

“We reconstructed the house’s facade and the field around it in Melbourne,” McGahan explained to us. While a fair chunk of the film was shot on location, the rest of it was shot on a soundstage in Australia. That wasn’t the only part of the house re-constructed for the film, though. One of the film’s producers, Tim McGahan informed us that they had completely reconstructed the staircase with false walls on all four sides so that they could film the characters ascending and descending them. The stairs were constructed this way because Sarah was plagued with terrible arthritis. One set that we ascended, called a switchback staircase, turned 9 times (if I remember correctly) but only took us up about 14 feet. In addition to the stunted ceilings, the stairs are also just 2-3 inches tall in most places. This is because Sarah was a mere four-foot, ten inches tall. In fact, most of the ceilings we saw in the house felt just a little too short. The rooms themselves are said to be the exact shape and layout as the room the spirits died in which makes them the spirit’s personal Hell.ĭue to its shape, you’d think the Witch’s Cap would be quite tall, but I actually hit my head a couple times as we entered it.
LENGTH OF WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE SAN JOSE HOW TO
Our tour guide informed us that every night at midnight, Sarah would come up to this room and listen as individual spirits told her how to build their rooms. In one of the higher floors in the house is the Witch’s Cap, a conical room that overlooks the twists and turns of the mansion’s nonsensical layout. Even finding a corner is tough due to the way it’s constructed.


It’s hard to get your bearings when you can almost never see from one side of the mansion to the other. The thing that exemplified this to me was the fact that it’s just as wide as it is tall. As we toured the Winchester Mystery House, the first thing I realized is how easy it would be to become lost. While the story of the film may take some creative liberties, the setting writes itself. She had a lot of money from the Winchester company and she used it to fulfill her passion.” “Then the loss of her daughter and husband destroyed and crippled her emotionally. I think she was very sad,” said Spierig when asked about his thoughts on Sarah. Of course, when he arrives at the house Price quickly realizes she isn’t crazy at all. With such a large fortune under the control of a woman who is literally building a prison for ghosts, anyone who wanted to take the Winchester company from her would have an easy case to make. The story of Doctor Eric Price ( Jason Clarke) entering the house to judge Sarah’s sanity seems like the perfect setup for a film like this. It’s a ghost story, and it’s a true story.” If you’ve seen the recently released trailer for the film starring Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester herself, you can easily see what Spierig means. “We put as much of the true story as we could in the film,” said Spierig. Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built uses this true story as a foundation, and builds upon it by showing us what “really” happened during the house’s construction all the way up to the earthquake in 1906. In 1884, she purchased an unfinished farmhouse and began building a home that was not just built for her, but for the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles. It’s what they did.” The medium channeled William and told her to leave New Haven, Connecticut, travel West and build a new home. “She was haunted by the spirits who died at the end of a rifle. While visiting a medium might seem like an odd way to tackle grief, one of the film’s directors, Peter Spierig insists it was normal for the time she lived in. She lived in Boston, MA at the time, and after her infant daughter also died, she went to a medium. After his death from tuberculosis in 1881, she inherited over $20 million dollars and over half the company. As you’ve probably guessed, Sarah Winchester was married to a member of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company family, William Wirt Winchester. It’s a sprawling mansion with no building plan and countless oddities that seem to make no sense – unless you know the real reason she built it that way. At its peak, it stood seven stories tall, but the famous 1906 earthquake brought it down to the five it stands at today. The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California built around the clock by Sarah Winchester from the year 1884 until 1922 when Sarah died. Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built may seem like it came out of nowhere, but the house, and woman, it’s based on have been a staple of American folklore for over one-hundred years.
