Barbara and I were married in August of 1964 and were living in El Paso, Texas when, one year later, we took our first trip to California. We saw much of the State but had planned to spend a couple of days with our friends, Jan and Dave, in San Jose, California while on our way home.
While we there, we had the opportunity to visit the Winchester House and to hear of all the mystery surrounding the history of this most unusual house. We were in San Jose in early August of 1965 when we spent the day looking at the property and hearing from the docents of the story of the strange behavior of Sarah Winchester and about how the house came to be built as it had been
The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearm tycoon, William Wirt Winchester.
The Queen Anne Victorian mansion is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan. It is a designated California historical landmark and is listed on the National Registrar of Historic Places.
It is privately owned and serves as a tourist attraction and well worth the price we paid to visit it. Since its construction in 1884, the property and mansion were claimed by many to be haunted by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles.
Under Winchester’s day-to-day guidance, its “from-the-ground-up” construction proceeded around the clock, by some accounts, without interruption, until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased.
Sarah Winchester’s biographer, however, claims that Winchester “routinely dismissed workers for months at a time ‘to take such rest as I might'” and notes that “this flies in the face of claims by today’s Mystery House proprietors that work at the ranch was ceaseless for thirty-eight years.
With hundreds of workers living there, all 13 bathrooms had to be functional, but were later disconnected. In Sarah Winchester’s later years, one had a window for a nurse to check on her.
In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began building her mansion. Carpenters were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven-story mansion. She did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so the home contains numerous oddities such as doors and stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms and stairs with odd-sized risers. Many accounts attribute these oddities to her belief in ghosts.
After her husband’s death from tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20.5 million (equivalent to $520 million in 2017). She also received nearly fifty percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to $25,000 a day in 2017. These inheritances gave her a tremendous amount of wealth which she used to fund the ongoing construction.
We had finished looking at the Sarah Winchester home when the Watts riots broke out while we were on our way back home.
Rather than try to explain about these two unrelated events, I have tried to show some history on the house and will give information on the riots, should you be too young to remember these occurrences. I suppose that we were fortunate to have seen the Winchester house and to have heard so much about the riots that helped to bring some needed changes to our nation. The results helped for us to better understand the problem of racism, but it still needs continuous reinforcement to remind us to not think that we have overcome all of our prejudices
Before the 1906 Earthquake, the Winchester house had been seven stories high, but today it is only four stories. The house is predominantly made of redwood, as Mrs. Winchester preferred the wood; however, she disliked the look of it. She therefore demanded that a faux grain and stain be applied. This is why almost all the wood in the home is covered. Approximately 20,500 U.S. gallons (78,000 L) of paint were required to paint the house.
The home itself is built using a floating foundation that is believed to have saved it from total collapse in the 1906 earthquake. This type of construction allows the home to shift freely, as it is not completely attached to its brick base.
There are roughly 161 rooms, including 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms (one completed and one unfinished) as well as 47 fireplaces, over 10,000 panes of glass, 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two basements and three elevators. Winchester’s property was about 162 acres at one time, but the estate has since been reduced to 4.5 acres, the minimum necessary to contain the house and nearby outbuildings. It has gold and silver chandeliers, hand-inlaid parquet floors and trim, and a vast array of colors and materials.
Due to Mrs. Winchester’s debilitating arthritis, special “easy riser” stairways were installed as a replacement for her original steep construction. This allowed her to move about her home freely as she was only able to raise her feet a few inches high. There was only one working toilet for Winchester, but all other restrooms were decoys to confuse spirits. This is also the reason why she slept in a different room each night.
In the early 1990s the Winchester property had parapsychologist and paranormal investigator, Christopher Chacon, conducted the only in-depth scientific investigation (30-day around-the-clock analysis) of the reported “haunt phenomena” on the property.
In 2016, it was announced that another room was found—an attic space that contains a pump organ, Victorian couch, dress form, sewing machine and paintings —and was made available for viewing by the public.
In 2017, the Winchester Mystery House debuted their first new daytime tour in 20 years, the ‘Explore More Tour’. This tour takes guests through rooms never before opened to the public, and explores the rooms left unfinished at the time of Sarah Winchester’s death.
We remember the trip also due to the fact that we were planning to drive through Los Angeles on our way back to Texas, but we had to make a fast change when we got to San Luis Obispo due to the breakout of the Watts riots or Watts rebellion beginning on August 11th to 16th, 1965.
On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, an African-American motorist on parole for robbery, was pulled over for reckless driving.
A minor roadside argument broke out, and then escalated into a fight with police. False rumors spread that the police had hurt a pregnant woman, and six days of looting and arson followed.
Los Angeles police needed the support of nearly 4,000 members of the California Army National Guard to quell the riots, which resulted in 34 deaths and over $40 million in property damage. The riots were blamed principally on police racism. It was the city’s worst unrest until the Rodney King riots of 1992.
The rioting intensified, and on Friday, August 13, about 2,300 National Guardsmen joined the police in trying to maintain order on the streets. Sergeant Ben Dunn said: “The streets of Watts resembled an all-out war zone in some far-off foreign country, it bore no resemblance to the United States of America.”
By nightfall on Saturday, 16,000 law enforcement personnel had been mobilized and patrolled the city. Blockades were established, and warning signs were posted throughout the riot zones threatening the use of deadly force (one sign warned residents to “Turn left or get shot”). 23 of the 34 people killed during the riots were shot by law enforcement or National Guardsmen.
Angered over the police response, residents of Watts engaged in a full-scale battle against the law enforcement personnel. Rioters tore up sidewalks and bricks to hurl at Guardsmen and police, and to smash their vehicles.
“The whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own machismo and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”
Despite allegations that “criminal elements” were responsible for the riots, the vast majority of those arrested had no prior criminal record.
Parker publicly said that the people he saw rioting were acting like “monkeys in the zoo overall, an estimated $40 million in damage was caused, with almost 1,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. Homes were not attacked, although some caught fire due to proximity to other fires.
This trip to California was first after our marriage, but was probable one that was most historic in the beginning of the Civil Rights movement that has followed.