by Richard Allan Wagner

Tuesday, September 08, 2015

The Winchester Mystery House


The MYSTERY of the Winchester House is now finally SOLVED,
and it has nothing to do with Haunting Spirits or Seances.


The highly sensationalized FOLK TALE that is fed to the public, portraying the extravagantly wealthy Mrs. Winchester as a superstitious widow who believed that evil spirits were out to get her, thus prompting her to build such a remarkably STRANGE mansion is PURE FICTION and has absolutely NO FACTUAL BASIS!



But who cares? After all, midnight flashlight tours designed to give tourists the sensation that they are experiencing various spooky phenomena typically associated with “Victorian Mansions” is both highly entertaining and lucrative…and therein lies the rub! This is not the LEGACY Sarah Winchester wanted to hand down!


The “spiritualist” FOLKLORE about Sarah Winchester’s life is primarily the creation of the people who acquired Sarah Winchester’s Mansion following her death. At that time, information regarding Mrs. Winchester’s spiritual and philosophical views were unknown. However, the question remained: “Why did she build such a remarkably strange house”?

In order to bring in tourist dollars, the enterprise known as “The Winchester Mystery House™” had little choice but to invent a story that would fill-in the blank pages of her life… and make it alluring to the public, and profitable for “The Winchester Mystery House™” enterprise.

On one of my many research visits to the “House” (October, 2005), a senior tour guide informed me that “In the old days, the tour guides were encouraged to make up provocative stories about Mrs. Winchester and the House in order to spice things up”.

Thus, from the very beginning, the fictional FOLKLORE story about Sarah Winchester developed, portraying her as a somewhat “crazed” woman who had allegedly consulted a Boston medium who told her that she was “cursed by her inheritance of the Winchester Rifle Fortune”, and that she had to go to California and build a house for the “spirits” in order to appease and prevent them from killing her.

As the false Folklore about Mrs. Winchester evolved, a wild story emerged, depicting her as a “spiritualist” who, nightly, conducted séances in order to receive strange building instructions from the Spirits so as to atone for her inheritance of the so-called “cursed Winchester Rifle fortune”.

All of this begs the burning question: If Mrs. Winchester truly believed she was “cursed” by the Winchester fortune, why would she make matters worse by continuing to own vast shares of stock in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and then later acquire 1,000 additional shares that she maintained and profited from for the rest of her life?

Mrs. Winchester’s closest friend, Henrietta Severs, specifically testified that the late builder of the mansion was neither a spiritualist nor did she conduct séances—which further begs the question: If Mrs. Winchester didn’t build her mansion to appease angry spirits, what was her real purpose for creating such a strange House?... What were her real intensions and motives?

Both the administrators and tour guides of the business known as “The Winchester Mystery House™” tirelessly recite their mantra: “We’ll never know what Mrs. Winchester was thinking.” However, that’s not true! Mrs. Winchester deliberately left behind a mountain of clues and hard evidence that clearly shows she designed her House to serve as an elaborate Puzzle—a Treasure Trail intended to lead the Adventurer to the inner recesses of her brilliant mind. All “Haunted House Nonsense” aside, let’s delve into Mrs. Winchester’s cleverly crafted rabbit-hole.

The evidence (both historical and archaeological) shows that Sarah Winchester strongly identified with the great genius Francis Bacon, and very likely saw herself as the reincarnation of Bacon, the details of which are specifically demonstrated with Bacon’s symbols and numeric cipher code lavishly displayed throughout Mrs. Winchester’s Grand Ballroom—particularly in the “Shakespearean Windows”.



Moreover, like Bacon, Sarah Winchester was a Rosicrucian and a Freemason (yes, there are women Freemasons). The House she built is overflowing with Rosicrucian and Masonic symbolism. For example, the so-called “Séance Room” (located in the precise center of the House) was actually Mrs. Winchester’s Rosicrucian “Sanctum”, a special place where Rosicrucians typically practice meditation and study at or near the center of their homes.

Examples of the Masonic connection are to be found in the front, wrought iron gates whose Masonic symbolism represents the guiding path of self initiation—leading directly through the twin Masonic pillars known as “Boaz” and “Jachin” to the so-called “Switchback Staircase” which literally doubles (Masonically) as the “Winding Staircase” and “Jacob’s Ladder”—and then there is the “Seven Eleven Staircase” representing the Masonic “Fork in the Road”.

Also, patterns in the architectural fabric of Mrs. Winchester’s house reveal an emphasis on certain Kabbalistic numbers utilized by Francis Bacon and his mentor, John Dee. These are the same numbers emphasized by the Rosicrucians and Freemasons… and Shakespeare. Thirteen is the most significant of these numbers as it is the most important prime number in the famous Fibonacci Sequence. It is also the code number for the names Sarah Pardee Winchester and… Shakespeare. Furthermore, Sarah Winchester made extensive use of the encryption techniques devised by Dee and Bacon.


The Winchester House is an intricate Puzzle of coded messages
implemented to guide the Adventurer on a Treasure Trail of discovery.



As to the abundant anomalous features of the House, many commentators have noted an uncanny resemblance between the Art displayed in the architecture of Sarah’s House and the Art of her contemporary, M.C. Escher. Escher’s body of work primarily focuses on the perspective of the essential properties inherent in a Fourth, Spatial Dimension.

A world governed by four spatial dimensions (based on Georg Bernhard Riemann’s revolutionary mathematical discoveries about the curvature of space) was a very prominent and popular idea throughout Sarah Winchester’s lifetime.

Lewis Carroll, another of Mrs. Winchester’s contemporaries, wrote two remarkable books about the amazing strange properties of a fourth dimension. His books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, give us a splendid look at the perplexing aspects of a transcendent four dimensional world. In Carroll’s (and Sarah Winchester’s) higher dimensional world, the distinction between three-dimensional properties such as left and right, up and down, forward and backward, large and small—even inside-and-out simply dissolve. Even time itself can, conceivably, speed up, slow down—or simply stand still. Carroll was basically predicting Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Now, the concept of four or more space-time dimensions is at the forefront of modern theoretical physics, particularly the bizarre world of Quantum Mechanics in which a quantum object, such as an electron, simultaneously occupies a multitude of separate points in space-time—a dynamic property that can only occur in four or more dimensions.


Quite remarkably, Mrs. Winchester’s Treasure Trail includes her incredible architectural allusions to a world in which higher spatial dimensions rule.


For example, in a world beyond three dimensions, Mrs. Winchester’s many upside-down pillars (just like Escher’s) are indistinguishable from right-side-up. Moreover, stairs and doors leading to seemingly solid walls become portals leading us into the transcendent realm a fourth spatial dimension. The same “higher dimensional” dynamics are at play with a skylight that is purposefully embedded into one of the mansion’s floors. Furthermore, Mrs. Winchester dazzles us with a display of large doors that, from a three dimensional perspective, lead to a ridiculously small space, and small doors or cupboards that lead to an enormously large space.

In other words, in higher dimensions, the distinction between large and small or fast and slow is gauged by an object’s relationship to the velocity of light, gravity and the curvature of space-time. All of this, of course, is in direct alignment with Einstein’s theories of Relativity.



Mrs. Winchester was clearly a misunderstood genius far ahead of her time.