Pod Insights National Park After Dark The Forgotten Winchester: Great Basin National Park About this episode Topping every “America’s Most Haunted” list sits The Winchester Mystery House. It’s story has been told time and time again, but do we really know the truth of the woman behind its facade, and have we treated her legacy fairly? In today’s episode, we discuss the forgotten Winchester. For a full list of our sources, visit http://npadpodcast.com/episodesFor the latest NPAD updates, group travel details, merch and more, follow us on npadpodcast.com and our socials at:Instagram: @nationalparkafterdarkTikTok: @nationalparkafterdarkSupport the show by becoming an Outsider and receive ad free listening, bonus content and more on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Want to see our faces? Catch full episodes on our YouTube Page! Thank you to the week’s partners! Ollie: Take the guesswork out of your dog's well-being. Go to ollie.com/npad and use code npad to get 60% off your first box! IQBAR: Text PARK to 64000 to get 20% off all IQBAR products and free shipping. Relief Band: For 20% off your order, head to Reliefband.com and use code NPAD. Naked Wines: To get 6 bottles of wine for $39.99, head to NakedWines.com/NPAD and use code NPAD for both the code AND PASSWORD.
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Transcript 11,980 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:31 Speaker 01 Did you know that if your spouse goes missing, but you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand-new season of Bear Brook, the award-winning true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In season three of Private Matter, we investigate another New Hampshire mystery. A beloved Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes from his small town. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found?
1:03 Speaker 02 If you knew Jay as well as I do, he's private. He doesn't want everybody to know his business.
1:11 Danielle LaRock? That, I don't believe you.
1:14 Speaker 04 I kind of revert back to that Bear Brook saying, like, what if we were to just come across something? And I wrote down, she said, I found him.
1:24 Speaker 01 Follow Bear Brook on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:32 Danielle LaRock? The Snake Range of the Silver State looms large within Great Basin National Park. The peaks, several reaching over 12,000 feet, have a way of making the valley below look small. But that is a trick of the eye. For the swaths of land hugged by these mountains, its bristlecone, pine forests, and sagebrush sea are large enough to get lost or forgotten in. On November 6, 2014, Ava Jensen, a member of the park's archaeological team, was out on an archaeological survey ahead of a prescribed burn project when she stumbled upon something surprising. Leaning against a juniper tree was an 1873 Winchester repeating rifle. Heart beating, eyes likely squinting in the bright Nevada sun,
2:18 Danielle LaRock? Ava approached her find. The rifle was resting gently against the tree, as if the owner simply set it down and forgot where they left it. And it had seemingly been there, baking in the desert sun next to the Strawberry Creek Campground for over 100 years. When its owner set it down, the Winchester rifle was arguably the most important gun in America. Its unique level-action design allowed it to shoot 30 rounds a minute, around 10 times faster than the muzzle-loading, single-shot rifles that came before it. Versatile and easy to use, it was the rifle of choice for many frontiersmen. Called the gun that won the West, it was carried by pioneers, cattle ranchers, and law enforcement. President Theodore Roosevelt loved it,
3:03 Danielle LaRock? while Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley took the rifle on tour in traveling shows. Even as the Old West faded from view, John Wayne brandished a Winchester on the silver screen, twirling it with one hand the way others might twirl a pistol. We don't know what the owner of the forgotten rifle in Great Basin used it for. Despite the best efforts of park archaeologists, the owner of the rifle remains unknown. And truth be told, the Winchester rifle is no stranger to mystery. In fact, the Winchester is at the heart of one of America's greatest ghost stories, one that inspired Stephen King and Walt Disney. A story of a woman, driven mad by the spirits killed by her namesake,
3:46 Danielle LaRock? trapped in a labyrinth of her own design.
3:51 Cassandra Yahnian? Welcome to National Park After Dark.
4:13 Cassandra Yahnian? Hello, everybody. Welcome back. We're so excited to have you. I'm Cassie. And I'm Danielle. And I'm so excited to tell you this story. I, it's so funny, because when you were reading the whole intro, I'm like, I remember this Winchester rifle that was found. It was all over the news. When it first originally happened and I remember seeing pictures of it. So the whole time you were talking, I was picturing exactly what I had seen before, but I've kind of forgotten about it since then. So I'm really excited for this.
4:41 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, I have been trying to work this story into an episode for a really long time because it's a super interesting find and one that, you know, finding anything just kind of placed and forgotten about and preserved in such a cool way is interesting and worth telling. But for a whole episode, I was just really thinking of how to do that. And then it hit me, of course spooky season is kind of on its tail end right now. We're in the beginning of November, but of course the Winchester mystery house and the legend behind the Winchester name, especially with Sarah, has been told time and time again in a bunch of different ways, but I wanted to approach it a little bit differently. So, and I've wanted to talk
5:24 Danielle LaRock? about Great Basin National Park for a really long time.
5:27 Cassandra Yahnian? I don't think we've ever talked about it on the podcast. We've never visited this park.
5:31 Danielle LaRock? No, and we're kind of not still.
5:35 Danielle LaRock? But at least we kind of were dipping our toe in. But anyway, before we get super started with the story, I just wanted to mention quickly that in case you missed it, a couple of weeks ago, we made the announcement that we are creating a gift guide for outsiders. So our community, we decided to put together within the parameters of like our newsletter, we are creating a guide of all different small businesses made, created, owned, operated, run by National Park After Dark listeners. And we are putting that together. We're just finishing it up. It's also going to have a little giving tree portion at the end. That's going to have a lot of different great organizations and charities that we've either discussed
6:18 Danielle LaRock? or listeners are a part of. And that's going to come out this week. So last chance to sign up for it. Super easy. We're not going to like send a bunch of stuff to your email because we don't have the time.
6:30 Cassandra Yahnian? Spam you.
6:32 Danielle LaRock? This took up enough time. So yeah, we send a newsletter once a month. This month is going to be the gift guide and to do that, you just go through our website, npadpodcast.com. There's going to be a pop up there really quick. If you want to put your email in there or there's a newsletter sign up like I think at the bottom of the page or something. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. And people wrote in some really cool gift guide opportunities. I was going through all the emails of people's small businesses that they have and different art that people create and experiences that you can sign up for. And it was really, really cool. So definitely go check it out. Yeah. Okay. Great. Well, let's get going into this story and correct me if I'm wrong,
7:15 Danielle LaRock? but is this one of those stories that you don't know a ton about that I just assumed you did? Yeah. Okay. I've heard her name before, but that's kind of where it ends. Which is so mind blowing to me. It really is. There's people like us out here. Just don't know nothing about the biggest stories there are to know. Yep. Okay. Well, this makes it so nice for a podcast arrangement because I have been avoiding this also for a little while because I didn't want to retell a story in a way that's been told so much. But even if I told it the exact same way, I've heard it over the years. It'd be my first time. It would be new to you, which is great. I'm here for it.
7:56 Danielle LaRock? Well, let's get going. So you may or may not have, in Cassie's case, heard the story of the Winchester mystery house. Nestled into the Santa Clara Valley in San Jose, California, there sits a haunted mansion. The sprawling Gothic and Victorian home has 160 rooms, 47 staircases, 10,000 window panes, 2,000 doors, three elevators, two basements and one shower. Yet the house isn't famous for its size, but its twisting, confounding design. Rooms adjoining at odd angles as if they were piled one on top of another, and there are passageways to nowhere. Some stairways lead into the ceiling and doorways open to nothing at all. The result is almost like a labyrinth.
8:40 Danielle LaRock? If you take a tour of the house, you'll walk almost an entire mile entirely inside.
8:45 Cassandra Yahnian? Wow.
8:46 Danielle LaRock? That's how huge this house is and just twisty, turny all over the place. The reason for this odd design, according to legend, is the home's original owner, Sarah Winchester. Winchester inherited a fortune from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and yet to some, that fortune was seen as blood money. The frontier was won through violence, including the decimation of American bison and the slaughter of indigenous people. In a popular version of the story, a spirit medium in Boston named Adam Coons told Winchester that she was being haunted by angry spirits, the ghosts of people killed by the Winchester rifle. To appease these spirits, or perhaps to confuse them,
9:26 Danielle LaRock? Winchester was told to build a house to contain them and never complete its construction. So she began building. Newspaper articles at the time proclaimed Winchester was so superstitious and fearful of death that she believed she would die if construction ever came to a halt. So the house remained under construction 24/7, 365, for 38 years. She held nightly séances alone to consult with spirits about what should be built next. Long after her passing, the house grew in notoriety. It inspired the Haunted Mansion Ride at Disney World and the works of Stephen King.
10:02 Cassandra Yahnian? Can I just say that that's my literal nightmare, is to live in a construction zone for my entire life? I've been renovating at my house and it's just like, I have no intentions of doing it for the rest of my life. And it is hard to live in a construction zone.
10:18 Danielle LaRock? I feel like, just from the other end and trying to like, record whilst you've been renovating, I feel like it's been two years straight.
10:28 Cassandra Yahnian? It has been, pretty much, with small little breaks, because that's how long we've owned the house. But we bought a fixer-upper that pretty much every room in this house I want to renovate, so it's.
10:39 Danielle LaRock? And you haven't even put in one cool room or staircase leading to nowhere.
10:43 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, I haven't, which is, I actually removed a staircase leading to nowhere.
10:48 Danielle LaRock? Oh, where?
10:48 Cassandra Yahnian? It was in the living room. Technically, it led to the attic, but it was super unnecessary.
10:54 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, I mean, you're just sprucing yours up and it's taking all this time, but you also don't have a team of like hundreds of people.
11:03 Cassandra Yahnian? I'm also not fearing that I'll die as soon as the construction finishes. So I'm kind of trying to get it done.
11:11 Danielle LaRock? There's even a horror movie based on Sarah's life starring Helen Mirren, and the mansion is listed as one of the 10 most haunted places in the world, according to Time Magazine. The foundation of this story is the psychic medium, Adam Koontz, who told Sarah she was being haunted, yet so far as we can tell, no medium by that name ever existed. The plot thickens. Historians have pored over spiritualist periodicals and city directories from Boston and have found nothing. And while it is entirely possible that Sarah visited a medium, there is no evidence that she did either, which begs the question, how much of this story is true? Who was Sarah Winchester, really?
11:55 Danielle LaRock? So that's kind of the overview, very base level, just to give you the the lowdown on the Winchester Mystery House, just so you have a foundational knowledge of like the legend and lore and kind of where this all began and why. And we'll get into it a tiny bit more, but now I just want to kind of go back to the beginning of Sarah's life to try and get a better understanding of where all this came about.
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13:45 Danielle LaRock? Sarah Lockwood Partey was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1839. A charming New England town at the height of the Industrial Revolution, she was born into a family of craftsmen. Her mother, Sarah Burns, came from a family of farmers and her father, Leonard Partey, was a sixth-generation woodworker. Her dad's side of the family were Puritans who came to New Haven in 1644 and Leonard himself was a very skilled craftsman and opened a successful mill and carpentry shop. A short girl with dark curly hair, Sarah was the third youngest of six siblings and her family called her Sally after her grandmother. Unlike her sister Belle, who would go on to be an outspoken proponent of progressive causes, Sarah was always a bit more private, even described as a bit shy.
14:30 Danielle LaRock? She had a sharp mind and grew up learning from her father as he crafted at his workbench. In 1850, when Sarah was 11 years old, she got some new neighbors. The Winchester family compared to the party's generations of successful craftsmen. The Winchesters look like an overnight success story. So it's kind of like old money versus new money type of thing. And I'm not that the parties were very wealthy, but they were doing pretty good for themselves. But the Winchesters were were um.
14:58 Cassandra Yahnian? Obviously very, very wealthy.
15:00 Danielle LaRock? Well, this is kind. Okay, I'm kind of jumping the gun a little bit here, but this is before their whole uh huge success, but they still had a lot going on. Oliver Winchester was born penniless and had a pretty rough childhood. But despite that, he developed and patented a new design for men's shirts and launched a very successful textile company. Selling shirts, he provided his family an upper middle class home, moving right on in next to the parties. Of particular interest to Sarah, it seems, was Oliver's thirteen year old son, William, because twelve years later, they got married. Sarah was twenty three, was petite and beautiful, wearing her dark hair and tight curls. And William, who was aged twenty five, was nearly a foot taller than her with reddish hair
15:45 Danielle LaRock? and a truly enormous set of mutton chops, which was the style at the time. I get it, but I'm glad that went out of fashion.
15:53 Cassandra Yahnian? Same.
15:55 Danielle LaRock? I love facial hair. I will say I love facial hair going on because if not, it feels a little like, I don't know.
16:02 Cassandra Yahnian? I'm not a huge fan of the baby face. I love a beard, a good beard, I think is fantastic.
16:08 Danielle LaRock? But it's got to connect. It can't.
16:10 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, it's got to connect and it can't be like partially grown in and play like a good beard.
16:17 Danielle LaRock? A full one. You don't want.
16:18 Cassandra Yahnian? Full one.
16:19 Danielle LaRock? You want somebody to commit to a beard once they've gotten it to its full capacity. You don't want to see it developing.
16:26 Cassandra Yahnian? I mean, if you don't, if you can't grow a full beard, rock the baby face or rock like a mustache or something because I also think mustaches are cool.
16:34 Danielle LaRock? Mustaches are the key to my heart. Anyway.
16:40 Danielle LaRock? And it is important to know here, just as like a side thing here, that he was a man of Sarah's own choosing, which at the time it wasn't unheard of. You know, we're in the mid 1800s at this point, but still at this time, especially with family dynamics and trying to position families into better positions, marrying off the children was still a thing, but she lucked out. He was a man of her own choosing. And on June 15th, 1866, they welcomed their first child into the world, Annie Party Winchester. But almost immediately, something seemed off. Sarah recovered well from her delivery, but Annie struggled to nurse or feed at all. Her weight steadily dropped and
17:23 Danielle LaRock? a doctor summoned to their home diagnosed her with morasmus, an inability to digest or absorb calories. Barely a month from her first birthday, Annie died. Sarah and William were heartbroken and sought seclusion the following year, and would never try for another baby. Infant deaths like Annie's were not uncommon at all at the time, as we have talked about a lot. And to make matters worse, prevailing religious views declared that infants who died before baptism were eternally damned. So that-
17:55 Cassandra Yahnian? That's awful.
17:57 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, it's like, I don't need that right now. I already feel-
18:01 Cassandra Yahnian? My baby.
18:02 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, like the lowest I can ever feel. Racked by grief, Sarah and William could hardly have known that their lives were about to change forever. Years earlier, Sarah's father-in-law, Oliver, had invested profits from his shirt business into other promising ventures. One investment was the purchase of a struggling arms company. After hiring a mechanic from his shirt factory as a gunsmith, Oliver patented a repeating rifle. Arguably, the most popular rifle at the time were muzzle loaders. An experienced user could fire two to four shots per minute with this type of weapon. However, the Henry patented by Winchester's company in 1860, with that weapon,
18:43 Danielle LaRock? you could fire 24 shots per minute. Oliver believed these rifles could help the Union Army win the Civil War, and he believed that a large government contract was the path to success for his company. And it's just so, the way that things work. With the universe and just timing. I just finished, and I know I've talked your ear off about this book before, so sorry, but I just finished The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones, which, I mean, I think we should do like a book roundup at the end of the year, which we're fast approaching, but just because we read so much and between us, we probably have like a good 70 to 80 books to like either consider or talk about.
19:23 Danielle LaRock? And this book is, unless in the next month, I read something that's blows my pants off, this book is my favorite book of the year, hands down.
19:32 Cassandra Yahnian? Very cool. That would be fun to just do a whole episode that we talk about different books. I mean, we do kind of do that. If you guys are hanging out on Patreon or Outsiders, we do have a collab with the Morbidly Curious Book Club where we go over a bunch of books that we both really love and that Patches, who runs that book club, really loves as well. So we do do that, but that would be cool to just sit down, especially because we have a lot of book recs that coincide with not only episodes, but also just our interests that I think that our audience really has interest in, even if we've never done an episode on it.
20:08 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, it feels like it's, having a podcast is so interesting because yes, we get to choose the topics and we get to pick our own adventure when it comes to what we discuss and learn about and things like that. But of course, we're, we're a bit limited into one facet of our interests with the outdoors and things like that.
20:29 Cassandra Yahnian? Mm hmm.
20:29 Danielle LaRock? But there's so much more to us. And I think that our books might, may reflect that and just, it would be a cool way to discuss a little bit more about other interests and other parts of who we are, um, a little bit, but anyway.
20:43 Cassandra Yahnian? I'm here for it. Let's do it.
20:45 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. So going back to this book, which is not a different type of my personality because everyone knows this about me, but this book, um, is really, really good. Anyways, it's kind of set during this time period. And a big part of this book is, without explicitly saying it, because it's voiced through the thoughts and words mostly of an indigenous man named Goodstab and He calls this refers to the Winchester as a many shots gun.
21:19 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh.
21:20 Danielle LaRock? And that he's wanting to acquire one of these.
21:23 Cassandra Yahnian? Mm hmm.
21:23 Danielle LaRock? And so anyway, yeah, it's like, wow, I just, I read that book.
21:27 Cassandra Yahnian? And now you're learning about the Winchester.
21:30 Danielle LaRock? Right.
21:30 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah.
21:31 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. Okay. So anyway, he thinks that a big government contract is going to do great things for this company. He has a vision for the company and that it could be super successful. So Oliver lobbied US officials and even sent a rifle to President Lincoln as a gift. But the contract never came. This proved to be a setback. And the disgruntled gunsmith staged a coup to try and take over the company. So that's being thrown into the mix as well. And although that was squashed, he renamed the company and the rifles after himself. The Winchester Repeating Arms Company. And with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, he began marketing the rifles as a tool of the frontier. Accessible, easy to use and an every man's rifle.
22:16 Danielle LaRock? One advertisement read, for Indian bear or buffalo hunting, it is unrivaled.
22:22 Cassandra Yahnian? Okay, not great market. That didn't age well at all.
22:25 Danielle LaRock? Yeah.
22:25 Cassandra Yahnian? Uh.
22:26 Danielle LaRock? I was waiting for your reaction.
22:28 Cassandra Yahnian? To market killing people with a gun, a gun company. Oh, my God.
22:33 Danielle LaRock? Yeah.
22:33 Cassandra Yahnian? That is. Okay, that's a choice.
22:37 Danielle LaRock? It is a choice and despite our thoughts, feelings and emotions on that now. The marketing at the time was very successful. The rifle was steadily adopted by everyone. Cowboys, lawmen, outlaws, pioneers. Future President Theodore Roosevelt praised this gun. During touring shows, Buffalo Bill Cody twirled a Winchester, telling crowds that, quote, for Indian fighting, it was boss. By this time, it was official US policy to eliminate nomadic Native American cultures by corralling tribes onto reservations. Yet while the Winchester rifle is widely seen as only a tool of oppression in history, tribes like the Lakota Sioux. Were also defending themselves with repeating rifles.
23:20 Danielle LaRock? In fact, one of the rifles biggest admittedly unexpected advertisements came in 1876. Reporters suggest General Custer and his men famously defeated in the Battle of Little Big Horn rode in with single shot carbines. Meanwhile, warriors of the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho carried Winchesters. To meet demand, the company needed to produce hundreds of thousands of these rifles and stock value increased sixfold in less than 15 years. Sarah, once the wife of a shirtmaker's son, was now married to the heir of a weapons company, not only a weapons company, one of the most successful of all time. William was pulled from his role at the shirt factory because at this point, he's not
24:05 Danielle LaRock? working for his dad yet. He's still kind of managing the other business, but with the rise of success of the Winchester rifle and they're wanting to kind of focus on that. He was pulled from his position there and kind of groomed to take over the rifle business because they knew it was going somewhere.
24:21 Cassandra Yahnian? Gotcha.
24:22 Danielle LaRock? And he wanted to be next in line. In 1869, Sarah and William were sent to San Francisco to survey a new office they opened on the West Coast. They took the Transcontinental Railroad and toured both the offices and the city itself, entertained though all the while by various different wealthy hosts. William correctly assessed that their investments in San Francisco would pay off. Company sales more than doubled the following year. Since their daughter Annie's death, Sarah and William had been living with William's parents in New Haven, Connecticut, but thanks to their family's newfound wealth, the family was now moving into a mansion on Prospect Hill, which is and or was, I don't know if
25:03 Danielle LaRock? it still is, but it was this exclusive, very high status neighborhood. It was like the good part of town.
25:09 Cassandra Yahnian? Gotcha.
25:10 Danielle LaRock? As the house was being built, William and Sarah were tasked with supervising construction and quickly grew to love doing that. So I don't know if you're loving overseeing your construction.
25:22 Cassandra Yahnian? No, I wouldn't call it a love. It's exciting. I mean, once it's, once you actually see things happening and it's coming to life and you're like, wow, my vision is here, that part is fun. And then when it's finished and you get to decorate, that part is fun for me. But the whole process of the actual construction, I wouldn't call.
25:45 Cassandra Yahnian? Fun. Although I have learned a lot of skills. I can tile now and I can build brickwork and I can install floors.
25:52 Danielle LaRock? She can do it all.
25:53 Cassandra Yahnian? I can do it all. Hire me.
25:57 Danielle LaRock? The brickwork is nice.
25:59 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, I did. I did a really good job. I'm really proud of it. And the tile work came out really well, too. So hire me.
26:06 Danielle LaRock? And it's, it must be nice to see also your work. You know, there's something to be said about, it's like type two fun, kind of.
26:14 Cassandra Yahnian? For sure. I look at it now and it's, I really like how it came out. I'm excited. Whenever anyone comes to my house for the first time, I'm like, I built this.
26:24 Cassandra Yahnian? And that part is fun for sure. It's definitely satisfying. I wouldn't call the process like, I love this. Like, I'm not gonna change careers and be one of those.
26:35 Danielle LaRock? Like a contractor or?
26:37 Cassandra Yahnian? Like, you know, on HGTV, you have the people who come in and they see this house and they're like, ah, I have a vision for this. And they design it and they, and they knock everything down and renovate everything. That will never be me.
26:52 Danielle LaRock? Okay, that's good news for me.
26:53 Cassandra Yahnian? It is great news.
26:55 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, I can't do this alone. Well, among many different tasks, the couple helped submit and amend designs for landscaping, outbuildings, and the interior finishings. They helped install a windmill to pump water and commissioned paintings of the family. William clearly loved design and architecture. The project helped him to refine his own aesthetic while he relied on Sarah's close involvement. In this work, the couple found partnership and shared passion and a welcome distraction from the grief over the loss of their daughter. But while the Winchester Arms Company brought Sarah and her family greater wealth and opportunity, she suffered a string of losses in the year 1880. In May of 1880, Sarah's mother passed away. And by the end of the year, William's father, Oliver, died as well.
27:40 Danielle LaRock? William automatically took his place as company president, but the loss took a toll on his already poor health. Since Sarah had married him, William had suffered from health problems, most apparent in a chronic cough and a sickly complexion that was even noted in his 1858 passport application. As it turns out, William had
28:00 Cassandra Yahnian? Tuberculosis.
28:01 Danielle LaRock? Thank you so much. I was gonna be like, and drumroll tuberculosis, because as we all know, everything is tuberculosis. And this left Sarah powerless to treat anything beyond his symptoms and his suffering. He'd slowly grown weaker in the recent years, and after his father's death, he just kind of started declining rapidly. It was, you know, any sort of huge emotional strain is gonna kind of tip you over the edge, especially when you have an illness like that. On March 7, 1881, William died of tuberculosis at the age of 43, and Sarah buried him next to their daughter, Annie. So now, at this point, Sarah has lost her daughter, her mother, her father-in-law, and her husband.
28:45 Cassandra Yahnian? Not so much loss, and it's not in that long of a time period either.
28:49 Danielle LaRock? It's over a year, in a year.
28:51 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, this is just one single year.
28:53 Danielle LaRock? Well, Annie, maybe Annie had died a couple of years before that, but not by much.
28:57 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, it feels all very closely linked.
29:00 Danielle LaRock? Yep.
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30:32 Danielle LaRock? And during her 40s and faced with overwhelming grief, Sarah was eager to leave New Haven. For a while, that meant touring Europe, but ultimately it would mean moving to California. She received a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis and her doctor suggested her, her health and getting, feeling better or managing symptoms, that she should move somewhere with a warmer and drier climate. And maybe reflecting on her time that she had spent in San Francisco with William, that big trip to open that West Coast office, California came to mind. After inheriting William's share of the Winchester stock, Sarah was extraordinarily wealthy. She could afford all that money could buy. So she decided California, here I come.
31:17 Danielle LaRock? She told her sisters about her plan and even offered to pay for their moves if they and their families wanted to join her. And I mean, she's picking up the tab. So some of them-
31:29 Cassandra Yahnian? Say no to that.
31:30 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, some of them said yes and moved their entire families across the country to be with her. By 1886, she'd purchased an eight bedroom farmhouse in San Jose, which she christened Yonata Villa, starting a new chapter in her life. After purchasing a farmhouse in San Jose, she immediately started to expand, by some estimates, adding more than 20 rooms in the first six months.
31:54 Cassandra Yahnian? Wow.
31:54 Danielle LaRock? Cassie could never.
31:55 Cassandra Yahnian? I could never.
31:56 Danielle LaRock? One reason she gave for adding the new rooms was to accommodate her family, inviting relatives from nearby and all the way from New Haven to visit. In practice, this didn't prove to be true. In letters, she frequently cited construction as the reason she couldn't have guests, which is a truly introverted win. Like for someone who's-
32:18 Cassandra Yahnian? Can't come over.
32:19 Danielle LaRock? Sorry, I have perpetual construction and you just simply can't come.
32:25 Cassandra Yahnian? You wouldn't want to be here. It's a construction zone. I've actually used that excuse, but it's real. I mean, right now, especially because we're renovating our, our guest bathroom. So it's kind of like anyone who comes over right now has to use our personal off our bedroom bathroom.
32:41 Danielle LaRock? Yeah.
32:42 Cassandra Yahnian? Which is just kind of awkward, I think, for people who are, I mean, it's fine, but it's just kind of a weird setup. And the actual bathroom that is our guest bedroom, your bathroom, I mean, it has a toilet, so you can use it, but we're currently doing the walls and stuff. So there's like dust everywhere. There's, it's just.
33:00 Danielle LaRock? It's just not ideal.
33:01 Cassandra Yahnian? No.
33:03 Danielle LaRock? No. No one can come.
33:04 Cassandra Yahnian? No one can come over.
33:07 Danielle LaRock? It quickly became clear that she really enjoyed working on the house. The love of architecture that she developed in the New Haven House and the lessons that she learned at her father's workbench, she could now run free with all of that. She saw inspiration far and wide and experimented with interior and exterior design. The home's grand ballroom was styled after those of New Haven, composed of a dazzling array of patterned mahogany, rosewood and teak. At the 1893 Colombian exposition in Chicago, a wine exhibit featured a statue of a Greek goddess, the Greek goddess of youth, and it was adorned in these grapevines and it was holding a goblet. And it was one of those pieces that she really adored and
33:47 Danielle LaRock? loved when she saw it. And she loved it so much, she had it a commissioned statue of the same goddess for her own home. So she's just through experience and her travels and different muses, she's incorporating all these different things into her own home. An international exposition in San Francisco had a quote unquote Japanese village display there. And Sarah, in turn, adopted Asian gardening themes, replicating the fair's horticultural building in miniature to house birds and plants from an estimated 100 different countries.
34:22 Cassandra Yahnian? Wow, that's really cool.
34:24 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, she's like. I love all of this and I have so much money and anything is possible. So it's all coming together here. She subscribed to the Architectural Record Journal, drafting and designing each room, she added. Maybe to accommodate her family, she designed a second floor as a collection of sleeping apartments. Each was connected by a sitting or sewing room and built-in drawers lined the hallways. Her approach was eclectic. She commissioned art glass windows from Austria and from Tiffany, featuring designs ranging from spider webs to Shakespeare quotes. Rooms were filled with items from around the world. Furniture from Asia, paintings from France, German chandeliers and English wall decor.
35:06 Cassandra Yahnian? See, this is the type of construction I can get behind. I love decorating. I really like buying furniture and putting things up. So that part is fun and I love.
35:17 Danielle LaRock? Well, this is design.
35:18 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, design is fun.
35:20 Danielle LaRock? The design.
35:21 Cassandra Yahnian? And getting stuff from your travels is like my favorite.
35:25 Danielle LaRock? She was often ingenious as well. One forward-thinking design was an irrigation system. Excess water from her indoor garden would pass through drains in the floor and end up in her outdoor flower boxes.
35:38 Cassandra Yahnian? Fun.
35:39 Danielle LaRock? But most of all, her approach was unique. Rather than working from a comprehensive architectural plan for the house, she drafted plans for each room individually. Foyers, parlors and verandas, which were then connected by a network of hallways and stairs. She oversaw all of the construction herself through the 1890s, waking each morning to design and direct additions to the house. While consistent, the idea that the construction ran around the clock, like 24/7, 365 days for, you know, what, going on 40 years, like I said in the beginning, that was a myth. She regularly sent workers home for months at a time when she was too tired to supervise construction.
36:18 Cassandra Yahnian? That makes sense because also it's so noisy. I can't imagine you just live in this constant noise all the time.
36:25 Danielle LaRock? And she's also traveling a lot as well. She's not at her house 24/7.
36:31 Cassandra Yahnian? She's like renovate my room, I'll be back in two months.
36:34 Danielle LaRock? I'm going to Austria. Like any homeowner, she hit roadblocks. Sometimes plaster wouldn't set right and other times she would struggle with various different contractors. But unlike most of us, if she didn't like how something turned out, she'd have it redone as many times as it took to get it right.
36:51 Cassandra Yahnian? See, this is what happens when you have endless amounts of money and you don't have to work. You can just do these things.
36:59 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, you can just be a perfectionist in every single way. One 1897 article in the San Jose News claimed that the house's defining feature at the time, a seven-story tower, was quote, "pulled down and rebuilt 16 times before it was satisfactory and it is now allowed to stand."
37:17 Cassandra Yahnian? I would hate to work for her.
37:21 Cassandra Yahnian? Like, do you know the work, the blood, sweat and tears that went into that? And she's like, not good enough. Do it 15 more times.
37:30 Danielle LaRock? And it's a big feature. It's a seven-story tower. It's not the wallpaper in a room.
37:36 Cassandra Yahnian? I would be so curious, and I don't know if you know this, but I would be so curious how many people quit.
37:41 Danielle LaRock? I don't know.
37:42 Cassandra Yahnian? I can imagine the number was slightly large.
37:46 Danielle LaRock? Well, of course, as I just mentioned, she did butt heads with contractors, but there is also something to be said about she's giving them work. Consistent work.
37:57 Cassandra Yahnian? Totally, but you know, I just as someone who like, we just did the tile work and we had to take down some and then redo it just because we messed up a portion. And I just can't imagine if someone came in and was like, I don't like that tile work. Can you redo it? Like, I just worked so hard on that.
38:16 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. But you also have other things to do. I don't know. I, I can see both sides of the coin, but it, it would be entirely frustrating for sure.
38:26 Cassandra Yahnian? I would have quit that job so fast.
38:28 Danielle LaRock? She would shift her focus from one space to the next fairly often. If a room didn't come together as she had hoped, she'd have it torn down or rebuilt, or just abandoned altogether as she turned her attention elsewhere. In time, the eight-room farmhouse transformed into a lavish castle, surrounded by elaborate gardens of fruit, vegetables, and decorative flowers. Sarah herself acknowledged this sprawl, describing the home in a letter to her sister-in-law as "rambling." As to why she did it, there's no doubt that the project helped her feel a connection with her late husband, William, continuing the passion that they had shared while designing the New Haven home. And rising for work each day surely helped to ease her grief, or at the very least, take her mind from it.
39:12 Danielle LaRock? And I mean, I have never related to something more, not with the building thing. But, and I can't even compare losing that many people in such a short amount of time. But when you're going through just immense grief, and I think there's a time where you, at least from my experience, you can't do anything. You can't get out of bed, you can't form a sentence, you can't think, you can't maintain anything. But then, there's this switch that happens, that it's almost as if I need to be busy every single moment of every single day, or preoccupied, or-
39:44 Cassandra Yahnian? You have to distract yourself.
39:45 Danielle LaRock? I need to be distracted, because if I have even one moment of downtime where I can relax, my mind is gonna go to a really difficult place, and I don't want to feel that right now. So let me just do everything else in the world there is to do. So this is like, an extreme, like, example of that, for sure. But if that truly is what was happening, I can 100%-
40:08 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, you can understand why she was, she was like this.
40:12 Danielle LaRock? If she were alive today, she might have pursued degrees in architecture and design, or even became like a contractor or interior designer. But that was not an opportunity afforded to many women of the 19th century. Instead, the home itself was her workshop and her university. One local reporter in an article on the eye-catching mansion said as much, writing that the house, quote, "is merely a workshop, and the structure itself is a collection of notes taken by a woman of great wealth while educating herself in the architecture of several countries." But most of the attention that Sarah received was not so kind. At first, people saw the unusual and ever-growing house as an architectural oddity. It was like, oh, interesting, that's unique.
40:54 Danielle LaRock? Huh, that's interesting. But as time went on, wild speculation began as to Sarah's motives for building the house. A consensus soon formed that she was a snob. One San Jose writer suggested that she was superstitious. How else could you possibly explain each added turret and tower? Waves of articles, which often copied and pasted whole paragraphs from earlier pieces and just built upon them, painted a picture of a paranoid woman fearful of death.
41:21 Cassandra Yahnian? God forbid a woman have a hobby.
41:23 Danielle LaRock? Honestly.
41:24 Cassandra Yahnian? Or want to be creative.
41:26 Danielle LaRock? But how strange was Sarah's home, really? Many other wealthy homes of this time were enormous. The Hayes Mansion, just a few miles down the road from where Sarah was building, was designed as three separate houses, each connected by covered walkways. The owner, a wealthy widow from Wisconsin, wanted to live with her two sons while maintaining a sense of privacy. And today, Hilton operates the enormous home as a hotel, which is immediately on my list. Like, oh, look that up. Immediately going there. The Hawes-Lilenthal House, also in the Bay Area, was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as eccentric and scrappy, as crazy as a quilt, apparently pieced together from the leavings
42:07 Danielle LaRock? of other houses. So all of this to say, sprawling and even cumbersome homes were not unique at the time at all, even within that one little area in the Bay Area. In that way, Sarah was not an outlier. She did stand out for doing all of the design herself, though. But more than any design choices she made, she stood out in three big ways. The first being her name. At the time, the Winchester Company was running large advertisements in the newspapers across the country. Their relentless publicity efforts helped their Model 1896 rifle outsell every other rifle in the entire world. So everyone knew what a Winchester was at this time. There's no hiding that name and your association with it.
42:58 Danielle LaRock? Sarah was not the only wealthy person in the Santa Clara Valley, but her last name was more widely known and brought with it a larger fortune and invited more scrutiny through its connections to the firearms industry. And while it's tempting to write Sarah off as a housewife who stumbled into this massive inheritance and just kind of it fell into her lap, she proved to be an extremely savvy money manager and investor herself. Lengthy correspondence between Sarah and her lawyer revealed years of very clever real estate investment, buying many other homes for herself and then reselling them at a profit. She also established financial trust to support her extended family, providing her sisters, nieces, and nephews with modest incomes and occasionally homes of their very own.
43:43 Cassandra Yahnian? They do say that men are more likely to invest, but when women invest, they do a lot better.
43:51 Danielle LaRock? They're more strategic, maybe, or?
43:53 Cassandra Yahnian? I'm not sure the total reason behind it, but I have read articles that just say that women tend to do better in their investments than men, but men overwhelmingly invest more often than women.
44:06 Danielle LaRock? Okay, gotcha. One nearby family, the Ledricks, sold Sarah some of their property, and the sale made quite the impression. The children recalled in amazement her grand entrance to their barnyard, arriving by a private horse-drawn coach, driven by a top hat-wearing coachman, appearing as if out of a fairy tale to cut their mother a check. Which is just the most awesome image to have of a woman of this time. Especially, you know, there's this air around her and this, all these rumors, starting of like this crazy widow who keeps to herself and is just building this crazy home, and she just arrives like a fucking boss.
44:48 Cassandra Yahnian? She's just like feeding the drama a little bit. She's like, oh, you want to say that about me? Look at this.
44:54 Danielle LaRock? Here's a check. Anyway, Sarah had always been a private person, but as she aged, her rheumatoid arthritis grew more and more debilitating. By 1903, the condition had severely limited the use of her arms and her hands. It was really painful for her to write. Around this time, her lawyer would offer in his letters to send her a stenographer to transcribe messages for her. And she also began losing her teeth and felt really self-conscious about her appearance. Born in the era of Queen Victoria, she had always loved Victorian design and fashion, even after it had fallen out of fashion. She regularly wore black morning dresses and veiled hats, a nod to the loss of her husband and her daughter, and perhaps
45:36 Danielle LaRock? also to mask the signs of her disability. And there's reason to believe that Sarah feared visitors to her home would critique or ridicule her architectural work. As one anonymous friend put it, "In spite of her seeming callousness to public opinion, Mrs. Winchester is really a tender-hearted woman, and public inspection of her work has been evaded by discouraging all visitors." So like, she just doesn't want anyone to make fun of her work, or to give her a hard time. It's more as if, "This is my passion and pride and joy, and this is my thing, and I don't need to hear what you think of it."
46:10 Cassandra Yahnian? And how rude of people to walk into her house and judge her home. Like, imagine if I walked in your house right now and was like, ew, why'd you pick this rug? Like, you live here, this is your, that's so rude.
46:24 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. And the way that they were doing it would, in all likelihood, be not to her face. They would report it into the news, and then she would read about it.
46:32 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah. And then they would be critiquing her to thousands of people, who would then also be like, ew, yeah, why that rug?
46:40 Danielle LaRock? Yep.
46:41 Cassandra Yahnian? It's like, what?
46:42 Danielle LaRock? Mind your own business.
46:44 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah. Let people live.
46:46 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. Let them live. Let them be eclectic. Eclectic is the best. I don't want to see another, if I see another friggin' gray floor and white wall combo.
46:55 Cassandra Yahnian? Millennial gray. This is why millennial gray happened, was because people like this
47:00 Danielle LaRock? shamed people like us.
47:02 Cassandra Yahnian? Yes.
47:02 Danielle LaRock? And by us, I mean us and Sarah.
47:06 Cassandra Yahnian? It's like you guys created millennial gray out of what was once beautiful.
47:11 Danielle LaRock? I, it's so funny because this is a perfect example, but so a couple of weeks ago, my mom, my sister and me went to the, um, oh my God, it's escaping me, the Brimfield, the Brimfield Antique Fair.
47:27 Cassandra Yahnian? Mm hmm.
47:28 Danielle LaRock? Which, as you know, um, and many people probably know, it's one of the largest antique and like crafts fairs in New England. It's, there's like, they get thousands of people a weekend. There's over 300 vendors there. It's crazy. And my mom said on a couple of occasions, how funny it was to see what me and my sister gravitated to because it was always completely opposite. My sister has a very, uh, I don't know if millennial take is the right word, but, cause I feel like.
48:00 Cassandra Yahnian? Especially when we just changed to millennial gray.
48:04 Danielle LaRock? But she kind of is. She like, she likes very minimal, clean, sleek types of things. So the antique market was kind of her nightmare. Thank you, Alyssa, for going with me. But there was like some craft vendors that offered some things like that. And then I, meanwhile, was hung up on this 1872 golden footstool that was like the weirdest, most random looking thing that I was debating for like two hours. I left it, came back, left it, came back. I'm like, do I need a footstool? Do I need a Victorian footstool?
48:38 Cassandra Yahnian? Like, why wouldn't you? I was on Facebook Marketplace, actually, a couple of days ago, and this giant pink antique couch showed up on it. And I was like, do I send this to Danielle?
48:49 Danielle LaRock? Did you not? You didn't?
48:51 Cassandra Yahnian? I didn't.
48:51 Danielle LaRock? Or did you?
48:52 Cassandra Yahnian? No, I didn't.
48:54 Danielle LaRock? I've been looking.
48:54 Cassandra Yahnian? Still, do you want a pink one?
48:56 Danielle LaRock? You know, I've been looking for a pink couch.
48:58 Cassandra Yahnian? I know you were, but I thought you gave that up. Oh, my God.
49:01 Danielle LaRock? No, I will never get that up.
49:03 Cassandra Yahnian? I have to look because it was so perfect and it was in Vermont.
49:07 Danielle LaRock? Does it look comf- here's my problem with the couch.
49:09 Cassandra Yahnian? It's not comfortable. It's antique.
49:12 Danielle LaRock? I know. Okay, here's my, here's my problem.
49:15 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, it's still for sale.
49:16 Danielle LaRock? Send it to me right now.
49:18 Cassandra Yahnian? I don't know.
49:18 Danielle LaRock? Wait, what platform are you on?
49:20 Cassandra Yahnian? I'm on Facebook Marketplace.
49:23 Danielle LaRock? I never look at my Facebook messages, so you need to tell me when you send them to me because I think I have my notifications off.
49:28 Cassandra Yahnian? I'm gonna text it to you, the link, because I know you don't look at Facebook.
49:32 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, my, my problem with the couch situation is in my current home, I don't have room, I don't have like a living room and then a side room or, or space for two couches, so.
49:43 Cassandra Yahnian? You have to pick one and it has to be comfortable.
49:46 Danielle LaRock? Correct. And I have.
49:48 Cassandra Yahnian? The one I just sent you.
49:49 Danielle LaRock? It's really hard. Okay. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
49:58 Cassandra Yahnian? I know.
49:58 Danielle LaRock? It's only $200?
50:00 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, and it's in Vermont.
50:03 Danielle LaRock? Okay, wait a minute. The description, though, is so interesting. Okay. Fun. Have nowhere to store the sweet couch that isn't mouse-proof. In great shape. Tender care needed for fixing a part of the back. A clean fix. Just need to brace upwards. Line on seat is because something was sitting there. Will work itself out. Dot, dot, dot. What does that mean?
50:27 Cassandra Yahnian? I don't know.
50:28 Danielle LaRock? Like, that feels ominous.
50:30 Cassandra Yahnian? It kind of feels like maybe, you know, like certain material, um, if you like push it one way, it makes a mark and then pushes it the other way, makes a mark.
50:39 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, but.
50:40 Cassandra Yahnian? But the description does sound like a mouse got into the back of it.
50:44 Danielle LaRock? I don't know, whatever. It's, I love it. I love it.
50:48 Cassandra Yahnian? I saw it and thought of you immediately.
50:50 Danielle LaRock? It kind of looks like a love seat size as well.
50:54 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, it's not a full couch.
50:55 Danielle LaRock? A picture of this thing.
50:56 Cassandra Yahnian? Not a full couch, but slightly bigger than a love seat.
51:00 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. Yeah. So here's my problem. I could never have that in, as my sole couch.
51:07 Cassandra Yahnian? That's decorative. That's a decorative couch.
51:10 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, so I'll get there someday when I'm not in a.
51:14 Cassandra Yahnian? Use it as your podcast couch.
51:16 Danielle LaRock? Oh, my God.
51:18 Cassandra Yahnian? This room isn't big enough for that, I don't think, but yeah.
51:21 Danielle LaRock? You know what? Hell, yeah.
51:22 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah.
51:23 Danielle LaRock? Okay, perfect. Where the hell am I?
51:36 Danielle LaRock? Right, okay, so back to Sarah, our girl. Despite clamoring from her neighbors and the press, she never answered questions about her home. She shunned interview requests and simply did not extend invitations to people she didn't know, not even to presidents. In the space of eight years, President William McKinley and President Theodore Roosevelt both visited the San Jose area. And for the elites at the time, social norms, it was just kind of expected that if you were in the upper crust, as Sarah most certainly was, that the wealthiest person with the wealthiest home in the area, in this case, of course, Sarah, should extend an invitation to be a host to these people who are visiting.
52:22 Cassandra Yahnian? Gotcha.
52:22 Danielle LaRock? President McKinley had even honored Sarah's husband, William, in a memorial in Washington. So it seemed like that would happen. She'd be like, oh, yeah, you know who I am. You honored my family and you're visiting, so come on over. Yeah, she never invited anyone.
52:39 Cassandra Yahnian? I mean, you shouldn't be have to host, and she can't. She's doing construction.
52:44 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, it's under construction. I'm sorry. It's unavailable.
52:47 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah.
52:48 Danielle LaRock? It seems to us like, yeah, just go, go rent a Hilton down the road.
52:52 Cassandra Yahnian? You're rich.
52:53 Danielle LaRock? Don't expect me to host you. But at the time, it was the way of doing things. And the press did not judge her kindly for her refusals like this. And then the third reason that Sarah stood out happened in 1906, when a devastating earthquake struck San Francisco. The largest earthquake in California history rocked the Bay Area and started a fire that lasted for several days. In the end, the disaster leveled about 80% of the city and killed 3,000 people. Sarah's house was far from the epicenter, but nonetheless suffered serious damage. Its most prominent feature, the seven-story tower.
53:31 Cassandra Yahnian? No.
53:33 Cassandra Yahnian? The one that was done in 16. No, not the tower.
53:37 Danielle LaRock? Well, it collapsed. The fifth and sixth floors collapsed into the floors below. Doors that once opened onto balconies opened into empty air. And pipes that once ran through the home jutted out of the house like a little hedgehog quill. The people of San Francisco rocked by this terrible disaster were determined to rebuild. And in the coming years, it rose from the ashes, building at a record speed. Sarah's sister Belle had a new seven room home built in just sixty days. So they were on rebuilding the city. But for Sarah, for whatever reason, chose not to rebuild. She opted instead to cart off the wreckage, patch up the damage and just leave it as it was. This might have been because she had other homes.
54:22 Danielle LaRock? By this time, she spent most of her time at an estate near her sister and her niece. The wreckage in San Jose may have also been painful for the self taught architect to see. You know, all those years of hard work and all those decisions and time and money and effort. Many nearby homes fared much better than her own. And it must have hurt seeing how her designs came undone relative to the work of other architects. Either way, for a city determined to rebuild, Sarah's choice to accept the damage was looked at with eyebrows raised. For shunning all expectations of wealth and the roles of upper class womanhood. Sarah was increasingly painted as a superstitious woman who was mentally ill.
55:03 Danielle LaRock? Author Mary Jo Ignoffo, who wrote an excellent biography of Sarah Winchester, put it this way. Neighbors who wished to know her or have access to her were rebuffed. To the local people, she was an enigma. They did not know what to make of her. Eventually, they just made fun of her. Because throughout history and into present day, if you're different in any way, you are singled out and ridiculed and othered. And you're kind of usually just like, oh, that person's weird.
55:34 Cassandra Yahnian? Nothing about her to me seems weird. She seems like she is private. Totally. But like in retrospect, she just seems like she's a private person. She has her close knit circle of her family and she likes to travel and collect things from her travels. Or from or gets ideas from her travels. Like there's nothing outwardly.
55:58 Danielle LaRock? And she doesn't want to be bothered.
56:00 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, which I think is totally fair. You've gone through so much trauma and loss and you already kind of have a stamp on your back just with your family name. It's like, leave me alone. Just doing my thing.
56:12 Danielle LaRock? Well, for these reasons, speculation about Sarah and her sprawling home grew each and every year. While earlier stories had claimed construction of her house was an attempt to stave off her death, a 1908 article introduced the idea that she was being haunted by spirits. The legend of Sarah as a superstitious, death-obsessed widow grew even larger, even as she herself grew older and the Winchester Repeating Arms Company began to falter. By 1915, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was poised to fulfill Oliver Winchester's greatest dream. Sarah's father-in-law wasn't able to sell rifles to the army during the Civil War, but as World War I erupted, the company was poised to seize the opportunity.
56:55 Danielle LaRock? Scrambling to meet demand, they expanded their factories and increased their workforce by 300%, allowing them to fulfill orders for allied powers like Russia, Britain, and of course, America. Business was booming, and so were Sarah's stock holdings. But while this expansion proved lucrative in the short term, demand for weapons cratered when the war ended. The Winchester Company had overextended itself and made no plans for a post-war market. Despite laying off workers and selling empty factory space, peacetime brought the company to its knees. As a result, in the final years of her life, Sarah's fortune shrank from 10 million, which is over like $150 million today, to just 3 million.
57:37 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, no.
57:38 Danielle LaRock? I, it's a blow.
57:40 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, no. Not 3 million.
57:43 Danielle LaRock? As the 1920s arrived, Sarah was 80 years old, and her arthritis grew more and more severe. She ventured out less, and her family, her lawyer, and her doctor all saw the writing on the wall. And so did she. Just as she orchestrated the affairs of her personal life, Sarah carefully planned for her death. In her will, she set up trusts to provide money to her family as well as her house staff, including her gardener, ranch hand, maid, and driver, who had all been loyal to her for many years. Seeking to deter any drama, she added a final requirement to her will. Anyone who contested the terms would lose whatever they were to receive otherwise.
58:24 Cassandra Yahnian? Which is so smart.
58:29 Danielle LaRock? When I draft up a will, I'm putting that in.
58:31 Cassandra Yahnian? It's like, this is what I want. You try to fight it, you're not getting anything. End of story.
58:35 Danielle LaRock? Period.
58:37 Cassandra Yahnian? Love it.
58:38 Danielle LaRock? Finally, she decided to move back to her San Jose mansion. She'd spent most of her final years at a house closer to family and San Francisco, but she returned to the sprawling, earthquake-damaged home to be closer to her doctor. And on Tuesday, September 5th, 1922, Sarah Winchester died. She was mourned by family at a small service in California and buried beside William and Annie in New Haven, Connecticut. In many ways, Sarah's death was just the beginning of her ghost story. After she passed away, her estate, valued at $3 million, was made public. Journalists in local papers were quick to speculate that the endless construction of her house whittled away her fortune. But for all of the effort that she put into it, her enormous, earthquake-damaged home was appraised as
59:22 Danielle LaRock? having no value. Her niece Daisy helped empty all of her personal effects from the property, but it wasn't expected to sell. Nevertheless, after just six months, it was leased to a man named John Brown. Brown was in the amusement park business. He designed an early roller coaster for Crystal Beach Resort in Canada, which was a huge success at the time. And another popular attraction at Crystal Beach was a "house of mystery." Years later, Brown would attempt to replicate the house of mystery using Sarah's home. Local journalists who'd long looked at Sarah's house from afar, peering over the hedges, now got a personal invitation from Brown. Their detailed reports kickstarted the site's
1:00:05 Danielle LaRock? success as a tourist attraction. From there, Brown's business served to perpetuate, embellish, and spread the false ghost story of Sarah Winchester. A woman who held nightly séances in a closet to commune with the dead, who built her house to appease and confuse spirits, and to escape her own death. The people that actually knew Sarah spoke out against these falsehoods, attempting to set the record straight. Roy Lieb, son of her longtime lawyer, Frank Lieb, spoke out in her favor in 1925, saying, "Mrs. Winchester was as sane and clear-headed as a woman as I have ever known, and she had a better grasp of business and financial affairs than most men." The commonly believed suspicion that she had hallucinations is all bunk.
1:00:49 Danielle LaRock? Her doctor Clyde Wayland attested that she was sharp as a tack until the very end, saying he "just saw red" when he heard the far-fetched stories about her. Carl and Ted Hanson grew up on the property as sons of Sarah's ranch foreman. In the 1920s, they repeatedly tried to refute the claims about Winchester, but soon gave up. They believed facts couldn't defeat this growing ghost story, and any details they gave might backfire on them, so they declined all future interview requests. Even the few accurate news articles from the time failed to make a dent in the emerging legend of the Mystery House. The story that we have heard of Sarah Winchester began as rumors,
1:01:29 Danielle LaRock? whispered amongst her neighbors who saw her enormous house and could not understand her desire for privacy. Newspaper articles and tour guides amplified, added to, and repeated these embellishments, like it taking eight trucks a day for six weeks to just empty the house. They also parroted outright lies, like the claim that Winchester was so obsessed with the number thirteen. As proof, visitors on tours are shown haphazard aftermarket chandeliers with thirteen candles, which owners of the attraction clearly added later. The house becoming a tourist attraction only incentivized this myth-making and perpetuation. Each successive generation of Mystery House owners added their own layer to the story, while adding huge billboards for miles around.
1:02:14 Danielle LaRock? Now, the Sarah Winchester Mystery House is widely held as one of the great American ghost stories. In the years since the Mystery House first opened, we've learned more about Sarah's life, and it's fair to say tour scripts have become a little more nuanced and have included a bit more about who Sarah truly was and what her life was really about. Yet little of the real Sarah Winchester can be seen in the legend. In fact, the popular story of Sarah and her strange house might have more to say about us than it does of her. Her treatment reveals a societal unease with single women living alone. It shows our discomfort with the class disparity and tremendous wealth, and most of all, it wrestles with the role guns have in America.
1:02:59 Danielle LaRock? Accepting that Sarah was driven mad by the guilt of slaughtered Native Peoples and decimated bison subtly places the blame on her shoulders and allows us as a nation to look away from that bloody history. It is tempting to believe in legends, to see something that we can't explain. And fill it with explanations that are plausible, or maybe just stories that we would like to believe. But legends can often miss the real story. Rather than see her paranoid, death-obsessed caricature, Sarah's real legacy was a fight against the disease that killed her husband, tuberculosis. While her house started rumors in local papers, Sarah sent large, strictly anonymous donations to create a tuberculosis hospital in New Haven, Connecticut.
1:03:44 Danielle LaRock? In her lifetime, she gave the modern equivalent of thirty million dollars, which built the William Wirt Winchester Hospital.
1:03:52 Cassandra Yahnian? Wow.
1:03:52 Danielle LaRock? Anonymously, also, which is...
1:03:54 Cassandra Yahnian? She wanted no credit. She just wanted there to be some help for people who are struggling with tuberculosis.
1:04:01 Danielle LaRock? Mm-hmm.
1:04:01 Cassandra Yahnian? Wow.
1:04:02 Danielle LaRock? And if the fight against tuberculosis was the guiding cause in her life after William's death, Sarah's contributions included a small nod to her greatest passion. Earmarked in her donation was a special gift of twenty-five thousand dollars to Beatrix Farnd, a pioneering female landscape architect who designed the gateway to the Winchester Hospital. Sarah thought it was beautiful. Going back to the very beginning of the episode and talking about Winchester rifles and the one that was found in Great Basin National Park, you can go to the National Park and see it.
1:04:36 Cassandra Yahnian? Cool.
1:04:36 Danielle LaRock? After discovering the forgotten Winchester in two thousand and fourteen, leaning against that juniper tree for one hundred years, the park service wanted to do everything they could to uncover its history. The rifle showed signs of its age, for sure. Its cracked wooden stock had sunk a few inches into the ground and the barrel was rusted brown. After carefully removing the fragile gun, a team of conservators preserved it so it could survive for years to come, while archaeologists surveyed the areas for signs of its owner. Were they a rancher with grazing sheep or cattle? Maybe a miner? A Shoshone, Paiute, or Goshute tribal member? They found the gun serial number, but no record of the sale and ultimately no evidence on site of who left it behind exists.
1:05:20 Danielle LaRock? Just a year later, the juniper tree it was leaning against burned up in a wildfire. So it's a really good thing they found it when they did. When the rifle was put on permanent display in the Lehman Caves Visitor Center, it was accompanied by stories of its origins in New Haven, its role on the American frontier, and the questions we have about its owner. Who were they? Did they buy the rifle for protection, for their livelihood? Did they ever fire it? The exhibit shares the evidence. And that the park is still searching for answers, digging through archives and speaking to local families about their history. But if Sarah's Winchester mystery is to be believed, the owner of the forgotten rifle might rather just stay anonymous. And that is the story
1:06:02 Danielle LaRock? of Sarah Winchester and her amazing, stunning, beautiful home and the very sane, totally understandable story behind her life.
1:06:12 Cassandra Yahnian? Well, I thought that that was so interesting and maybe it's also coming from someone who knew very, very little of Sarah Winchester. But I thought, because the only thing I did know about Sarah Winchester was that her home was supposedly very haunted and that she was a ghost. So for you to do a whole episode on her life and debunk this whole thing was I was not expecting that turn at the end.
1:06:39 Danielle LaRock? I just felt like I love a legend and a ghost story just as much as the next person. But I think that there's a time and place for them. And when there's just so much information about this woman and what drove her to do these things. And it's just such an understandable. And like you mentioned earlier, I don't see how this is strange at all.
1:07:05 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah.
1:07:06 Danielle LaRock? And then to learn about John Brown and how he kind of just perpetuated all of this stuff and kind of just made her to be.
1:07:12 Cassandra Yahnian? Kind of made everything up?
1:07:13 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. And it just kind of snowballed from there and just, I don't know, I have a lot of sympathy for Sarah and I feel like history did her really dirty in how she's remembered. And I just wanted to just throw a differing perspective into the ring a little bit because I think there is something to be true about this. The Winchester mystery house has cemented itself in the local lore and I don't see it changing much.
1:07:41 Danielle LaRock? But I think it would be just as big of a draw if everyone knew the true story behind it. I still want to go. I want to go more now.
1:07:48 Cassandra Yahnian? Totally.
1:07:49 Danielle LaRock? Hearing more about how it was designed and thoughtfully put together and how eclectic it is. And, you know, rather than the ghosts of people slaughtered in the American West haunted this woman. And that's why she built it, you know? I don't know. I just think that.
1:08:05 Cassandra Yahnian? It almost makes it more interesting to visit now, knowing how vilified she was in life. And how strange people thought her home was to go and now see the house yourself. And you can decide if you think it's strange or not.
1:08:18 Danielle LaRock? I mean, I think it, and I think it is strange. If my neighbors just loved, had a passion for interior design and architecture and construction, and just never stopped, well, quote unquote, never stopped or worked on their home for decades.
1:08:33 Cassandra Yahnian? It would draw some attention.
1:08:35 Danielle LaRock? For sure. I'd be like, what's going on over there? But she just got a bad edit and I feel bad about that. So, yeah, like I said, not much to be said about Great Basin National Park.
1:08:48 Cassandra Yahnian? Just gonna say, you really loosely threw that in there.
1:08:51 Danielle LaRock? There was a tie, though. You saw the tie was so.
1:08:53 Cassandra Yahnian? I totally saw the tie. It is very related. It's just funny.
1:08:59 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, we'll get back there. Sorry. Sorry, GBNP. We'll be back. Well, everyone, thank you so much for listening and we will see you next week. In the meantime, enjoy the view.
1:09:13 Cassandra Yahnian? But watch your back.
1:09:14 Danielle LaRock? Bye, everyone.
1:09:15 Cassandra Yahnian? Bye.
1:09:16 Danielle LaRock? Thank you for joining us again this week. If you love National Park After Dark and want to hear exclusive bonus stories, join us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Patreon subscribers have access to our National Park After Dark Book Club, live streams, Discord, and much more. If you prefer to watch our episodes, video episodes are now available on YouTube. If you're enjoying the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And to follow along with all our adventures, you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X at National Park After Dark.
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