Want to hear more ghost stories about the Winchester Mystery House? Listen to this week's episode of our haunted house podcast series, Dark House, for exclusive ghost stories and insights into the home's haunted reputation. Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Winchester, hired laborers to constantly build and renovate the mansion for 38 years to ward off spirits. Hauntings and spirit sightings aside, a tour of the fabled home is definitely worth the price of admission. Well, turns out Mallon owned Pacific American Decorative Company. Recently, architectural historian Jim Wolf dug into the mystery of who actually created them, and he landed on the answer that it was actually glassworker John Mallon. This discovery confirmed something that many historians had a hunch about: the true artisan who made its impeccable stained glass windows. According to the Times Union, workers were removing parts of the wall when they noticed something peculiar: a beautifully preserved envelope tucked inside from 100 years ago from the Pacific American Decorative Company. In September 2019, one of the many mysteries of the Winchester House, as the National Registry of Historic Places refers to it, was solved during restoration work in one of its many dining rooms. The home was designated a historic landmark in 1974, and it's listed in the National Registry of Historic Places. The couple opened the house up to the public in 1923 and eventually bought the property (which is now owned by a privately held company that represents their descendants). It was then leased to John and Mayme Brown for a 10-year period. The rumors only grew after her death, when the property sold at auction to a private investor for around $135,000-today just north of $2 million. She later subscribed to many magazines and journals on the subjects and taught herself the craft. And, of course, the truth is likely bit simpler: Sarah's father had been a carpenter during the height of the Victorian period, and so she grew up loving design and architecture. The Winchester Mystery House is an architectural wonder and historic landmark in San Jose, CA that was once the personal residence of Sarah Lockwood Pardee Winchester, the widow of William Wirt Winchester and heiress to a large portion of the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune. Historians have never been able to corroborate the visit with the medium, and many of Sarah's longtime employees and friends denied the story both during and after her lifetime. Unfortunately for her, the ghosts followed her to California, so she tried to outsmart them by building a rambling home with a tangle of hallways.

Other versions of the story purport that Sarah was driven west because she was being haunted in the family mansion in New Haven.

According to folklore, Sarah was motivated to build a home with such odd features because a medium told her that the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester rifle would haunt her until the day she died unless she went out west to build a house with room for all of them. In order to make sense of this perceived monstrosity in what was then a rural community, rumors began to swirl about her motivations. It's a question people have asked ever since Sarah started construction.

Winchester mystery house owner