{"id":30391,"date":"2019-05-15T14:56:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-15T14:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mathewingram.blog\/?p=30391"},"modified":"2019-05-15T14:56:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T14:56:00","slug":"a-bizarre-mansion-built-by-the-heiress-to-the-winchester-rifle-fortune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2019\/05\/15\/a-bizarre-mansion-built-by-the-heiress-to-the-winchester-rifle-fortune\/","title":{"rendered":"A bizarre mansion built by the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"618\" height=\"412\" src=\"https:\/\/mathewingramblog.files.wordpress.com\/2019\/10\/winchestermysteryhousecover.jpg?w=618\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-30404\" srcset=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/winchestermysteryhousecover.jpg 618w, https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/winchestermysteryhousecover-300x200.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 618px) 100vw, 618px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sarah Lockwood Winchester was the widow of William Wirt Winchester, who died in 1881 of tuberculosis and left Sarah his fortune, which at the time amounted to $20 million (about $450 million in today&#8217;s dollars), since he was a member of the family that invented the Winchester repeating rifle. She moved to the Santa Clara Valley and started building a house, one that she kept adding onto until her death in 1922, which has come to be known as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/real-winchester-mystery-house\">the Winchester Mystery House<\/a>. By the time she died, the building covered more than 24,000 square feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The main mystery is why she built the house the way she did &#8212; not only did it have 160 rooms (including 40 bedrooms) and a number of towers and other features, but it also contained a number of bizarre rooms and features that seemed to have no purpose. There&#8217;s a staircase that ends at a ceiling, a closet that is only an inch deep, a &#8220;door to nowhere&#8221; that opens into empty space, and a magnificent stained glass window that is behind a wall, and so doesn&#8217;t receive any light with which to illuminate it (the house has about 10,000 other panes of stained glass to make up for it though).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/mathewingramblog.files.wordpress.com\/2019\/10\/6329b8af0adaf059bf_pre-1906-view-from-south-1024x621.jpg?w=1024\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-30405\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sarah Lockwood Winchester was the widow of William Wirt Winchester, who died in 1881 of tuberculosis and left Sarah his fortune, which at the time amounted to $20 million (about $450 million in today&#8217;s dollars), since he was a member of the family that invented the Winchester repeating rifle. She moved to the Santa Clara &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2019\/05\/15\/a-bizarre-mansion-built-by-the-heiress-to-the-winchester-rifle-fortune\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A bizarre mansion built by the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}