The Winchester Connection: New England's Strangest Deaths and Curses

The Winchester Mystery House is in San Jose, California. The stairs to nowhere, the doors opening onto walls, the thirty-eight years of continuous construction.

Everything else in the story is from Connecticut.

The rifle was made in New Haven. The fortune was made in New Haven. Sarah Winchester was born in New Haven. Her daughter, her husband and her father-in-law all died in Connecticut. And when she died in California, she was brought back to New Haven and buried there.

The house gets the tourism. New England has the graves.

What actually happened

Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven. She married William Wirt Winchester, heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company — a New Haven manufacturer, and one of the most consequential industrial concerns in American history.

Then a compressed sequence of loss: their infant daughter died within weeks of birth. Some years later her father-in-law died. Then, shortly after, her husband died of tuberculosis.

She inherited an enormous fortune and a substantial stake in the company, and she left for California, where she bought a farmhouse and began building.

The curse, and where it came from

The familiar version: a Boston medium told Sarah she was haunted by everyone killed by Winchester rifles, and that she must build continuously or die.

There is no contemporary evidence for this. No record of the consultation has been established, and the account appears to postdate her. It is a story about her, not from her.

What is documented is a woman who lost a baby, then a father-in-law, then a husband, in a short span; who was extremely wealthy; who suffered severe arthritis; and who spent decades altering a house she had no reason to make legible to anyone else.

Building without a master plan, over thirty-eight years, with unlimited money and nobody to please, produces exactly the architecture the house has. Stairs meet ceilings because a wing was added and a floor was raised. Doors open onto drops because something behind them was removed. You do not need a séance to explain a house nobody ever finished designing.

The curse story does something specific: it converts a grieving, private, disabled woman into an eccentric driven by guilt over her husband's family's rifles. It is a more sellable narrative and a considerably less kind one.

The New England ledger

The Winchester story is the biggest of a familiar New England pattern: a family loses several members in quick succession, and the survivors are handed an explanation.

We have written about the others.

Mercy Brown and the vampire panic is the same shape and the same decade — a family being consumed one member at a time, and neighbours reaching for the only mechanism they had. In Exeter that mechanism was exhumation and a burned heart. Tuberculosis explains both households.

Both stories are about the same disease. William Winchester died of tuberculosis. So did Mercy Brown, her mother and her sister. In one case the family had money and the response became architecture. In the other the family had none and the response was a shovel.

That is the most interesting thing in this whole subject and almost nobody puts the two side by side.

What there is to see

Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven holds Sarah, William and their daughter. She was brought back east and buried beside them — which is not the behaviour of a woman fleeing a haunting.

The Winchester factory buildings in New Haven have been redeveloped.

There is no Winchester attraction in Connecticut. The entire industry sits three thousand miles away, around a house she built after leaving. New England has the actual history and none of the gift shop, which is a recurring theme — Connecticut hanged the first accused witch in the colonies forty-five years before Salem and nobody sells a ticket to it either.