I moved to San Francisco in January of 1987, and visited the Mystery House sometime soon after. It didn't make a big impression on me. There's a lot of hype about this place ... Britain's LivingTV "reality" show Most Haunted even did a live broadcast from the location last Halloween.
A friend invited me to meet her in San Jose yesterday, and we toured the Mystery House together. I was secretly hoping for something ghostly ... or ghastly ... or spooky.
No such luck.
The Winchester Mystery House is a classic example of taking an idea/place that has fabulous potential and missing the point. There's so much material here to make a good, lively tour ... the mysterious, eccentric Sarah Winchester ... the rambling, random building style of the home ... the clever innovations she came up with to make life easier for her there. Heck, you could even draw on the many ghost stories about the mansion.
But the tour group I was with heard only a canned spiel about the house (details about the kind of wood used on the floors, for instance) that completely failed to convey what life was like in the house for those who lived and worked there. And the ghost story aspect was never mentioned ... not even in passing!
A friend invited me to meet her in San Jose yesterday, and we toured the Mystery House together. I was secretly hoping for something ghostly ... or ghastly ... or spooky.
No such luck.
The Winchester Mystery House is a classic example of taking an idea/place that has fabulous potential and missing the point. There's so much material here to make a good, lively tour ... the mysterious, eccentric Sarah Winchester ... the rambling, random building style of the home ... the clever innovations she came up with to make life easier for her there. Heck, you could even draw on the many ghost stories about the mansion.
But the tour group I was with heard only a canned spiel about the house (details about the kind of wood used on the floors, for instance) that completely failed to convey what life was like in the house for those who lived and worked there. And the ghost story aspect was never mentioned ... not even in passing!
The guide made several dismissive (and weirdly sexist), clueless "jokes" about life in the 19th century. And although spiritualism was touched on very briefly, it was spoken about as something Sarah Winchester believed that proved she was insane. No mention of how the spiritualist movement in the 19th century was a tremendously galvanizing force for many of all social classes in America and beyond.
I left the house feeling that a great disservice had been done. Not just to Sarah Winchester, who both loved and felt trapped in her enormous house, but to the hundreds of people who worked on it over the years, and to those who feel drawn to it still. I heard a tour guide talking to one of the visitors after the official tour was over, and his love for the house and deep knowledge of it was very apparent. Why not use some of that passion in creating the scripted tour?
If you're interested in seeing what I saw on the tour, there's a great guide to the house here (created by a former tour guide): http://strangetastic.com/strangetastic-winchester-mystery-house/
A lot of what really went on in the house is a mystery to this day. I'd like to see the proprietors concentrate more on the mystery, and less on the gift shop and scripted spiels.
(image is one of the many beautiful Tiffany stained glass windows in the home)
