She had to be a nurse, janitor, musician, philosopher, peacemaker, wrangler, fire stoker, baseball player, professor, and poet for less than $50 a month. The school teacher, sometimes slightly older than her pupils, was a renaissance individual. When they arrived on their first day of school they may have only known how to speak a foreign language but they soon learned how to speak, read, spell, and write English. They got to school on foot, on horseback, or in a wagon. The children who attended ranged in age from five to 21 and endured dust storms, prairie fires, and cattle drives swirling past the school house in order to get an eighth grade education. They were called names like Prairie Flower, Buzzard Roost, and Good Intent. The constant addition of rooms, secret doors, stairways to nowhere and the garbled layout is odd, but the result is strangely beautiful.For a hundred years, white frame or native stone one-room schoolhouses dotted the section corners across Kansas. Sarah is said to have been following the advice of a medium who told her she must keep construction going to appease the souls of those killed by the Winchester rifle.įragile and reclusive after the death of her daughter and then her husband, Sarah was rarely seen outside the home but project-managed the construction closely. Sarah Winchester bought a simple two-storey farmhouse on the site where the mansion stands in 1884 and almost immediately embarked on a frantic construction project that would continue without a break for nearly four decades. But he also picked up on her sadness there, in particular that associated with the loss of her infant daughter, Annie, who died mysteriously when she was just nine days old. Picture: Winchester Mystery House.Ĭlairvoyant and spiritual medium, James Van Prague, visited the house last year and during a seance in the grand ballroom declared that Sarah is happy that people are still enjoying her home. The Australian connection runs further it was directed by Aussie brothers Michael and Peter Spierig and co-stars Australian actors Jason Clarke and Sarah Snook. The mansion was closed for three days last year for location filming and the rest was shot on a meticulously recreated soundstage at Melbourne’s Docklands. So intriguing is Sarah’s story and her home, it’s now the subject of a horror film starring Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester. But to Sarah, it was simple: she was trying to confuse the spirits she believed were after her. To the many people who visit Winchester Mystery House, there seems to be no reason for the confusing layout of the home that Sarah built and added on to for more than 38 years before her death in 1922. The story of the home, which you can learn from one of many guided tours held daily, is as long and bewitching as the winding hallways and curious stairways that make up the property. Reputed to be the most haunted house in America, the Victorian mansion was once the home of Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Winchester and heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms rifle fortune that was once known as “the gun that won the west.” And that’s not even the strangest thing about Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, south of San Francisco. There are stairways that stop at the ceiling, windows in the floor and doors that open out onto two-storey drops.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |