Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1839, though the exact date of her birth was never recorded. She was the fifth of seven children born to Leonard Pardee, a skilled carpenter and shrewd businessman, and Sarah Burns. Her father’s success allowed the family to live comfortably, and when the Civil War broke out, he supplied the Union Army with ambulances, a decision that made the family fortune. Sarah grew up in a progressive, free-thinking household, and her talents emerged early.
By the age of twelve, she had mastered Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian, and she demonstrated remarkable skill in music, mathematics, and science. Despite standing only four feet ten inches tall, she was widely regarded as one of the most beautiful young women in New Haven. Her education set her apart from most women of her time. She attended the Young Ladies Collegiate Institute, the only institution within Yale College that accepted female students.
Yale at the time embraced a progressive, even esoteric, intellectual culture, and several members of her family belonged to the Freemasons. Sarah was also exposed to unconventional ideas through a friend whose aunt was the writer Delia Bacon, who had gained notoriety for claiming that William Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by Sir Francis Bacon. This theory, which attracted believers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain, shaped the intellectual world in which Sarah moved. On September 30, 1862, Sarah married William Wirt Winchester, a wealthy young man she had known since childhood.
William had been born in Baltimore on July 22, 1837, the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, a businessman and politician, and Jane Ellen Hope. The family had moved to New Haven when William was young, and it was likely there that the couple first met, probably at the First Baptist Church. William’s sister Annie had been Sarah’s classmate at the Young Ladies Collegiate Institute. Oliver Winchester had founded a shirt-manufacturing company, but his ambitions soon turned to firearms.
In 1856, he acquired the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company through a hostile takeover, moved its headquarters to New Haven, and eventually renamed it the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. William, who shared his father’s passion for firearms, sold his shares in the clothing business and became treasurer of the family’s arms company. The firm grew into a national success, selling more than seven hundred thousand rifles between its founding and 1916. Its most famous product, the Winchester Model 1873, became known as the gun that won the West, and its users included Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, and President Theodore Roosevelt.
In June 1866, Sarah gave birth to a daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester. The child suffered from marasmus, a condition that prevented her from properly processing calories and proteins, leading to severe malnourishment. Annie died just six weeks after her birth. Devastated by the loss, Sarah and William decided they would not have more children.
On December 10, 1880, Oliver Fisher Winchester died, leaving the arms company to his son. William, however, did not live long to enjoy his inheritance. On March 7, 1881, he died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-three. In the space of a few months, Sarah lost her father-in-law and her husband, and she inherited a fortune worth approximately twenty million dollars, the equivalent of more than five hundred million today.
She also received a fifty percent ownership stake in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which generated a passive income of roughly one thousand dollars a day. Following this life-changing turn, Sarah departed on a three-year world tour, a common pursuit for wealthy women of her time. Little is known about her travels. Reports suggest she may have spent time with Freemasons in France, where the movement had begun to admit women, and she was likely drawn to European architecture.
She reportedly visited Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, where she was intrigued not only by its structure but also by its strange staircases that led nowhere. Upon her return to the United States, Sarah left New Haven and settled in the San Francisco Bay area. In 1884, she purchased an eight-room cottage in San Jose with 160 acres of land. She chose the location partly to be near relatives who had moved west during the California gold rush of 1849.
Not long after buying the farmhouse, she hired a crew of twenty carpenters and began what would become a construction project that lasted until her death. Sarah insisted that work continue without interruption, and the house expanded constantly. Over time, the cottage grew into a gigantic Victorian mansion, in some areas reaching seven stories high, with between five and six hundred rooms. The mansion attracted attention not only for its size but for its bizarre features.
Local residents wondered why Sarah Winchester would spend her fortune on such a strange house. A popular rumor developed that, after her husband’s death, she had visited a medium named Adam Coons, who supposedly told her that the spirits of people killed by the Winchester rifle had cursed her family. According to the legend, the spirits demanded that she build them a mansion and never stop construction, or they would take her life. It was said that Sarah conducted seances almost every night, communicating with the spirits through a ouija board and receiving building instructions.
The story held that she deliberately confused the evil spirits by installing stairs and doors that led nowhere, using the numbers seven and eleven throughout the house, and sleeping in a different bedroom each night to evade them. But this version of events rests on little evidence. No proof exists that Sarah ever visited Adam Coons or that she was a spiritualist. Her close companion and nurse, Henrietta Severs, stated plainly that Sarah Winchester had no spiritualist inclinations.
Sarah also stopped construction for certain periods, which the curse legend does not explain. Many of the house’s odd features, including sealed passageways and staircases that led nowhere, may simply have resulted from changes in plans after an earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay area at about five in the morning on April 18, 1906. The quake caused substantial structural damage to the mansion and terrified Sarah. Afterward, she shifted her approach, building outward rather than upward as she had originally intended.
Far from being the work of a haunted woman, the Winchester house appears to have been an intentional puzzle. Its maze-like corridors, winding hallways, dead ends, and secret shortcuts allowed people to move quickly from one side of the house to another. These features suggest Sarah may have been building a carefully designed labyrinth, possibly for years, as a way to leave behind a legacy. She was known as a decorating genius with a particular passion for stained glass.
The mansion’s interior drew on Persian, Egyptian, Greek, and Japanese styles, and some of its wall treatments had been used in the White House. Its main ballroom alone cost nine thousand dollars to build. The house featured forty-seven chimneys, some with overhead ceilings, along with skylights, large doors leading to small spaces, and small doors leading to larger ones. Her attention to detail was meticulous, and she believed that a person’s surroundings could improve their life.
In her final years, Sarah suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and required the constant help of servants and nurses. She died of heart failure on September 5, 1922. Her remains were buried in Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut, beside her husband and child. In her will, she left her possessions, excluding the house, to her niece.
The Winchester mansion was not mentioned in the will and was sold at auction to a local investor for more than one hundred thirty-five thousand dollars, worth roughly two million today. Since 1923, the mansion has been open to the public as a major tourist attraction in California. Guides have told its story millions of times, usually emphasizing the legend of the curse, which has proved popular with visitors. In 1974, the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places and designated a California Historical Landmark.
The 2018 horror film Winchester was based on the mansion and on the life of the woman who spent nearly four decades building it, leaving behind one of the strangest and most compelling homes in American history.