Notes

After her husband's death from tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited more than US$20.5 million (equivalent to $543 million in 2019). She also received nearly fifty percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to $26,000 a day in 2019. These inheritances gave her a tremendous amount of wealth which she used to fund the ongoing construction.[5]

After her infant daughter died of an illness known as marasmus, a children's disease in which the body wastes away, and her husband died of pulmonary tuberculosis, a Boston medium[6] told her (while supposedly channeling her late husband) that she should leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles.[7]

Winchester left New Haven and headed for California. Although it is possible she was simply seeking a change of location and a hobby during her lengthy depression, other sources say that Winchester came to believe her family and fortune were haunted by ghosts and that only by moving West and continuously building them a house could she appease these spirits.[7][

In 1884, she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began building her mansion. Carpenters were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven-story mansion. She did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so the home contains numerous oddities such as doors and stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms and stairs with odd-sized risers. Many accounts attribute these oddities to her belief in ghosts.[9] Environmental psychologists have theorized that the odd layout itself contributes to the feeling of the house being haunted today.