story go ahead but yeah that that that's what I want I mean that's also
yeah that's the thing like if if it was a if you could contact me through like a parallel universe and you could just
like walk past the door or like I could see you in my in my like security camera
or any of those things like that would [ __ ] scare me so much I don't even know what to do and I know that you're
nice and I know that you wouldn't hurtt me but I still I don't love it so I
don't know my answer is I don't know if I would ever go to say especially if
like I show up in the form that I took when I died so like I'm walking around with like my head underneath my armpits
like just like walking around headless decapitated your face is in like a scream like a in a scream like I don't I
don't know why my death had oh it's CU I saw a saw last night that's why I think about deaths like this yeah yeah I'm
sure I'm sure um but yeah so during this time a lot of people are thinking about this um Sarah does end up knowing the
stanfords who made Stanford University and I didn't I think if I knew this I forgot but Stanford University was
actually made as in memory of their son who died when he was a teenager um he
died in Europe on a trip and they said that they saw a spiritualist and the spiritualist was like you should build
something in his memory I don't then I don't know if that really happened but either way stand for University is made for their the Stanford's dead son um to
as like a memorial to him um so Sarah wants a place for her entire family she
wants to be able to play play around with architecture because that's what she likes to do her family was Woodworkers she really is interested in
it like sincerely so she was 100% right because she picked a place in San Jose a
lot of her property was in like Paulo Alto and Silicon Valley area so like she owned a big chunk of that land for for a
while she has asks her sisters to go with her and and they do so they go from Connecticut to California they take the
train at different times everyone moves one sister's husband is a principal at a school but he gets fired and they move
around her sister Belle ends up being one of the founders of the Humane Society in California and uh she does
really fun stuff like she citizens arrest people that she sees hurting animals um which I love her daughter
Daisy lives with lives with her in the big house for a while um her Daisy her daughter Sarah's niece Daisy is also
named Marian but but called Daisy she's Sarah snook in the Winchester movie so like the niece that's there she's there
a lot um Sarah pays for her homes she buys homes for her family all over this area she owns like dozens of houses
around San Jose San Francisco she owns a big house boat it's like an called an ark like a huge boat that she lives on
for a while that her family lives on she hires a lawyer named Frank leeb he's her lawyer for the rest of of their lives um
land land use in this area is super super complicated CU there aren't any records really cuz it's like yeah we
sent this family of people out here with a gun 50 years ago and they said they owed this land but like we don't know
when they did like starting from scratch on land that they stole and then called it something else and all the things so
it's kind of complicated so she has a lawyer um incidentally Frank her lawyer
his first partner was a man named Delphin M Delmas and he ended up moving
to New York and defending Henry ktha for the murder of Stanford white that we talked I I love how everything just overlaps
Taylor you said that she inherited $20 million did you look up what that is in today's
money is it like $600 million six over 600 million yeah $66 million [ __ ]
crazy amount of money she was rich so they said that like like the dividends
were giving her like a$1 thousand dollar a day you know like she she just had she had tons of
money um so she bought the house in the Winchester Mystery House what it turns
into in San Jose California it was pretty isolated it isn't as much now but it was at the time and she wasn't the
only one doing this like Elizabeth Colt the wife of Samuel Colt of the guns in
Connecticut also built a big rambling house you know so like also a gun lady
built a big house but people really zeroed it on Sarah as like being crazy um this was a very very Victorian time
so they had a lot of money and she would architecture magazines there's like cancel checks that she sent to like get
an architecture Magazine subscription so they know that she did her family was woodw workers so she would build things
but she would use her own um like plans to tell the contractors what to do but
because she didn't have like an architecture degree or any formal training sometimes she would be wrong so
she would build build and then tear it down if it wasn't exactly what she wanted she built a hallway one time and it was too dark so she built a skylight
and the Skylight leaked so it was a constant repair and building in just like a normal rich person way and it
wasn't like constant constant you like in the movie they're like 24 hours a day people are always building it wasn't like that but it was like a fair amount
of building and um in
1906 the house has a seven-story tower five stories in most other places it
just continues to grow which I think is awesome and I wish I could do that like I would love to like add to my house it' be super fun like I love that people are
like oh me grab something from this house and add it to my house and like do all these things like it sounds like you know a fun rich person H to have Taylor
I feel like you're kind of setting this up as though the story of why she did
this isn't true yeah how many people were living with her at this
house oh that's a good question I feel like a um her her niece and her niece's
adopted daughter lived there for a while with her and there also were a ton of people who just worked there there was like obviously like Carriage guy who
turned into the car guy and his family lived there there were a lot of gardeners she employed a lot of um
Japanese people in a time when that was like not something that a lot of people did because it was obviously always but
super racist time and Japanese people specifically um so a lot of people lived there and worked there as like contractors but like in her house with
her it was mostly just like her and her niece she and I just and I just looked it up and the house is 24,000 square
feet so I don't I guess that's what rich I'm not rich I don't know I need to be
rich I need make more money what rich people do she has like a dumb amount of money you know so like what do you do
with a dumb amount of money you know she she you you do what you want to do you do your passion like what do you like
doing like she's like I like architecture I like these buildings I like woodworking I like you know doing
these designs so that's what she did and in 1906 the house had a seven-story
tower that she had built most of the house was five stories and on April 18th 1906 was the great San Francisco San
Francisco earthquake and her Tower fell and all the top stories fell so
unfortunately that explains the stairways and the doors because she didn't rebuild she just sealed things
off so if the fifth floor collapsed she would just seal off the top of the staircase and that's why there
staircases that go to nowhere God this sucks Taylor I know I want I wanted to talk
about the ghost stuff at the beginning because that sucks an ongoing construction of lack of
interaction but why why okay so where did you where did
where was the conclusive evidence that this was not because of ghosts that she did this like everywhere else the house
is marketing campaign let me tell I'll tell you about I'll get there I know um
so a bit about Sarah herself during this time she worked on her Investments and her trusts she gave
money to her family in a trust so that you know all of the money that they would get like a certain allowance and then when they died the rest of the
money would go to this hospital that she built she built a hospital in Connecticut um named after her husband
it was a William wart Winchester Hospital for tuberculosis she built um it was she I mean it was like she spent
like $3 million on it so like just an incredible amount of money on it it became a hospital of World War I
soldiers then tuberculos it's now a hospital for lung disease at yell University so it continues to be
something that you know helps people with with lung diseases not like tuberculosis isn't like as big as it was
now there's like other things so she gave tons of money anonymously she would like give money if someone asked her for
money she would give money to someone else to give to them so it couldn't even like Trail back to her because she was really really private part of the reason
that she was Private is she suffered from severe arthritis so her hands were
like all clawed up and her feet so a lot of the staircases in the Winchester House are just like an inch off the
floor so it's like a whole bunch of stairs to go like not very far and they kind of wind and that was for her
because she couldn't lift her legs very high she had arrus yeah um she also um also all of
her teeth her teeth are really bad her teeth are missing so like I just want to say that we're very lucky to be in a
time we're even like you don't have to be rich to have nice teeth and then also rich people even then like she couldn't
get her teeth fixed she tried to get nice dentures and like she couldn't find nice ones you know and now like all rich
people have the same teeth because they just buy like the weird veneers so very lucky that we very lucky to have teeth
because it's new in human life that our teeth are nice um and just remember she was very very private she donated
secretly she rarely had visitors so she was always in morning so she did always wear black and she did always wear that Veil but she wore that Veil because she
was kind of embarrassed by her teeth you know she didn't want to like see a lot of people because her arthritis was so
bad um and a lot of people like worked for her her whole life and they really loved her
and they're like she was like a really nice woman to them but because of her secrecy and because of the media and
everybody wants to tell a story because she is super rich and it is because of guns even in her own time um stories
started to happen to come out about her in the San Jose Daily News in March 29th
1895 there is a story that headline is strange story a woman who thinks she'll
die when her house is built 10 years ago the handsome residence was apparently ready for occupancy but improvements and
additions are constantly being made for the reason it is said that the owner of the house believes that when it is
entirely completed she will die the Superstition has resulted in the construction of a maze of Domes turrets
cupas and Towers covering territory enough for a castle so they were talking
about her before she even died just like spreading rumors cuz she's like an old lady who wears all black and lives in
this creepy weird house was she even that old of course they were um when she died she was like in her 70s which was very old for the time
as well yeah I guess yeah so it didn't get better these rumors were kind of everywhere kind of
all over the country about her and her house but she chose to ignore them a lot um and just continue on um she did not
constantly work on the house she did in like 1916 she built an elevator in the house so that she could go up and down
but she lived in her different properties she had a ton of houses she would do something like hey I want to come visit you for a while let me just
buy a house next door you know she she would like there's a picture of the outside of the
house that has a doorway to Nowhere have you seen that one right that's because
yeah those are because like parts of the house fell off in the earthquake damn it I know it
sucks carry on I know so Sarah died in 1922 her assets were divided up her
niece auctioned off a lot of the stuff so another unfortunate thing is like none of the stuff in the house is hers
it was empty it was emptied out um so the stuff was stuff that was given like hard auctioned off it like disappeared
into the abyss um the house was sold to an amusement park man named John Brown
and his wife MIM John had invented the roller coaster called the backer upper
I'm sure you've been on one of these it's one where you like go up like you're gonna go upside down but you don't and then you go back oh yeah yeah
you know what I mean you go up yeah and then you go back it was called the back upper this guy became a millionaire off
it huh yep and so um I also think that he might
have known my great grandpa because my great grandpa Bish he owned a company called the Bish Roco Amusement Company I
believe it was called and he um had invented a a ride um called The Flying
scooter and I have a bunch of like um ads for the flying scooter I have like tickets of his for when he went to like
the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 so like come from a roller coas coaster folk so maybe they knew each other fish
Roco m company Chicago Illinois yep look at that yep that's a you're like you're
like you're like amusement park royalty almost I am a Music Park Realty not
almost yeah did a guessed um so they bought the
house and immediately made it into a tourist attraction so that's she died in 1922 by 1923 100 years ago exactly this
year it was um a tourist attraction um in 1924 Harry Houdini was on a tour of
America trying to debunk spiritualism because like he seems I don't know why but that's hilarious and um he did like
a a cursor investigation of the house and he told them that they should call
it the Winchester Mystery House so that name comes from Houdini that's fun which is fun in the 1970s a dude named Keith
KD who used to work at the frontier Frontier Village at Disneyland became the manager and he was like exactly who
you'd think like a guy who would you know he worked at the front Frontier I can't even say that Frontier Village at Disneyland so he was like pretending to
be a cowboy for years and so he was like a big personality he got it on the national register of historic places in
1981 um and he put up these Billboards that you see if you drive into San Jose they have like the house and like a
skull behind them to make it like make it into like a really scary attraction he really hyped up the 13 thing which
isn't really true so they're like you know like 13 Nails in all the closets there's 13 hangers and the things and
you can see that in like the um in like the virtual but it's just something that they added later or like put
significance on saying that Sarah was obsessed with the number of 13 but like she really wasn't they have if you go
now they have nightly seances which again sounds super fun they said there's a seance room in the middle of the house
where she had seances that wouldn't even really make sense if you had a seance in that time you would have had it in your
dining room because it's like a social thing you wouldn't have hid it you would have had people come over and just do it so that's probably not true um I read a
thing that in 2016 they found a room like an extra room they had like a bunch of her stuff in it and I looked at the
picture and it's like Victorian couch with a scary doll on it so like I believe that's zero because of course that's what you'd find if you wanted
that to be scary um and now you can go on tours you can get married there
there's some actually really beautiful pictures of a wedding there um cuz it's a beautiful house you can have team building events there you can go on
nightly flashlight tours which sounds super fun um I don't think it's what
Sarah would have wanted her Legacy to be I think she would have either not really wanted a legacy or she would have wanted it to be the the tuberculosis hospital
and the and the hospital to help people with lung diseases but um instead it's this it's Mystery House which I think is
brought a lot of joy to a lot of people and kind of a really fun story so I don't mind it for her oh man think it
was fun making a boatload of money a tour is a $100 a person yeah they're making a [ __ ] ton of
money over there good for them I mean they must it must be working because people are going so I still want to I
don't not want to go I still want to go so scary you know and I'd still be scared the whole time and I'd still be
scared if I went to a San there and all of those fun things so that be very fun for nothing I think it still be really
really fun so it's mostly rumor and stuff that you know was made by the amusement park company to be an
amusement but it's interesting and cool I am
disappointed I wish it was a basically woman who had a lot of money and a lot
of ghosts in her thoughts and that's why she did what she did that would have been much better I I do
you interesting sorry it's okay yeah not everything can be
true that's great statement that is a [ __ ] award awardwinning comment right
there not everything can be true I love it um sweet well thanks Taylor you know what's funny is um I realized this as
you started talking I was like our stories again are going to overlap because I also have a scary house that is probably haunted that also had events
happen in it in the 1800s no early 1900s whatever same difference um so thank you
for the story is there anything you want to share before we go ahead and cut things off yeah one quick thing um I got
a note from my friend Elizabeth who um wanted to just talk about how we use the
word crazy and I definitely like you know agree that it's it's like a tough
word and and we know a lot about like mental illness and all of that and just want to make sure that it's clear that like we you know definitely support you
know getting help for yourself we know mental illness is not anyone's fault but like they say in last podcast it's your responsibility and we will be you know
we'll think about it nice Mak sense yeah it does um and then also thank you to
everyone who is is new listening new listeners our listenership has gone up a bunch so we're super excited um if you
like it please give us five stars on Apple podcast and leave a review that's super helpful and we are everywhere at
Doom toell pod on Instagram and um YouTube and all those things and let us
know if you have any questions or ideas we're at Doom toell pod gmail.com we would love to hear from you awesome love
it thank you well we'll go ahead and cut this off we'll rejoin you on Wednesday