Lola was pretty excited to discover that many of the windows and sinks were at her height! There's even one tiny doorway that only Mrs Winchester could fit through without stooping. Mrs Winchester was very short (4'10') so many of the fixtures were built for her height which just adds to the strange feel of the interior. The 'Door to Nowhere' open on the second floor It is also said that these oddities were included to confuse spirits.

There is one staircase that leads directly to the ceiling, another staircase that goes up 7 steps and then down 11, a door that leads directly outside on the second floor, false cupboards that are only an inch deep. This resulted in a lot of changes being made (over 600 rooms were built and rebuilt) and an awful lot of odd decisions made when it came to the placement of rooms, doors, windows etc. She is said to have taken to her seance room late every night and would emerge a few hours later with the next day's building plans. The rest of the house was designed by Mrs Winchester, supposedly after she consulted with spirits in nightly seances. Only one room was architect designed, the grand ballroom which was built almost entirely without the use of nails. What makes it even stranger is that Mrs Winchester designed most of the home herself without the help of an architect. So this background already gives the house a little mystery. This work would continue 24 hours a day until Mrs Winchester's death in 1922. In order to appease the spirits, or at least confuse them so they could no longer haunt her, she was advised to head west and find an unfinished home to work on - continuously. She appears to have been quite a superstitious person and after the death of her husband she is said to have consulted a medium who advised her that she was haunted by the spirits of those who had been killed by the Winchester repeating rifle. Fifteen years earlier the Winchesters had lost their only child in early infancy and these two losses impacted greatly on Mrs Winchester.

Sarah Winchester moved to San Jose from the east coast after the early death of her husband.

Winchester mystery house floor plan