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Sarah Winchester 1839 - 1922

Sarah Lockwood (Pardee) Winchester of San Jose, Santa Clara County, California United States was born on September 1, 1839 in New Haven, New Haven County, Connecticut. She was married to William Wirt Winchester, and they were together until William's death on March 7, 1881 in New Haven, New Haven County. She had a child Annie Pardee Winchester. Sarah Winchester died at age 83 years old on September 5, 1922 in San Jose, Santa Clara County, California, and was buried at Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut.

Sarah Lockwood (Pardee) Winchester

Sarah Lockwood Pardee

San Jose, Santa Clara County, California United States

September 1, 1839

New Haven, New Haven County, Connecticut, United States

September 5, 1922

San Jose, Santa Clara County, California, United States

Female

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Sarah Winchester Sarah Winchester (1839 - 1922)

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Sarah Lockwood (Pardee) Winchester's History: 1839 - 1922

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Introduction

Sarah Lockwood (Pardee) Winchester was born to Leonard Pardee (1807 - 1869) and Sarah W. Burns (1808 - 1880) in the summer of 1839 (or 1840 - records vary). She had six siblings: Sarah E., born 1831; Mary Jane, born 1834, Antoinette "Nettie", born 1834; Leonard Jr., born 1827; Isabella "Belle", born 1843; and Estella Lillian , born 1845. When she was about 20, on September 30, 1862, Sarah married William Wirt Winchester, the only son of the owner of Winchester Repeating Arms Company. They had one daughter, Annie Pardee Winchester, who was born on June 15th 1866 and who died on July 25th of the same year. She was thought to have died of marasmus, a disorder that creates malnutrition and at that time lead to death. They had no other children. Sarah's husband, William, died about 15 years later in March of 1881 of TB. Since William's father had died the year before, Sarah inherited $20 million and 50% ownership in the Winchester company, as well as an income of $1,000/day. To put this massive inheritance in perspective, $20 million in 2020 dollars would be over half a billion and $1,000/day would be about $25,500/day) Sarah was devastated by the loss of her family and moved across country to the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1886, she bought a small farmhouse in San Jose, California called Llanada Villa (this property is now known as the Winchester Mystery House) and a couple of years later she bought 140 acres of land in what is now downtown Los Altos, California, to use as a ranch. (She also bought a farmhouse - now called the Winchester Merriman House - for her sister and her husband in Los Altos. ) And she bought a houseboat which was nicknamed "Sarah's Ark" that she kept near a eucalyptus grove on Winchester Road which burned down in 1929.) If you know Los Altos today, you know how valuable those 140 acres would be now! All of this property was in the San Francisco Bay Area. The story about the "Winchester Mystery House" is that Sarah was told by a psychic that losing her husband and daughter was the result of the vengeful ghosts of people who had been killed by Winchester guns. The only way to protect against these ghosts was to continuously build, night and day. So that's what she did - she had builders 24/7 working on her small farmhouse in San Jose until the day she died - and so the Winchester House is what we see today. As someone who is native to San Jose and its environs, I believe something quite different. Sarah was clever and innovative (if you visit the house, you will see many interesting features that she invented). But she wasn't an architect so there are stairs that lead nowhere and steps that are too shallow, as well as doors that lead nowhere. I also think that she was agoraphobic. I think that she kept building and creating because she couldn't leave her house - so she built her own world. (The only known photo of her at that time is the one below in her carriage - she would ride in her carriage on the grounds. ) She could certainly afford to indulge her whims - or limitations. When Sarah died in 1922, she was first buried in California and then her remains, as well as those of her sister, were moved to New Haven Connecticut. She was ultimately buried next to her husband and child. Her will, in 13 sections, signed 13 times (yes, she was superstitious about the number 13, too) left the "Winchester Mystery House" and the contents to her niece, Marian Marriott. After Marian took what she wanted, the rest of the furnishings, as well as the house, were auctioned off. Since February of 1923, the house has been a tourist attraction. The rest of the estate was left to charity. See Winchester House. Also see Sarah Winchester: Obituary.
09/1

1839

Birthday

September 1, 1839

Birthdate

New Haven, New Haven County, Connecticut United States

Birthplace

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Ethnicity & Family History

Sarah was Caucasian, of English heritage on her paternal line. Her several times great-grandfather was born in England in 1623. He immigrated to Connecticut before the United States was born and succeeding generations leading up to Sarah were born in Connecticut. Sarah's maternal line also went back in Connecticut to Benjamin Burns, who was born in 1718 in Milford, Connecticut.
Nationality & Locations

Sarah was born and raised in Connecticut and descended on her maternal and paternal lines to generations of people born in Connecticut. She moved to Massachusetts in 1858, when she was 19, and married William Winchester in Connecticut when the was 23 years old, remaining in Connecticut until after the death of her infant daughter and her husband fifteen years later. After the deaths of her daughter and husband, Sarah moved to San Jose, Santa Clara County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lived until she died in September of 1922 at the age of 83. First buried in the Bay Area, California, Sarah's body was later moved back to New Haven, Connecticut, where she remains.
Professional Career

While she spoke four languages and played the piano, after she married Sarah was what was called a "housewife." After her infant daughter and husband died, Sarah occupied her days with overseeing and designing the construction of her home in San Jose, California, on the street named for her - "Winchester Boulevard." Sprawling over six acres, the house contained 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and six kitchens. Today, the "Winchester Mystery House" is a tourist attraction. Sarah was also a philanthropist, most notably financially aiding the department of the Connecticut State Hospital devoted to the treatment of tuberculosis patients. Her husband died of tuberculosis.
Personal Life & Family

According to an obituary from the Modesto Herald on Sept 7 1922, she "for many years had aided financially the department of the Connecticut state hospital devoted to the treatment of tuberculosis patients as well as being interested in other charitable activities" (Sarah's husband died of TB). Born into a large family of seven siblings, Sarah married William Wirt Winchester, heir to the Winchester gun manufacturing company. They had one daughter, Annie, who died as an infant. They never had more children and sadly, William died only 15 years after their daughter. Left with a massive fortune and no immediate family, Sarah moved across the country to the San Francisco Bay Area (now Silicon Valley) and began building a massive home. Construction continued night and day and Sarah supposedly became a recluse in her home. (Although there are reports that she visited her sister and niece, who also lived in the area.) Sarah died in San Jose, California where she and her sister were originally buried. Her body was later moved to Connecticut, to be buried next to her beloved daughter and husband.
09/5

1922

Death

September 5, 1922

Death date

Heart failure (died in her sleep)

Cause of death

San Jose, Santa Clara County, California United States
Death location

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Gravesite & Burial

mm/dd/yyyy
Funeral date
Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut United States
Burial location
Obituary

SARAH WINCHESTER DEAD AT SAN JOSE SAN JOSE, September 6 - Sarah Winchester, widow of William Wirt Winchester, son of the founder of the Winchester Arms company, died at her home near here today. She has lived a quiet, secluded life here for about thirty years. For many years she has aided financially the department of the Connecticut state hospital devoted to the treatment of tuberculosis patients as well as being interested in other charitable activities. - Modesto Morning Herald (Associated Press) Modesto, California on Thursday, September 07, 1922 on page 1.

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Sarah Winchester lived 9 years longer than the average family member when died at the age of 83.

The average age of a Pardee family member is 74.

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11 Memories, Stories & Photos about Sarah

Kathy Pinna

32.9k+ favorites

12/07/2020

As difficult as it may be to believe now, San Jose when I was growing up was a small town (maybe 25,000 people) full of orchards and food processing plants. If you said "I'm from San Jose", people would say "where?" and you'd have to say "60 miles south of San Francisco". So when people came to visit, there were only two places to take them: the Rosicrucian Museum and the Winchester Mystery House. Lots of visits - many many times of visiting both places.

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Mary Neeley

550 favorites

12/10/2020

Sarah Winchester

The most expensive window in The Winchester Mystery House, valued at over $20,000. It was imported from Europe by Tiffany's in New York. It was installed on an inside wall, where the rays of the sun never reaches it.

Date & Place: at The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Santa Clara County, California United States

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Mary Neeley

550 favorites

12/10/2020

Sarah Winchester

Winchester Mystery House 1990 visit

Date & Place: 1990 at Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Santa Clara County, California United States

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AncientFaces

411 favorites

12/22/2011

Winchester House

Home of Sarah Winchester, widow of the gun maker. Now named the "Winchester Mystery House" - after her husband died, Sarah kept building and building and building. She thought it protected her from haunted spirits.

Located at 525 South Winchester Boulevard, San Jose, Santa Clara County, California.

I've been on numerous tours of the grounds over the years. The Halloween flashlight tour is always fun! Also, during normal times, they'll rent out the dining room for private parties.

Side note - this house is right down the street from our AncientFaces office. Fitting right?

Date & Place: at Winchester Mystery House 525 S Winchester Blvd, in San Jose, Santa Clara County, California 95128, United States

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Kathy Pinna

32.9k+ favorites

12/07/2020

Sarah Winchester

A hand-tinted ambrotype of Sarah Winchester taken in 1865 by the Taber Photographic Company of San Francisco.

Date & Place: Not specified or unknown.

Comments

Kathy Pinna

32.9k+ favorites

12/07/2020

Everything you think you know about the Winchester Mystery House probably isn't true

From SFGATE Feb 7 2018

The story is so famous most locals can recite it by heart: An eccentric widow, heir to an American rifle fortune, is tortured by the horrors wrought by the weapon. She becomes convinced only building a labyrinthine house will keep her safe and, if construction stops, the spirits will find and kill her. The result of her delusion is the Winchester Mystery House, a monument to madness.

It’s a memorable explanation for the unfathomable strangeness of Sarah Winchester’s mansion. But, as far as historical record goes, there’s scant proof for any of it.

The insanity of Sarah Winchester is, in short, a lie.

The myth of Sarah Winchester begins in 1895, over a decade after Winchester bought a modest farmhouse in San Jose. Although legend would have you believe Winchester was on the run from an army of ghosts, the reason for her move was familial, not supernatural. After the death of her husband, William Wirt Winchester, of tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah decided to leave the East Coast to be with family. Her brother-in-law was the president of Mills College, and two of her sisters already lived in the Bay Area. Some historians believe she initially bought the San Jose farmhouse with an eye for expansion — as the family’s wealthiest member, she could afford to build a place to house them all.

Upon the death of her husband, Sarah, a bright young woman from New Haven, Connecticut, instantly became one of the wealthiest women in the world. Her share of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company amounted to a $20 million inheritance, 50-percent ownership in the company and an income of $1,000 per day (over $25,000 in today’s money). Flush with cash and full of architectural ideas, Winchester set out to renovate her new property.

From the start, she had a hard time squaring her ambitions with conventional architecture. She parted ways with several architects before deciding to start drawing up plans herself. With no professional training, it didn’t always go smoothly.

"I am constantly having to make an upheaval for some reason,” Winchester wrote to her sister-in-law in 1898. “For instance, my upper hall which leads to the sleeping apartment was rendered so unexpectedly dark by a little addition that after a number of people had missed their footing on the stairs I decided that safety demanded something to be done."

Far from an exercise in spiritualism, Winchester’s labyrinth arose because she made mistakes — and had the disposable income to carry on making them. It didn’t help her reputation that she was naturally reserved. While most Bay Area millionaires were out in society, attending galas and loudly donating to charities, Winchester preferred a quiet life with the close family who occasionally lived with her. In the absence of her own voice, locals began to gossip.

By 1895, the house was large enough to draw the speculating eyes of the community. The Feb. 24, 1895 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article that almost single-handedly laid the foundation for the Winchester Mystery House legend.

"The sound of the hammer is never hushed,” it reported. “... The reason for it is in Mrs. Winchester's belief that when the house is entirely finished she will die."

The ghostly motivation that is so famous today is never mentioned. Instead, Mrs. Winchester is strictly concerned with the house as the source of her immortality.

"Whether she had discovered the secret of eternal youth and will live as long as the building material, saws and hammers last, or is doomed to disappointed as great as Ponce de Leon in his search for the fountain of life, is question for time to solve,” the story concludes.

The story was so popular it was picked up by newspapers around the state. But the narrative is dubious at best. For one, the hammers did stop — and often. In one letter to family, Winchester said she’d suspended construction for the summer, as it was too hot to work.

"I became rather worn and tired out and dismissed all the workmen to take such rest as I might through the winter,” she wrote.

Colin Dickey, author of “Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places,” speculates the growing rumors around Winchester were rooted in economic uncertainty. In 1893, America was hit with a years-long depression. Unemployment soared, hitting over 40-percent in some states. In Sarah Winchester, the Bay Area found a perfect villain: a reclusive widow, wasting her money on a pointless mansion while people starved outside its gates. Her house, Dickey writes, was a "gaudy reminder of the haves versus the have-nots."

With this in mind, it’s interesting to note the 1895 Chronicle piece focuses not the fountain of youth aspect — that only gets a few lines in a two-column story — but on the home itself. The majority of the article describes elaborate grounds and luxurious furnishings. A 1909 article about Winchester that ran in the Chronicle also notes not the supernatural, but the wastefulness of her endeavors.

"The lonely heiress to millions has found her sole pleasure during the last seven years in directing the efforts of workmen who are called upon to construct one month what they destroy the next,” the story reads.

Some modern-day historians speculate one of the reasons Winchester kept building was because of the economic climate. By continuing construction, she was able to keep locals employed. In her unusual way, it was an act of kindness.

"She had a social conscience and she did try to give back," Winchester Mystery House historian Janan Boehme told the Los Angeles Times in 2017. "This house, in itself, was her biggest social work of all."

Of the dozens of articles we found about the heiress in California newspaper archives, none written during her lifetime mention her desperately hiding from ghosts. Often, she’s described as an eccentric with too much money. But in other cases, she’s praised for her ingenuity. In 1905, the San Francisco Call wrote a glowing article about another real estate project of hers: a medieval castle in San Mateo County.

The house will be “an imitation of the beautiful baronies of feudal times,” the Call proclaimed. It would be “one of the most unique estates in California.”

Although it was ultimately never built, Winchester planned to have a castle with a moat and drawbridge — a novelty, not another escape from water-abhorring spirits.

---

When Sarah Winchester died in 1922, the news made barely a ripple. Back in New Haven, her hometown paper wrote excitedly of the over $1 million gift she’d bequeathed to a local hospital. In the Bay Area, only her small circle of friends mourned her.

“A few days ago, a quiet woman went quietly out of life, leaving a fortune of some millions, all of it for philanthropy,” an unsigned editorial in the Mill Valley Record wrote. “She had no children, so she gave her stocks and bonds, her wealth of whatever form, to the public, in the most advantageous manner possible... This woman was Mrs. Winchester…

“How many thousands of lives will be blessed by Mrs. Winchester's bequest, yet the newspaper accounts of her going and its attendant circumstances were brief and unadorned.”

Winchester’s will gave most of her wealth to charity, and all that remained went to her niece. Her many real estate holdings — she lived in a different, more modest home in her final years — were auctioned off. The famed Winchester mansion fell into the hands of John H. Brown, a theme park worker who designed roller coasters.

One of his inventions, the Backety-Back coaster in Canada, killed a woman who was thrown from a car. After her death, the Browns moved to California. When the Winchester house went up for rent, Brown and his wife Mayme jumped at the chance and quickly began playing up the home’s strangeness.

Less than two years after Sarah Winchester’s death, newspapers were suddenly beginning to write about the mansion’s supernatural powers.

“The seance room, dedicated to the spirit world in which Mrs. Winchester had such faith, is magnificently done in heavy velvet of many colors,” the Healdsburg Tribune wrote in 1924. “... Here are hundreds of clothes hooks, upon which hang many costumes. Mrs. Winchester, it is said, believed that she could don any of these costumes and speak to the spirits of the characters of the area represented by the clothing.”

(It is worth noting here: There are no contemporary accounts of Winchester holding seances in the home, and “Ghostland” writes that the “seance room” was actually a gardener’s private quarters.)

The myth took hold, though, and the home, with its dead ends and tight turns, is easy to imagine as haunted. Although the spirits are fun, the ghosts shroud the real life of a fascinating, creative woman. Winchester was "as sane and clear headed a woman as I have ever known,” her lawyer Samuel Leib said after her death. “She had a better grasp of business and financial affairs than most men."

The legend of Sarah Winchester, Dickey writes in "Ghostland," combines our "uneasiness about women living alone, withdrawn from society" and "the gun that won the West and the violence white Americans carried out in the name of civilization."

"It's a compelling story, perhaps, because it's one in which Sarah Winchester is punished for her transgressions," Dickey writes. "... We've projected shame on her."

Comments

Kathy Pinna

32.9k+ favorites

10/26/2016

Sarah Winchester

A photo of Sarah Winchester, widow of gun maker William Wirt Winchester, in front of her home (the Winchester Mystery House) in San Jose California. The story is told that she didn't leave the house but simply rode in the carriage around the grounds of her house.

This is the only known photo of Sarah, probably taken sometime between that late 1910s and 1922, when she died.

Date & Place: in San Jose, Santa Clara County, California United States

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Kathy Pinna

32.9k+ favorites

12/07/2020

Sarah Winchester

A photo of Sarah Winchester's final resting place, with her husband and daughter.

Date & Place: Not specified or unknown.

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EAST FRONT - Winchester House, 525 South Winchester...

AncientFaces

411 favorites

12/22/2011

EAST FRONT - Winchester House, 525 South Winchester...

Date & Place: Not specified or unknown.

Comments

1. EAST FRONT - Winchester House, 525 South Winchester...

AncientFaces

411 favorites

12/22/2011

1. EAST FRONT - Winchester House, 525 South Winchester...

Date & Place: Not specified or unknown.

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Sarah Pardee's Family Tree & Friends

Sarah Pardee's Family Tree

Parent

Sarah Winchester Sep 1, 1839 - Sep 5, 1922

Partner

Child

Sibling

Marriage

William Wirt Winchester