by Christopher Gryniewicz

Created on: July 09, 2009   Last Updated: January 21, 2011

Remember Rose Red? It was the ABC mini-series written by Stephen King about the endlessly growing house. In the film, it was built by the eccentric widow of a millionaire who believed that continuous construction could postpone her death into eternity. Believe it or not, this yarn of fiction could have carried the by-line, "Based on a true story." Although the names were changed to protect the innocent and the location was moved a little further north, the home of Sarah Winchester provided the foundation of King's Rose Red. The history of what has become known as the Winchester Mystery House is as a tantalizing a tale as the one the spawned from King's mind.

Sarah Winchester, born Sarah Lockwood Pardee, married William Wirt Winchester, the second president of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, in September 1862. Four years later two major events occurred in their lives. First, Oliver Winchester, William's father, changed the name of the company William was going to inherit from the New Haven Arms Company to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Second, 1866 saw both the birth and death of Sarah and William's only daughter.

Seven years later, in 1873, saw a birth of another sort, the model 1873 Winchester Rifle was created. It was a gun that would make Winchester a household name. The model 1873 was among the first of its kind; it was a repeating rifle with center shot ammunition. Much like we use the word Kleenex today to describe all tissue, Winchester came to describe all repeating rifles, earning the company the nickname, "the gun that won the west." Sadly, both for Sarah and for the future of the Winchester company, Oliver and William both passed on four months apart in 1880 and 1881. After their deaths, the company went to Sarah's sister Mary's husband, William Converse. As for Sarah, she left for California with a twenty million dollar inheritance and a steady income of one thousand dollars a day.

How does one decide to spend twenty million dollars in 1884? Well, if you're Sarah Winchester you ask your local medium. The most common belief of how the idea of Winchester Mystery House was born is that it was on the advice of a medium. Sarah was told that she and her family had been cursed, and that she would be haunted by the spirits of those killed by the Winchester Rifle if she did not make amends. To make amends with these spirits, she was told to move West and keep building until she died. Sarah, as the story goes, took this advice very seriously.

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